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Having stopped short the previous day due to Andy's boots being soaked by some very wet weather, we set off today to do Beinn Uldlamain and Sgairneach Mhor, with the additional A'Mharconaich.
The weather today was a lot better, and Andy's boots had had an overnight dry out hanging under our campsites hand drier and an additional waterproofing application. Funny enough, after had dried his boots he read the instructions for applying the proofing and it said wet item before applying!
We took the standard listed starting point of Layby on A9 at entrance to Coire Dhomhain. Having gone under the railway, we made good time on the Land Rover tracks crossing a few fords on the way. We were heading for the burn crossing point expecting maybe a paddle as in the route guide when we found a lovely new bridge. It looked a ideal crossing point with an easy heather route to the top of Sgairneach Mhor.
- New bridge
It's quite a long slog through heather and marsh to the summit from here, but at least Andy's boots were holding up to this extra test.
- Waiting for a bus at Sgairneach Mhor summit
Onward through the Summit we followed the centre of the wide ridge heading SW. The cloud base had come down and we overshot our intended turn point to head North to Beinn Udlamai by a good 300 ft. We hadn't been overly concerned with the fog, as we followed a sheep track, there was quite an obvious stop point on our heading of when the ground started to rise for the 865m summit, but it did suprise us both how much we had misjudged the distance in the fog .
As we descended into the plateau between the Munro's the cloud lifted and we looked up at the steep ridge of Beinn Udlamain. The ridge walk looked quite hard from below, but this is actually quite deceptive, and renewed with energy from pasta and tuna we made it to the top quite quickly.
- Beinn Udlamain Summit - with some new modern art twisted metal fence posts
We then followed the fence post over towards A'Mharconaich and noted our intended decent route backdown towards the A9 heading towards the Sow of Atholl.
- Descent direction down towards the Sow of Atholl.
We made our way to A'Mharconaich passing 2 cairns on the bealach that could have easily led us to think we had made it early, had we not now beeb more concious of distance travelled on a 1:25k map and steps taken, we finally reach the unimpressive cairn of the summit.
- A'Mharconaich Summit
- Andy at the summit of A'Mharconaich
We doubled back to the descent point prevously noted and made our way down to Coire Dhomhain. Following the Land Rover track back, the temptation to take a shortcut across the railway line instead of the underpass was high, but that would be tresspassing, and we certaily wouldn't have wanted to follow the numerous mud tracks that could easily drawn a hiker off in that direction.
3rd day of walking complete, we headed back to "Camp Pitlochry", for quite a few beers. The MWIS forecast for the next day was pretty bad so we had decided to take the day off and have a hangover.