Walkhighlands

After yesterday's poor show in Bridge of Orchy it was with some trepidation that I set off from Ardvorlich at 9.50am- there were already plenty of cars there.

My boots were still pretty wet and felt as though they weighed a few pound each and my quads felt bruised. At least the wether was better than in had been for the past few days.

As we climbed steadily southwards I was unable to match Neil's pace and thought it was going to be a fairly unenjoyable walk.

Passing the point where the path splits in two at about 740m there is a little climb slightly eastwards to reach the top of the broad ridge up to Ben Vorlich. As we reached this point we received a terrific buffeting from the wind, this continued to strengthen as we climbed requiring us to put on outer shell and ski-goggles. The final approach to the summit follows a zig-zag track, with the wind blowing in such a way that you were almost blown up the zigs, but struggled to make headway on the zags.

At the summit we braced ourselves at the summit cairn whilst another chap took our photo.



We then headed down the west ridge to find some shelter to take lunch (I had brought more food today after yesterday's struggle).

The descent to the bealach is steep and was tricky in the wind, although this eased slightly as we dropped height.

We took the route up the northern side of Stuc a' Chroin which was steep with occasional easy scrambling. Topping out there was about 500m to go to the summit proper. There are two summit cairns, the left appears higher, but the guide book I was using suggested the right hand cairn is the summit, so we visited each to be on the safe side; although I think that once you're on this small summit plateau you should be able to say you're at the top without having to actually touch either cairn (I guess it's another idiosyncrasy of the munro bagger).



We took the bypass route down, skirting round to the west then descending and contouring round the western flank of Ben Vorlich before eventually joining the track we had climbed earlier in the morning.

By now the sun was out and the wind had stopped (well it had at this low altitude) and taking advantage of the relatively flat track I jogged down to the start arriving back 4 hours and 20 minutes after setting off.