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Yes, a snow trip for the first time since March 2020! We weren't the only ones thinking that way, though. Inverlochlarig car park was full before 9 on Sunday morning. I have never seen that in normal times. Anyway, to get peace we were going up the Ishag Burn to get the North ridge of Beinn a'Chroin. Less than a kilometre of stumbling through tussocks and we decided just to go straight up. We took a promising looking gully, with the snow line at about 400 metres.
There's a shoulder at about 700 metres. I went wrong there about 20 years ago. The cloud line had been about 750 metres and we took the route that started most promisingly. It ended very scrambly and it was nice today to be able to see and pick out the entire route. Ice axes out but no crampons needed at any point.
We ate on the old summit sheltering from an icy blast.. From there to the current top was hotching and it was nice to see people enjoying themselves but we were looking to break snow again on the way down
I remembered descending from the gap betweeen the tops and there was another opinion for going west then dropping. As some sort of compromise we went straight down. That was just stupid. Actually with good visibilitiy and out of the wind, it was fun but there was a lot of step retracing to get round crags. In poor visibility it would have been no joke.
Down at the lochan, we'd been going to cut across but a couple of plunges through concealed ice holes, before even reaching it, dissuaded us.
We'd another snack in the warm sunshine before we went below it and layered up again. Bit of a trudge back to Inverllochlarig but a cracking day.