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I've been waiting for a goo enough weather window to get to me "proper" hills for a while now. Storm after storm has made bigger outings impractical but suddenly we were being promised several days of settled weather! I got to my planning board and came up with a rather ambitious 4 Munro / 4 Corbett galumph along Glen Dessary. I was excited, til I saw some photos of the northern Munros on Skye still looking rather white. Given that we'd need to do at least one high camp, in the uncertainty about how much white stuff would still be around, I switched to plan B - a wee route from Murlaggan into two of the most remote - and, to my mind - cracking Grahams: Meith Bheinn and An Stac. We'd done them last time from Lochailort and I had been looking forward to going in from Glen Pean - somewhere that we'd never been before, surprising as it is after all these trips to the far flung reaches of the highlands.
We set off on Thursday evening, camping at the upper end of Loch Arkaig, leaving the rollercoaster ride for the morning. A cold night, with frost on the grass, but an OK morning. We breakfasted heartily on porridge and peanut butter and set off along the road. Allison was feeling seriously car-sick by the time we reached Murlaggan, for some reason
and needed a few minutes to let the queasiness pass before we could set off. A couple of fine fellows, one with an impressive rack of antlers, greeted us as we drove into the parking area. Two other cars there. It's been a while since we set off with the big packs, and I was a bit concerned I'd leave something behind. We hd axes and, just in case, crampons. I chucked a can of gas over to Allison, who said she already had one in her pack. I knew the one in my Jet Boil wasn't full, but assumed that her spare was (I have a considerable collection of gas canisters with small amounts of gas left in them at home). This proved, later, to be an unwise assumption.
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Al, on Flickr
Anyway, we loaded up out backs and set off along the forest track towards Glen Pean bothy - this is good gravel track for almost the entire distance to the howff and could easily be cycled if you happened to be of that persuasion. There's a rather smelly deer feeding station along the way - the stags grumpily moved aside as we approached. It was just lovely to be walking into a new and remote place. At the bothy we were greeted by 4 quite crazy dogs, mostly of the collie type, belonging to two guys that had arrived last night and were staying for the weekend. They were busy chopping wood by the front door, and we had a blether, mostly about bothies, before hoisting our burdens and continuing along the path.
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Al, on Flickr
By now the track had become very wet in places - this was to continue for much of the remainder of the walk. But nothing desperate. We reached Lochan Leum an t-Saigart, where the marked path ends on the map. The river needs to be crossed - it was only ankle deep and we managed without removing boots. There is a boat tucked up under a knoll, so I suppose you could borrow that. There's a visible path that continues onwards, skirting the loch and rising up the hillside on the south side, the start marked by a cairn, maybe 30m above the loch. narrow in places, not a place to take a tumble with a big pack on. Once the loch has been passed the path continues sometimes dropping down to the valley floor, sometimes hugging the slopes on your left.
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Al, on Flickr
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After a while the terrain becomes more rugged, with the mighty cliffs of Carn Mor on the north side and the bulk of Sgurr nan Coireachan on the left. We passed above the almost hidden Lochan Dubh, which looks like it gets sunshine only at the height of summer. Exiting Coire Beithe, we met with a clearer stalkers path that both continues along the glen and that rises up the slopes of Sgurr nan Coireachan. The latter was our chosen direction - we would climb part of the way up the path then head west at about 300m aiming for Cnoc Gorm, which would then lead to An Stac.
An Stac in the distance
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Al, on Flickr
Lochan Dubh
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Al, on Flickr
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Loch Morar
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I did have a short swither here - we were planning to do Sgurr nan Coireachan as Allison needed it for her Munros, but I wasn't sure that we had time to get up and down then continue over An Stac today. I decided that we'd leave it for our walk out, although it did mean having to repeat a couple of hundred metres of ascent. But the stalkers path is one of these old, well engineered ones that makes walking fairly effortless. Some of it is rather overgrown and you can lose it at points if you don't watch carefully. We crossed one of the streams running down and headed up an obvious shoulder to the north of Allt an Toll Gainmhich which slowly took us up Cnoc Gorm. We could see An Stac directly ahead, and, looking back, could see that the shoulder of Coireachan we'd be going up was almost bereft of snow. That was helpful.
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It's a fairly easy climb to the summit of An Stac from this direction. Sadly, a brief snow shower was working its way west to east and our views were correspondingly impaired. We set about getting down off the mountain. I'd routed us down the way we'd come up last time - probably not the best plan. This is one craggy, slabby mountain and needs care, particularly with big packs (we'd left ours last time as we'd pitched the tent somewhere near Loch a'Bhroadainn). It soon became clear that the descent was going to be awkward if we headed directly down the shoulder, as we couldn't see what was below us - we moved across to the more northwestern aspects of the hillside and picked our way round slippy wet slabs. The descent seemed to take forever, and probably did. I had also planned that we'd aim for somewhere near the ridiculously low bealach between An Stac and Meith Bheinn (200m) at the top of Gleann Taodhail, but look as we might, we could see no suitable looking camp spots anywhere there. We did spot a possible green place beside the Abhainn Taodhail, much further down the glen and decided to aim for that. Several lifetimes later we made it there, found a spot that would do ok and pitched.
Meith Bheinn
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Al, on Flickr
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Al, on Flickr
Now the gas - or rather lack of it - came into play. The canister Allison had was almost as empty as the one I had with me - we were therefore going to have to ration its use. Just typical - when you have plenty of water you have no gas...we made do with no coffee after our Huel and would miss out on hot drinks for much of the remainder of the weekend in case we had to resort to porridge or Huel made with cold water...
It rained/snowed heavily overnight, which was unexpected, and the tent was really wet with condensation, probably becasue it was iced over on the outer sheet. As this is the tent we're hoping to take on the CWT later this spring, condensation is a worry, although I'm hoping that we'll be past the time of ice and snow by May...that is, if we're even here in May - the doings of a certain Russian homicidal maniac may put an end to us all before then. But back to brighter thoughts - we left the tent up hoping it would dry off (it did) and set up Gleann Taodhail with lightened packs on to climb Meith Bheinn. We used the stalkers path some of the way, then crossed the Abhainn and followed pretty good deer tracks towards Slaite Coire. We ended up on the rough shoulder of the hill, rather than - as I'd routed - going up the coire floor, but it didn't matter, it was a good day weather wise and we were enjoying the outing. Various ups and downs led us eventually to the summit. This is another slabby rocky hill, one not to be taken lightly in poor visibility. The northern faces were still frozen, where the sun hadn't reached them yet. We looked out to Rùm and Skye, it was great to be back in this part of the country. Over to our right, on the northern shore of Loch Morar, we could see the extremely long tail of Bidean a'Chabhair that we'd once traversed in scorching weather.
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Al, on Flickr
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An Stac
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We followed our route back down off Meith Bheinn, returning to the tent and eking a half cup of coffee before we packed up and set off. We followed the stalkers path down to the shores of Loch Morar and continued round towards Oban Bothy - a place we've read much about but never visited. Sadly it was still locked (it's an estate bothy and closes between August and the end of February for stalking). Guess they've not got round to opening up yet. There is an "emergency shelter" which is basically a lean-to shed, so you'd need to be in an emergency to want to stay there. We walked past various structures in various states of disrepair, Allison found an old Younger's beer bottle (maybe 1930s???) mostly buried in the grass. They don't make bottles that thick anymore! We also passed a strange iron cauldron, maybe for getting salt from seawater?
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Al, on Flickr
Oban Bothy
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My plan was to get as close to the path up Sgurr nan Coireachan as we could manage then pitch for the night. It had all looked very boggy in the valley floor when we'd come along yesterday, so I wasn't entirely confident we'd find a spot, but we did, about 0.75km from the start of the path. Right beside the river - we removed shoes and had a (very brief as it was icy cold) paddle in the crystal clear water. It looked like it was going to be a clear night - we were largely closed in from the sky by the surrounding mountainside, but we did have a wander up to a small rise from where you could see a section of Loch Morar and the afterglow of the sun as it sank. Another cold night - we peered out the tent about 10pm and saw a grey glow in the sky (the moon being a very young sliver) - I got my camera out and realised we were seeing the aurora...in all these years we've never seen them before. Given that most of our northern sky was taken up by mighty black cliffs, we only saw a glimpse, but it was quite exciting. The stars were out in force and the Milky Way was also visible. How fantastic to be far removed from people and the things of man.
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Another cold night, but we had left the door open (no rain) so the condensation problem didn't recur. While out at her morning ablutions, Allison managed to fall onto her hands and hurt both thumbs, one quite badly. I hoped she wouldn't need to wield her axe as we headed for Coireachan...We left the tent up again, reckoning that walking back to the tent after we'd been up the hill would be less trouble than humphing all our kit up 900m ascent. The stalkers path was helpful, mostly avoiding the patches of snow, although it was often icy underfoot. It continued up to about 650m - thereafter we had a line of old fence posts to follow up to the summit. The snow - what there was of it - was perfect - crisp and consolidated. The sun was shining, wind negligible - what a beautiful day to be out in the mountains. We reached the summit, gazing down at the white capped hills all around and a cloud inversion in Glen Mallie. Once again we followed our outward way on the return leg, stopping by a giant boulder erased in ice with meltwater running between the ie and the rock - a bit like those oil slides you used to get in the psychedelic shows...groovy.
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Al, on Flickr
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We returned to the tent and packed up, shouldering our packs once more as we walked back along Glen Pean. In the sun it was warm and definitely spring like - but cold enough when in the shade to remind you that summer's still some way off. We passed by Glen Pean bothy, which was empty one again, and stopped inside for a wee look. Nice and tidy, good stock of firewood and even a pop up tent! Oh, to have the opportunity of spending another night around here...but we had no food left, you know we had no gas, and Allison had her work to get back to. So we headed back to the gravel track and the walk (mostly in the cool shade of the trees) back to where the car was parked. That last wee bit, when you go past the locked gate, it always is longer than I remember to get back to the car park...It was about 5.30 by this time - I thought I'd some extra Huel in the car (I knew I'd extra gas) but it turned out I didn't. so we wolfed down a couple of bags of crisps and set off back along the Arkaig road. The Gray Corries and The Ben had a covering of new snow from when we'd come up, all looked lovely and crisp in the setting sun. What a fine weekend. Lets hope we get a few more of this sort now spring is (almost) here
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