I learned a lot about Plastic Surgery

[kurtstat]

These two Munros: Beinn a' Chaorainn and Beinn Teallach. Were these the two that I'd noticed when I was coming down off Creag Pitridh last July? I’d certainly noticed some Munro-esque hills the other side of Loch Laggan, but whether they were these two I just don’t know. Anyway, the weather forecast looked better for the Friday than for the Saturday so I moved a few things around in my diary and drove up the A9 to Dalwhinnie, then along the A86 to Roughburn.

The first proper bit of the walk (where you leave the forest road and strike rightwards up the hillside next to the trees) was hard going. Steep, pathless, boggy, tussocky. You just have to make the best line you can to get to Meall Clachaig. I stopped for a pork pie and took pictures of the view back to Loch Treig.



I almost got the line right, But not quite, so I had to follow the deer fence about 300m to the left in order to reach the stile. Once over that, the walk quality improved markedly. A path. A feeling of space. And a proper ridge-shoulder to provide a sense of purpose.

By this time I was fully engaged in conversation with a retired surgeon from Glasgow who was walking at the same speed as me (we ended up doing the whole of the rest of the walk together), so for most of the ascent from the deer fence to the summit of Beinn a’ Chaorainn we were swapping NHS Scotland anecdotes, finding out which hospitals we'd both worked at and which ex-colleagues we’d both worked with. Iain was also prepared to answer all my daft-laddie questions about Plastic Surgery, so this walk ended up as a weird cross between a Munro-bagging trip and a tutorial.

The bit of the walk between the three summits of Beinn a’Chaorainn is the highlight of the day. It’s a sort of broad, sloping platform ridge, that drops away suddenly to the right. I also liked the view across to the back of Creag Meagaidh, which had been my 100th Munro nine months earlier.



The descent north west to the bealach was less of a highlight. The route was pathless again, and a wee bit bouldery at times, but at least we had a landmark (the cairn at Tom Mor) to aim for. Then an ascent – with an intermittent path – up Beinn Teallach. Looking back made us feel glad we'd done Beinn a’ Chaorainn first; it would've been a slog to go up the way we’d come down.

The area around the summit of Beinn Teallach is a nice sort of bumpy-rocky plateau. And the views to the west open up a bit from here. It took me a while to figure out (hopefully correctly) that the prominent - and enticing - pair of hills on the horizon were Meall na Teanga and Sron a’ Choire Ghaibh, so they’ve now been moved up the list.



The descent was pretty straightforward. Quite gentle, too. No steepness to speak of. The only potential hazards were crossings of the deer fence and the Allt a’ Chaorainn, but we found the right places to do both at the first attempt.

A seven-and-a-half-hour trip. 9:15am to 4:45pm. And yes, I think anti-clockwise is the best way for these two.