free to be able to rate and comment on reports (as well as access 1:25000 mapping).
Every now and again you get mountain days where everything lines up perfectly, this turned out to be one of those days.
An early start from mine at 4:30am for the near 5 hour drive to Klibreck parking area, suited & booted and on our way walking just before 10:00am where the car thermometer was reading a cool minus 7, very surprised to be the only car here and we never saw another soul all day long.
- First view Ben Klibreck
This could be a bit of a soggy walk in but today with ground frost it made the going fairly easy
- Conival & BMA
- Ben Hope
With this being the first Munro of the year for myself Jonny616 & JB likes a beer it didn't take long before we started to build up a fair old sweat and jackets, gloves,hats were soon removed on the climb up to the first minor top.We all had taken crampons and axes and were wearing winter boots but to be perfectly honest we could near enough got away with summer boots,but better safe than sorry.
Once over the first minor top we did encounter the deepest snow we came across all day
- As deep as it got all day
It now was just a case of one foot infront of the other, until we got to the bottom of the final steep climb to the summit, we dumped of bags here to lighten the load and made our way slowly up to the highest point of Ben Klibreck
- Not a bad view at all
- Catching the sun above a stunning inversion
- Nice inversion
- Some more
- Last one
We lingered here probably longer than we should have before the freezing cold started to really bite, that and the fast approaching dusk forced us to scurry back to our bags and start to retrace our inward route,rather than retrace the route back we decided the best course of action was to at a point suitable to make a direct decent to the end of the lochan and then walk between the other two wee lochans back to the road end, we knew this would mean a road walk back to the car at the end, but with the gathering dusk we felt this was the best option
I'm not really sure if saved us anymore time but we made the choice and a road walk back to the car it was.Once back at the road end it was just a case of headtorches on a plod with a couple of final picture of the moon rising above Ben Klibreck
- Moon rising
- Moon rising
- Last one