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With my other half away to Manchester for a few days, I obtained a rather useful hill-pass. After spending the last few days deliberating, and watching weather forecasts, I plumped for the Ring of Steall, partly to get my 50th munro on a nice hill, and partly because I hadn't touched the Mamores before.
Weather predictions took a bit of a dive over the last couple of days, but I thought i'd go for it anyway, So alarm set for 4:00am
I eventually fought the urge to stay in bed and was up and away before 5am. I took a wee detour to the Spean Bridge Commando memorial on the way.
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- Memorial at Dawn
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- Memorial & Mountains
Shortly before 8:00am, I arrived at the car park at the end of the Glen Nevis Road, got my stuff together and set off along the Nevis Gorge. It's a beautiful place. Certainly one worth re-visiting for a low level daunder. After a wee while, the day's initial target came into view
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- An Gearanach & Steall Falls
The days first obstacle to negotiate was the (in) famous wire bridge. I can honestly say I was cacking myself more doing this than i did on the Aonach Eagach, probably because falling in would have ruined a fairly expensive camera/lens combo. I took this rather slowly
Made it successfully though, although I seemed to be sweating a bit afterwards!
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- THAT bridge
Steall Falls was next, and what an awesome sight it is. There had been a fair amount of rain, so it was a bit of a torrent. While trying to figure out how the hell to cross, I took a shot of it.
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- Steall Falls :)
There was no safe crossing so I wandered downstream and paddled across barefoot. Christ, that was refreshing. There then followed a boggy crossing to gain the ascent path to An Gearanach. And good god, what a slog this was. Lack of sleep was partially to blame, but moreso my unacceptable lack of fitness. I was blowing out of the proverbial most of the way up. Luckily there were some photo ops to break things up a little.
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- Glen Nevis
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- Ben Nevis
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- Sgurr Bhuic and it's bizarre circular rock formations
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- The Grey Corries
I slowly worked my way up to the ridge and views of the Eastern Mamores tried to open up. Mainly Binnein Beag.
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- Binnein Beag
It was now a looooooooooong way back down to the wire bridge.
Before long i reached the summit of An Gearnach. Now my previous photos may suggest the weather was looking promising. Erm, not exactly. Just as I reached the summit, the clag rolled in and I would in it for pretty much the whole round. I met a guy called Adam from Liverpool at the top and we joined forces for the remainder of the round. It turned out that he'd done his first Munro earlier in the week, Ben Lomond. what a way to get 2,3,4 and 5
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- An Gearanach Summit
The scramble onto An Garbhanach is almost immediate upon leaving the Munro summit, and i must say it was an enjoyable wee scramble. We made our way down to the bealach, and shot up Stob Choire a'Charn.
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- Stob Coire a'Charn
It was very windy here and bitterly cold. After consulting the map and compass, we found the correct descent path to the bealach for the next Munro. Although, naively we convinced ourselves that the top in between was Am Bodach
However, I'd read frequently on here that the climb up it was brutal, and sure enough, 10 minutes later the REAL climb was upon us. This was tough going. I put the camera away as it was raining, damp and windy and slowly headed up. I was almost sick on 2 or 3 occasions. FINALLY we made it.
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- Am Bodach
It was too cold to hang around the tops today so after a quick hello to the couple following us, we set off for the next top, and the start of the Devil's Ridge. We didn't take long to descend, then headed up Sgorr an Lubhair, a previous is it/isn't it munro. Again, no hanging about and we were off to the Devils Ridge.
No photos of this as it was P-ing down and the camera was staying bagged. The wind had also got pretty stiff to make it more interesting
Despite the conditions, it was a cracking wee ridge, and there were no issues at the scrambly bit. I wish the weather had been better to get a decent shot of it.
All that remained was the slow plod up the final munro, Sgurr a'Mhaim, my 50th Munro since starting this addictive nonsense in May last year. I eventually (good god i'm unfit) made it to the massive summit cairn and took a wee stone as a memento (i know, i know). Stupidly I forgot to take a photo. So here is my late summit cairn shot
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- 50th Summit
All that remained was the long and unpleasant descent, firstly on wee bits of muddy, quartzite screen, then a bouldery steep, but good path down. After an eternity we dropped out of the clag to see we still had loads of descent to do.
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- Glen Nevis
As a compensation, the weather was improving and the views were getting better all the time. Finally, we dropped down onto the main path back to the car park. finally, we endured the walk back to the cars to round off a truly excellent round of 4 cracking munros.
