With my new place last weekend limited to a quick visit to our friend Neil’s exhibition opening at the Southside Studios I made up for it by getting the furthest away from Glasgow that I have been so far this weekend. A three day hill walking trip called, and after sneaking out of the office early on Thursday and a 5 1/2 hour bus ride I was in Torridon in Wester Ross – one of the more remote parts of Scotland.
On Friday I woke my legs up with a climb up Liathach – bagging my first Munro – Spidean a’ Choire Leith and was rewarded with spectacular views of wild mountains, lochs and not a tree or sign of habitation in sight. The mountain has two Munros so we headed for the second peak – via a series of rocky outcrops (the ridge on the image below) that required some tricky scrambling skills and a bit of rope work to traverse. Of course there is a bypass track that would have made life much easier, but we had some hard-core walkers in this ‘high-tops’ group so over the ridges we went. The decent was a bone jarring ride straight off the second Munro – Mullach an Rathain leaving my quads like jelly – in fact I am still recovering.
Day 2 dawned more to the Scottish weatherman’s liking with cloud at 300 m and driving rain. We ascended directly up a scree slope which meant for every two steps forward we slid one back making it painfully slow going. As minor near death experience for enlivened proceeding for me, a climber above me dislodged a couple of rucksack sized stones on a ledge above me – with powers of jujitsu I never knew I had I deflected one of them over and away while I brought the Jedi mind trick into play to stop the other inches before it reached me!
I made it to the first of the Munros on Ben Eighe – Ruadh-stac Mor, but had had enough of the cloud, driving rain and freezing conditions, so rather than make a quick dash for the remaining Munro for more views of the inside of a cloud I joined a group that descended into the prehistoric feeling Coire Mhic Fhearchair with a beautiful loch, amazing rock buttresses and small burns cascading over steps in the rock. The two hour walk back out to the bus absolutely soaked was somewhat less joyous as you could imagine.
On our final day of walking the cloud remained but the wind had eased which made for an ethereal climb up Ben Alligin through the mist and focused our attention on more immediate aspects like the crazy purple lichen and small burns that appeared suddenly out of the gloom. Not quite the spectacular views that are apparently on offer on a good day but I figured that 1 out of 3 is pretty good going for Scotland. There was a couple of straightforward scampers to the top of the two Munros – Sgurr Mhor and Tom na Gruagaich before we returned to the bus for the journey home – somewhat footsore after 20 hours of walking in three days.
Next we hopped on a random local bus for the beautiful ride down the eastern coast, overlooked by a series of wind farms on the mainland. Alighting halfway down where the bus stopped, with promises of collection and a free ride from the friendly bus driver we walked for a couple of hours through the farms and hedgerows before catching the same bus right down to the very southern tip of the island to 
With a few hours to kill before our ride home we explored the start of the 
