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This trip reports starts the night before on my failed attempt to get to the white corries car park as I had originally planned to make ascent of Meall a'Bhuiridh and Creise from the ski centre. The Road across Rannoch Moor was filling as pretty quick I drove across, I finally made it to the road up to the ski centre it was covered in snow, so I just gave up and sacked it in, drove back down to Tyndrum for the night
I decided I would do An Caisteal & Beinn a’Chroin instead, looking back was definitely the better choice of the day. I went for a bit of a later start ,leaving the van about 9 AM.
The same as the other days on this trip it started out as another solo day, luckily the Snow was different from the day before no longer was I trudging through powder but nice consolidated snow. The ascent to the ridge of An Caisteal was pretty easy going where I ended up passing another group early on.
After I was on the ridge and the walk over to the main summit was easy going. I did a few stops along the way for a photos , once again I was treated to fantastic weather with little wind and clear blue sky’s. My frequent photos stops had slowed me down and the group I overtook on the first part of the ascent caught up with me.
This is where I met Lauren and Donald, who were two friends out winter walking. After having a good chat and laugh we spent the rest of the day together as we were both doing the same route.
This is what really made the day for me was to be out on the hill with some company, a lot of my more recent days all been solo because none of my friends were available for my trips. The other upside to having company was I had people to take photographs of, instead of getting my tripod out.
After getting to the summit of An Caisteal and having a wee break we headed down to the Bealach for the next objective of Beinn a’Chroin.
I told Lauren and Donald that I was training for my winter ML assessment, of which they seemed very happy as they were unsure about how getting up the next section of the route, the steep ascent of Beinn a’Chroin. For me it was a fun and the useful experience of looking after a group in the winter hills.
We decided not to go for the summer way up up the steep section and decided to go for a more diagonal snow route on the left, which was perfectly acceptable to do with crampons and a walking axe. During the ascent which in itself was one of more exciting bits of today there were some pretty nice icefalls which had formed and I would of been half temped to give it a go myself if I had two technical axes.
After our little group had made it to the summit area of Beinn a’Chroin, still excited by our small climb there was a short distance to go to the summit.
We got to the main summit 942m but within our group we had another map which said this was 938m and the other summit a few hundred metres away on both maps was 940m. We decided since we were here we might as well get the other summit in anyway.
From there we headed down into their corrie and followed the winding path out until we reached the farm track which continued to where we had parked our vehicles.
I then said my goodbyes to my new friends hoping to get some more days out with them this winter at some point and then wondered what mountains I would walk up tomorrow.
Hope you enjoy this report.
