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The forecast for the weekend had been looking quite good for a while and with each check of cloud base and pressure charts my plans progressed up the ladder of hills saved for a good day. Perhaps Strathconon from Luipmaldrig? Then an upgrade to maybe Knoydart? Then finally with two days of crystal clear skies forecast and inversion potential I thought it was time to return to the NW Highlands. Besides being where I first started hillwalking it is also my first love in a geological sense, with (in my entirely unbiased opinion) some of the finest rocks in Europe. I’m sure you’ve all had a little gawk at them before, but indulge me while I weave a little of their three billion year history through this report.
The route is blatantly stolen from Rockhopper with a few modifications so thank you for the inspiration. I booked the Monday off work and headed up on Saturday afternoon for a not entirely relaxing walk through the cow field at the start of the Coire Hallie park by headtorch, a lot of eyes staring back at me from the dark. I put the tent up just at the base of the path up Sail Liath and it was calm enough I didn’t even bother with the inner tent, a rare prospect in February (foreshadowing…).
Next morning was a slow start, I always forget that it takes a lot longer to strike camp in winter. When everything is done in gloves or from still inside your sleeping bag its not the most efficient process and I wasn’t on the move till eight. The climb up Sail Liath is quite fast and by nine I was at the top marveling at the view. Obviously I knew what An teallach looks like, it must be one of the most photographed mountains in Scotland, but it still manages to exceed expectations in the flesh.
I’d chosen this route over the pinnacles as I thought it would be a real shame to miss them out, there was a little lying snow particularly on NE to E facing ledges and a few older hard snow patches I was very keen to avoid without axe or crampons. I delayed my final decision about an ascent of Corrag Bhuidhe until right below it from where I could see the route was snow free. The main difficulty is a single c. 4m slab that had a few blobs of ice on key footholds and so felt a little harder than its Mod grade especially with a large camping bag awkwardly getting in the way.
The views here are simply sensational, both along the ridge, and perhaps even more so across to Beinn Dearg Mor which might simply be the best looking mountain in the entire country? Its steep sides, circularity, perfectly sculpted central coire and cliffs satisfy ever eight year olds ideals of what a mountain should look like. Not to mention some of the best terminal moraine I have ever seen, you can just imagine the ice spilling down from Coire nan Clach pushing those ridges along with it.
Once past the Corrag Bhuidhe ascent the rest of the pinnacles are not particularly challenging, with the main danger being standing around for too long looking at the view. I left the bag at the top of Sgurr Fiona and headed off towards Bidein a’ Ghlas Thuill. There I met the only person I would meet for the whole weekend, a very nice man from West Yorkshire who’d come up a gully in the last of the winter conditions just managing to cling on.
My descent route towards Loch na Sealga involved reascending Sgurr Fiona before dropping down into Coir’ a Ghamhna. This is initially ok going on the scree at the top, however lower down it became an interesting array of boulders, holes, bog, and slippy moss designed to test your patience, balance, and ankles.
The river crossing at the bottom was shallow and easily manageable but the freezing water was a reminder that it was infact still February and not July. From here the path that heads round towards Gleann na Muice Beag is initially very boggy with areas causing you to wonder if you’d ever be seen again if you dared to step on them. By the time it heads up the glen however it has become a very well constructed and dry stalkers path.
- River crossing looking back up at the descent
It was somewhere around here that I realized something was amiss. My usual tent pole storage is to strap it to the side of the bag under the compression straps with the base securely tucked into the little pockets at the base of the bag. Its never failed me in five years of carrying it like that. However what was now noticeable absent from my bag was any trace of a tent pole. I can only assume that at one of my slips in the way down Coir’ a Ghamhna it had become dislodged and I didn’t hear it come loose over the sound of my arse hitting the hill.
Its again a rare day in February that you can be confident enough in the weather to push further on away from the road to a high camp knowing that you have no way to pitch your tent. It also made carrying the rest of the tent over five more munros rather a fruitless task…
The final climb up Ruadh Stac Mor seemed to take and age and I was very aware I had a sunset to catch. The short daylight being the only other reminder it was infact “Winter”. The views didn’t disappoint and as a bivy location it must be up there with the best.
I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag doing the typical 30 minutes of sleep, wake up and shuffle about, repeat ad infinitum, when my dad messaged me about the aurora. I used to be quite good at checking the forecasts however living in Glasgow the last few years has made it a bit pointless and I’ve fallen out the habit, no dark northern skies here. When I poked my head out the sleeping bag I think I audibly gasped. The sky was green, no grey band on the distant horizon, these were pillars of light reaching up to the zenith flickering and moving as I watched. The next hour was spent fiddling with the camera and cursing I had decided not to pack my mini tripod. In the end a pile of dairy milk did an adequate if awkward job.
They kept up all night every time I awoke and took another peak. Perhaps due to a graze with a rock in the night my mat developed a slow leak, that necessitated several reinflation’s and the packing of jacket trousers underneath for a little extra warmth. Waking up before sunrise I decided it was time to start the day, a lengthy process when coffee has to be made, breakfast eaten and crucially boots defrosted from their solid as a rock form.
- Warming the boots and making coffee at the same time
The descent to the bealach with A’ Mhaighdean is short, although still quite icy in the early morning before the sun had properly warmed it. It is also here we will start our rock bothering. The bealach is marked by a very defined change in rock. The grey rock at the base here is the Lewisian: a set of gneisses (a granite that has been squeezed and cooked) that are the oldest rocks in Scotland. They formed between 2.7 and 3.0 billion years ago and represent some of the early continental crust that was forming around the time plate tectonics likely started. Their history is far too complicated to go into in any sort of detail, but they have seen their fair share of mountain building and ocean rifting, and they certainly show it in their complex folding
- Complex folding in the Lewisian
The Ruadh in Ruadh Stac Mor refers to the colour of the Torridonian sandstones that drape the Lewisian. These sandstones are comparative young at only around a billion years. They were deposited in an arid environment where eroding mountains now located in Canada were washing great piles of rock and sand in braided rivers and alluvial fans over the Lewisian. The lands surface would have looked very different from today with land plants not evolving for another 500 million years there would have been nothing to stabilise any slopes and no real soils. As a result the landscape likely looked a lot like death valley does today. Alluvial fans and rivers washing sand and rock down from steep mountains. Some of this topography can still be seen in the contact between the Torridonian and the Lewisian, with the surface where they meet showing obvious ancient topography – what was once a hill a billion years ago is a hill once again.
- Contact between grey basement Lewisian and overlying Torridonian sandstones
- A hill within a hill, seperated by a billion years
The Torridonian tends to get finer in grainsize as you go up the sequence, marking a change from high energy short transport environments such as a mountain river, to larger rivers on flatter land. At the base the breccias can be really quite course with large boulders and cobbles all pointing the same direction. These line up through the action of flowing water just like in a modern river and show that a billion years ago water was flowing from left to right.
- Cobbles of an ancient river
Higher up these sandstones show lovely dipping cross beds that show how they formed in braided river environments with sand cascading down the front of each small dune to form another bed.
- Dipping beds of a sandy dune
Back to the hills. By now I was at the summit of A’ Mhaighdean and the views are every bit living up to their hype. The cliffs seem to drop endlessly to Fionn and Dubh Lochs and the view over the sea is incredible. As a little aside the cliffs of Beinn Lair and Beinn Airigh Charr are formed of rocks of the Loch Maree Group, this is all that is left of a two billion year old ocean that existed within the Lewisian. It is also host to the NW Highlands premier Gold-Copper deposit, but that is getting seriously off topic.
- A’ Mhaighdean views
On the way down towards Beinn Tarsuinn the clouds started to fill in to the east and Slioch looked particularly fine standing proud above them. The ascent from the bealach is not as bad as I had feared and one short coffee stop (thermos if you are looking for brand ambassadors my inbox is open…) I was on the ridge. The scrambling along the ridgeline here is never hard and the views to either side, across to the last three munros, and down Gleann na Muice to An Teallach are spectacular.
- Repping the flask
Carrying onwards and round to Mullach Coire Mhic Fhearchair the cloud spilling around Meall Garbh was simply stunning.
- A waterfall of clouds
It is also here that we meet the final main character in our rock tale. These are the distinctive grey rocks that cap a lot of hills in the NW highlands, the Liath in Sail Liath for example. They are another sandstone much like the Torridonian, but almost 600 million years younger and much purer in composition. They are made almost completely of quartz sand – picture one of those perfectly white beaches made into a rock and this is what your would get. They have some lovely alternating directions of crossbeds that shows water flowed one way and then the other, likely in and then out with the tides. They also higher up have the burrows of a marine worm that make the distinctive pipe shapes. Their marine setting shows that in the 600 million years since the Torridonian wore down those ancient mountains the whole region had been eroded flat and now lay just below sea level. They also dip noticeably to the east at about 30*, being deposited on a flat seabed this means they must have been tilted to this angle. However the underlying Torridonian sands that were there first are flat meaning that everything has been tilted twice and when the quartzites were laid down the Torridonian must have dipped to the west and a second tilting returned them coincidently to almost flat.
- The pipes within the Pipe Rock are ancient burrows
The ascent of Sgurr Ban took longer than I would have liked on tired legs, however at least the Torridonian makes nicer terrain than the quartzites that form those hideous angular boulder fields. Incidentally if you need all Scottish rocks rated by walking terrain they form I have opinions for you.
It was getting on in the day by this point and a combination of tired legs and a desire to get back to Glasgow before midnight meant that Beinn a’ Chlaidheimn was a hill too far today. Instead I decided to drop down towards the glen to the east. The descent off Sgurr Ban is initially awful (that damned quartzite again) but then pleasant down great sweeping slabs of Torridonian that if not quite up to those on Skye are still a delight. From here once across the river it’s a simple matter of 10km back to the car including 300m of quite unwelcome ascent.
- Back at the bottom
Incidentally the cliffs on the eastern side of the glen mark the location of the Moine Thrust, the boundary between the unaltered NW highlands and the various mountain building events that formed the rocks of everything to the SE. The Moine (or at least some of it) is likely a very close relative of the Torridonian being of about the same age and forming as detritus from the same mountains, a good example of what too much heat and pressure can do to you.
The map below shows the rocks, time, and environments we’ve traveled through. Pink is the ancient crust of the young earth, The Lewisian. Green the two billion year old ocean of the Loch Maree Group. Yellow the Torridonian sandstones that wore down those ancient mountains on a still barren landscape. Grey the quartzites of a shallow sea thriving with some of the early explosions of complex life. Then over the Moine thrust and into the beige rocks of the rest of Caledonian Scotland… I for one think that a geologic education makes the perfect companion for the hills, you will never be bored even on the roundest munro and it adds a layer of appreciation for the vastness of the time and forces that have shaped the world around us from the largest mountains to the smallest pebble falling into a stream a billion years after the last stream deposited it.
The final arrival at the car was made with incredible views of the setting sun just in time to dodge the cows in daylight this time and start the very long drive home to set that 08:59:59 alarm for the next day.
- Sun streaming past Beinn Dearg Mor before the final climb
- The Beinn Dearg range looking good as the sun set
I am still sifting through all the pictures I took on this walk, so might come back at some point and include a link to a flickr album once I have stitched all the panoramas and the like.
I often proclaim a day in the hills to have been my best - normally whichever was most recent. However I truly cannot think of any that rival these two and I have had some stunners; summit camps of Sgurr na Stri, Bluebird winter mountaineering days on The Ben, roasting hot boat trips into the Dubhs Ridge in the Cullin, summit camps on the Beinn Dearg munros and in the snow in Glen Shiel, Beinn Alligin - Beinn Dearg (the other one) and Beinn Eighe in a day, all of Scotland 4000ers in one walk.
You can insert your own cliché or superlative but I’m a bit worried not only is that the best days in the hills I have ever had, it might well be the best I will ever have.