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There are no photos for this walk on account of the rather **** weather but I have written it up so that our record of our trip to Kinlochewe will be complete.
Maol Chean-dearg looked like a good day out when I first saw it from nearby Sgorr Ruadh last year.
Leaving the small car park at Coulags on the A890 we crossed back over the bridge and turned left through the gate of the lodge. A little way up the track there is a cairn on the left which takes you along the riverside, rejoining the main track beyond the lodge. The rather muddy path carries on up the glen and crosses the river at a bridge. Not long after this the path divides, the left branch going steeply up to the bealach between Maol Chean-dearg and Meall nan Ceapairen.
Have a bit of a rest at the bealach: you will be glad you did once you start up the eroded, steep scree-like path
(I realise I’m not selling this very well!). After a while the gradient does lessen and here it is quite easy to lose the path in poor visibility (or perhaps we are just incompetent
). Anyway we reached a small cairn and wondered if we had reached the summit. Visibility was very limited so we consulted the GPS (which never lies
) only to discovered that we had wandered a bit off piste
. We retraced our steps and then scrambled up a boulderfield (the Munro book says it resembles a great pile of sandstone boulders – that is because it is a great pile of sandstone boulders!) to the real summit, from which apparently there are spectacular views.
We descended the way we had come (well not quite!) and the scree was just as much fun as on the way up.
We regained the bealach where lunch was gratefully consumed. The original plan was to continue to An Ruadh-stac and we did indeed wander across in that direction. However, the slabs (or what we could see of them) looked really intimidating and rather exposed so we dropped off to the southeast
, past some picturesque lochans, arriving back at the bridge sometime later. Then back down the glen to the car.
