Janey and Keith: More walking and climbing in the North West

So I am finally back in Edinburgh for more than a couple of days. I have spent the last 2 weeks in the west highlands helping out with Duke of Edinburgh again, and then up the North West climbing and walking with Keith.

The lovely beds

Helping out with the Duke of Edinburgh was good - free food and alcohol, what more could one want. The beds on the other hand were horrific. Actual mould on the mattresses that have been around since the 1950s.

I went for a walk up Stob Ghabhar on Tuesday 19th June as a detour on route to check on the group of kids at the Clashgour campsite, followed by a walk up the corbett Mam na Gualainn on Wednesday. The views over Loch Leven and the mamores from Mam na Gulainn were amazing.

Loch Leven

The Mamores

Keith headed up after work on Thursday evening to meet up with me and take advantage of the free meal, before we headed off to Guinard Bay on Friday afternoon. The weather in the North West was surprisingly good on friday, we ended up climbing a route called Halcyon Days (VS 4c**) at Guinard crag before cooking dinner on the beach and enjoying some wine straight from the bottle - classy!

Janey on Halcyon Days

Guinard Bay from the crag

nom nom

We had planned to do An Teallach on Saturday, but when we woke up the midges were so bad that we couldnt face getting out of the car to organise our walking packs. The cloud base was also down at around 400m which was rather off putting, so we headed up to Ullapool for a wee touristy look around, then continued on to Reiff for some single pitch seaside climbing.

I led Westering Home (E1 5b ***) and Pop Out (HVS 5a *). Keith led Hy Brasil (VS 4c **) and we soloed a severe called Midreiff, before driving back down towards Torridon to camp before our planned hill day for Sunday.

K arete hugging on Hy Brasil

Approaching the reachy top out on Westering Home

sorting some gear on 'Pop Out'

We woke up to a very low cloud base on Sunday morning (around 350metres) but manned up and headed for the hills - Moruisg (928m) and Sgurr nan Ceannaichean, marked as 915m on the OS map and guidebook but has been remeasured and downgraded to a corbett at 913m.

The visability was horrendous and required constant walking on bearing and pacing throughout the day. Not so pleasant...but what else to do when the weather is horrid!

Summit of Moruisg

Azalea

loving the nav between summits

summit of Sgurr nan Ceannaichean

the view

For Monday the plan was to do the Liathach Ridge line, but once again when we woke up the cloud base had remained as low as 400m so we decided we would leave it for a nice weathered day.

We drove back down to Glen Coe, where the weather turned out to be a perfect day (infact almost too hot). We wandered up Buachaille Etive Beag before food at the Real Food Cafe in Tyndrum on our way back to Edinburgh. This was a fairly short day, we were an hour quicker than the book time with two long breaks at each summit :)