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The second walk this year and old habits are hard to break. We took a slight detour and gave ourselves a harder route than we first thought. However ever cloud has a silver lining. Boab and I went without Gerry who was away on a course. What a day. Glorious sunshine, everything in the bag apart from sun cream or a bonnet to cover the receding hairline. My scalp feels if it someone is dragging broken glass over it. Had a haircut today and the lady was thankfully very gentle.
Boab had looked at the route and discovered that the bridge across Alit Gleann Auchreoch was missing it planks. Therefore plan B involved cycling up along the path to the buildings at Cononish. It is only 3 miles from the car park at Dalrigh but took us about 25 minutes. We took the bikes across some boggy ground . Could not cycle them but able to push through most of it. We padlocked them and left the bikes at the bridge. The weird thing is there is no path, road or route at the end of the bridge. Reminds me of the bridge on the M8 in Glasgow affectionly know as the bridge to nowhere.
The route is pathless and you cover a fair amount of boggy parts and a few streams to cross. The plan was to follow the route along the flank of Coire Cruinn and then up to Ben Oss. Some how we got memorized or distracted by Ben Lui. Having agreed the route we got our heads down and ended up heading towards Creag Dhubh Bhealaich and transversing around Ben Oss.
There were plenty of deer looking and taking an interest in these 2 walkers taking an unusual route. Peering over the top of the rocks and thinking they’ll have to turn back.
Anyway by the time we discovered our mistake we decided that it would be quicker to carry on and head towards Creag Dhubh Bhealaich. This was tough, steep ground with lots of boulder fields and a very stiff incline. Getting to the bhealaich was harder than we thought. We did a wee stock take and decided it was route 1. We had worked out that where directly below the summit and just went for it. Scary but successful.
It turned out to be a great decision and on the top we were both surprised to see what looked like a TV ariel, which just got larger and larger as we gained more height. It was in fact a couple from Edinburgh who has camped overnight and were speaking to other radio enthusiasts from Spain, France and good old Wales. Surreal I was thinking and funnily enough the comment came that we must have been up early. That’s not what I was thinking.
After a well deserved rest and some food and fluid off we went towards the second Munro of the day Beinn Dubhcraig. After such a hard first climb this was a piece of cake. ( every cloud has a silver lining) and though you loose a bit of height towards Bhealaich Buidhe it was nothing compared to the transverse around Ben Oss.
The views up here towards Loch Lomond are superb and we had a great day. We met a guy from Kendal who had done over 180 Munros. Mostly in the mist and rain he said and this was the first one he had done since 2008. Well worth the wait then as the weather was great!!
A great day out, a good route and always nice to meet people from all over the UK. Hearing conversations with other from across Europe was good and well done to the couple from Edinburgh for carrying all that gear.
