We dropped off a car at the finishing position of the walk and set off in one car to the beginning. The walk started along a forest path, alongside some stunning waterfalls, which were partly iced over. Andy pointed out a perfect circle of ice, formed by spinning in the currents of the water - if he hadn't pointed it out I would have thought it was a bin lid!
We soon came to a forest track, which was covered with deep snow, but also run through with a line of well trodden steps. This was heavy and long going though - with heads down treading carefully into each well trodden step, so as to avoid the effort of creating new ones. The sun was blazing, and with the build up of heat from walking, I kept feeling like I was in Corsica or Sardinia.
Eventually, we came to the end of the track and got a view of the ridge wed be ascending. It looked pretty steep and rugged, despite being a Grade 1. We proceeded up, gaining significant height, and covering some reasonably exposed and technical sections before donning crampons, axe, harness and helmet. The route up was certainly less overtly exposed than yesterday, but in parts was possibly more technical and more akin to my experience last year in terms of having to utilise exposed rock and heather. Steve certainly found it less scary than the previous day, but there was still a need to mange balance onto the mountain side carefully, so to me it was pretty much as scary as the previous day. But fun too.
The first summit did not disappoint. We were treated to the same 360 degree vista, including some very impressive cornices.
We continued over the hump of the mountain and down to a baelach which led to the next summit. The snow sparkled, but cut by just the occasional line of foot steps, human and non-human. We saw ptarmigan prints, which led to a couple of ptarmigans in the distance. The next mountain faced us, looking a bit like a large dollop of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sprinkles on top.
Before long we were taking our crampons and helmets off and starting our next ascent. We were in close, single file so as to reuse treads in the snow and made a consistent and speedy pace. But it took a surprisingly long time to get to the top. Having said that, I realised that I'd had a smile on my face for about the last 2 hours.
The summit finally fell beneath our feet, we paused to finish our coffee off and chatted for a while to a couple of slightly older walkers, one of whom carried an axe with a old wooden handle. We started our second descent. The sun was setting now and the original summit to our left looked like it had been covered in a layer of thick smooth clay, which had cracked (creating small gorges on it's surface).
We looked for some snow holes which Andy had pointed out previously, but they were largely filled in with snow (shame, I wanted to step inside and see what it would have been like to sleep in one).
The descent was long, but gradual and easy and the lowering sun provided a spectacular view over the mountain and brought lovely shadows, silhouettes (particularly of the 2 walkers in front of us), and colours (particularly of the forest trees in front of us).
We crossed our final mountain stream (we'd crossed a few over the past couple of days and it was surprising that we'd not slipped in to any), and re-entered the forest through an almost fairy tale path.
It had been a fantastic day, but also quite tiring, so I was quite pleased to return to the car.
After saying goodbye, we went to mozzers for more steak and wine.
Munro - Beinn a Chaorainn, Beinn Teallach
GPX File
No comments:
Post a Comment