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I took a couple of days off in May to head off to some hills which only had slightly obscure weekday buses - which is my idea of fun, really, problem solving and hill walking in one! I'd had my eyes on the four hills to the west of Drumochter for a while, because a southern start and a proper traverse was more appealing than making loops out of them, and seemed like it would fit well into a day.
The Citylink buses to Inverness are strictly listed stops only, so there are only a couple of buses which stop anywhere on the Drumochter pass - fornightly Fishers Tours trips with a listed stop at Dalnaspidal. The timings made it easier to connect at Pitlochry than at Perth, so that was where I went on the early Citylink bus, with time to stock up at the co-op and then have a second breakfast before the second bus turned up.
It was running to time, and not as busy as I expected (I thought it might be full of people using their free bus passes), although the driver asked me to help him find Dalnaspidal, as he'd never stopped there and there was no marked stop - as it turned out we both missed it, and I was put off at the layby at the top of the pass! It did increase the distance a bit, but some flat walking as a warm up didn't really seem like a bad thing
I could have started from Coire Dhomhain, which is actually where the WH route starts, but I didn't much fancy the Sow of Atholl from that side - and also, if I'm going to a place I like to go to that place. So I did head back along to Dalnaspidal, where it was still daffodil season (it was nice to see them again), through a slightly confusing little junction and over the railway line and onto the track leading towards Loch Garry.
So much for the peace of the countryside - between a cuckoo shouting out something like 50 o' clock and lapwings making their electronic noises, along with the traffic back on the road, there wasn't much quiet.
I'd seen one good weather forecast, one bad one and one middling one - it seemed reasonably middling at the moment, grey but with the cloud only just touching the tops of the higher hills, and an occasional suggestion that it might clear later. And it was surprisingly scenic regardless, a kind of steampunk view of the Sow of Atholl over the sluice of the dam.
- Steampunk mountain
Lapwings with their odd shaped wings were zooming about overhead, too fast to get a decent photo, but a little bit further on I got a good view of one on the ground - although not without dodging a determinedly photobombing sheep.
- Lapwing
Just before the second bridge I turned off onto a good path, but as it was obviously heading up the valley I soon turned onto a wet sketchy one, and then on to none at all as I started to climb - it wasn't bad walking, a little bit wet and a little bit rough, and occasional tiny flowers.
- Sow of Atholl
Even this gentler side of the hill was still fairly steep - although after a while I suddenly ended up back on a path that had presumably been there all the time if I'd only known it, although I have no idea exactly where it came from.
- On a track
There was a good view back now, the curving road and the wriggling River Garry and other random bits of water lying about.
- Looking down the road
Eventually things started to flatten off - after all the earlier steepness the summit was just the highest inch of the flat top, and I wandered on until I found it.
- Sow of Atholl summit
Up on the nice flat summit it looked perfectly possible to just wander off towards Sgairneach Mhor, so that's what I did, only to remember at the edge why that wasn't a good idea and have to turn down towards the gentler northern edge of the gap, picking up a tiny narrow path on the way..
- Not the way to go
It's almost as if something has tried to cut a slice out of the hill - an oddly steep little valley in what would otherwise be a fairly smooth ridge.
- The gap between
The other side was not so pleasant, however - I found myself climbing up quite steeply beside a little line of grouse butts, not really a very long slope, but I got a bit bogged down in it (and it was quite boggy). And then, having toiled and toiled up, I suddenly found myself back on a perfectly good path - possibly the one used by people not trying to include the Sow of Atholl in the day.
- On a path again
So that was ok - still a bit of a slow climb ahead, but after a while it narrowed to curve around a scooped out valley, still holding odd patches of snow, which reminded me a bit of the climb up Dun Da Ghaoithe on Mull.
- Coire Creagach
Unlike that hill, however, the summit was just perched at the top of this slope - a grouse had been using the wind shelter and flew off when it saw me coming, leaving its wet footprints behind.
- Footprints left behind
I stopped in the shelter to eat a bite of lunch, but despite making good time earlier I was behind now, and soon hurried on across the very flat top.
- Sgairneach Mhor summit
The wind was pretty fierce up here, and I wanted to put on my windproof jacket, although the wind really didn't want me to, pressing it against me or hauling it away until I finally managed to fight my way into it! Beyond the summit the top of the hill was very broad and very flat - it should have been quick walking, but it somehow wasn't, possibly because of the wind.
- Long flat path
I followed the path on along the top, until I suddenly realised that I should be turning off to the right somewhere, down towards the dip between Sgairneach Mhor and Beinn Udlamain. I expected some kind of path to keep going, since it was a recognised route, but it seemed to have vanished completely, and the ground was horrible, all worn away into rough dips and mounds.
I felt suddenly very alone - I didn't like the place, and the geography seemed odd, with the hill ahead of me not the one I was actually aiming for, and some enormous hills that I didn't know looming menacingly out of the haze and cloud to the west and vanishing again. I was also getting worried about time in a practical sense - I could see the ridge of Beinn Udlamain rising on my right, and it looked like it would be a nice place once I was on it, but there still seemed to be a lot of wet nasty ground to cross to get there, and I was getting short of time to get over the rest of the hills and up to the north for the bus I needed to catch.
- Gnarly ground
At some point I just lost my nerve completely - I knew that going on over Beinn Udlamain and at least one of the others was the sensible thing to do, and that trying to find my way down of the tiny valley to the track would be more unpleasant, at least in the short term, but something had spooked me, and I just couldn't bring myself to head upwards again.
Maybe it was still reaction from Pen yr Ole Wen, because I got similarly spooked on Marsco the first time I was out after a rough trip up the west side of Islay, or maybe I was just looking for an excuse to chicken out. But in fact it was quite a sensible decision, because 10 minutes after that I looked up and found that the cloud was covering all the tops of the hills, and an hour or so later it was pouring with rain - I think what I'd felt without recognising it was actually the change in the weather.
It was a long valley, impressive in its way, but not easy to walk down at first, where it was too narrow even to have a flat base, and I was scrambling over mounds on one side or the other. A bit further on it was at least wide enough for a definite burn, but not often for a burn and a path - a thread of path would appear for a bit, and then once again I'd find myself picking a way along the slanting bank, or walking on stones in the burn itself.
- Narrow valley
Further on again the valley did begin to widen a bit, although the track didn't seem to be getting much closer, and then I did finally pick up a real path - I thought it would lead me to the track, but instead it led along the hillside a few metres above it, so that I had to slide down the steep heathery slope on my bottom to finally get onto solid ground (the best fun of the day, to be fair).
- Meeting the track
From there it was much easier walking, but it was also round about here that it started to pour, so it was just hood up and head down and keep marching - my camera went in a huff in the damp, so there are no photos after that (it cheered up once I got home, but that was two days later), but at that point there wasn't very much to see anyway.
After three miles to the road it was still five miles to the Dalwhinnie junction, although it had at least dried up by then - marking out half a mile to the head of the pass, then a mile to a little mast on a hill, and another mile to Balsporran, and so on. I genuinely enjoy just walking, but it was feeling like a long hard road by the end of it.
I was staying at Comrie Croft to put myself into position for the next day, so it was bus to Perth - a nice polite bus which started signalling that it was going to pull in for me before I even put my hand out - and then onto the last Crieff bus, with a friendly driver who when asked if she could tell me when Comrie Croft was coming up said no, she would forget all about it and have to put me off on the homeward run. Fortunately this time the prophecy didn't come true, and I was dropped off at the end of the track to find my way up to the fairy lights and quite a luxurious room, although I wasn't going to have much time to spend in it.
I had comforted myself when I dropped out with the thought that I had at least picked off the hill that was hardest to reach and left myself with a nice round of three, and it was true - but the day hadn't done much for my Munro total, which had sat at 19 all through the covid years, and not been helped by the various 3000 footers I'd been over in the Carneddau, nice though they'd mostly been!
