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Yet again we were chasing the best weather and that appeared to be in the far north. I had planned to meet Dean in Newtonmore but had been about to fall asleep behind the wheel and so had had to pitch up at the side of a minor road near Dunkeld to grab some sleep. It probably would have been helpful if I’d told Dean this was what I was doing as I awoke to find a fair few worried messages wondering if I’d come off the road. After a decent rest, and a few messages to both Dean and my husband to assure them I was in fact still alive, I packed up the car at 5.30am and was soon at Newtonmore. The plan was to head towards Ben Kilbreck as it was the only hill which MWIS and the met office agreed would be in guaranteed blazing sunshine. I really should be less of a slave to the forecasts as they’re never as accurate as I think they will be, but when you’re spending your hard earned and not very plentiful cash on petrol, its hard not to go for the hills that look best. Anyway, having just done a last minute refresh on the met office at Bonar Bridge while Dean was driving I found that Ben More Assynt now had now cleared a little (according to forecast) and wasn’t looking quite so claggy. No stranger to my last minute plan changing, Dean was not too surprised when I suddenly directed him to turn off towards Oykel Bridge. The morning was glorious and a hard frost coated the fields and also the road which made for some fairly slow driving.
We reached Inchnadamph around 10.30 and after packing our bags with plenty of warm clothing, crampons and axes, we stormed off towards the back of Ben More Assynt. The hills were clear, no clag in sight and our plan was to head up the south east ridge, heading over Conival and then dropping back down for an easy walk back to the car. It’s quite a distance round to the back of Ben More Assynt from Inchnadamph but we made pretty good speed, however we hadn’t really gained much height. In fact after crossing through the Bealach between Breabag and Conival we actually lost some height horror of horrors. The corrie and lochan underneath the ridge is a pretty place, however the clag was starting to come down (god damn you met office) so I was on a mission to get somewhere with more of a view before the chances of views were lost. We had originally planned to head right round to the south end of the ridge however Dean was bored with all of the contouring at this point and with my desperate need to get high quick we decided to head straight up the side of the ridge. This was pretty relentlessly steep, but we did at least gain height rapidly. After about 50 meters we were both regretting our decision (sort of) and were taking very regular breaks, obviously mine were only so I could take my obligatory photos of Dean looking like he might die while leaning on something. It didn’t get any better further up. There was a lot of hanging onto tussocks and I would describe most of my movements as full Gollum.
Dean's lean
When we finally reached the ridge, we sat down for a sandwich to recover the lost energy from the ascent just as two people appeared over some rocks slightly eastward. I am not the best of people and I have to say I was more than a little grumpy to have to share the hill with anyone, given that this was midweek in February and I had not expected to have to speak to anyone other than Dean, but they were nice enough. Dean is a better human (in some respects) and so was happy enough to chat away, it seemed they were somewhat surprised to bump into us too. The man was a little put out that we appeared to have overtaken them. It turned out they were doing some mammoth walk twice the length of ours starting out from the track to Ben More Lodge so once he realised we weren’t even close to being in competition with them he looked less upset. We let them get ahead/were too busy chatting and eating sandwiches to even be close to keeping up with them.
There was no snow on the ridge itself which made the small sections of scrambling much easier. There is nothing too difficult, only one pinnacle where there’s a small exposed section to get around it. It would have been much more difficult under snow, or if the rock had been icy but on that day the rock was dry enough and there were enough good hand holds to make it round without issue. Annoyingly the clag had really glued itself down by now and views were sparse. We reached the summit of Ben More Assynt but didn’t hang around for long as the wind was starting to pick up and my pathetic Raynaud hands were not keen on sitting about for long. At some point we found a single glove lying on the ground, and suspecting that it belonged to the two we’d met earlier we picked it up. Later, hearing voices in the clag ahead one of us yelled something along the lines of ‘if you can hear us we’ve got your glove’ and sure enough, the man we’d met earlier materialised out of the cloud to collect his lost property.
The one bit of exposure. Dean on left.
The ridge to Conival had a little more snow, however no need for axes or crampons still. As we reached the low point suddenly the clag parted and views! Not the most extensive but still, we could see the lochan we’d contoured around earlier in the day and every now and then some of the other Assynt hills would briefly come into view. This lifted my spirits (although I was actually having a great time despite my complaining about the lack of view) and we sped upwards to the top of Conival. Suddenly the clouds parted and we could see in every direction. I was delighted however my delight was tempered slightly by the gale force winds which by now had really started to batter the hill. We could barely stand up by the time we left the summit and there were a few instances of almost getting knocked off our feet while descending the first hundred metres.
Given that we hadn’t seen the other couple for a while we presumed that they must have been miles ahead of us so it was a bit of a shock when we spotted them coming down the hill behind us. Turned out they’d tried to head directly down from Conival to the bealach between it and Breabag in order to include Breabag in their loop but found the gradient and lack of route through crags too much so had a last minute change of plan. We ended up walking the rest of the way back down with them (minus when they went for a swim – this seemed deranged given the temperatures) as we agreed to giving them a lift back to their van many miles down the road at their original start point. The walk out seemed a lot longer than the way in, and although we’d originally planned to go and have a look at the caves, when we got to the turn off we couldn’t be bothered on this occasion and so it was a short distance further back to the start. All in all an excellent day out 😊.
