Yesterday Stu and I went up Buachaille Etive Beag, the little herdsman of Etive. It’s a ridge parallel to its big brother, Buachaille Etive Mor, but lacks that mountain’s grandeur and the stirring aspect when seen from Rannoch Moor, which I snapped with difficulty from the speeding car:
Remarkable to see the mountains like this when our last climb was mainly on deep snow and hard ice. I’ve been wanting to go to Glencoe for months now and when I got out of the car at the car park I was exhilarated to be there. I took a few photos while a cuckoo cuckooed. There wasn’t much of a view of our mountain, mainly a convex rounded lump looming above, but I took this one of a part of the slope, looking roughly East:
Glencoe is a forbidding place where the mountains frown down upon you, but it’s also somehow a cosy and delightful place, where unexpected complexity reveals itself as you explore. On a day like this part of you wants to linger at the bottom, go for a stroll, set up camp, build a fire, go to the Clachaig Inn for a few pints, swim in the lochs and cavort amongst the shining birch trees before lying in the deep grass to bathe in the light filtered through those fresh young leaves, with the spectacle of the fierce edge of Aonach Eagach adding a spicy hint of danger.
We set off up the valley between Beinn Fhada – one of the fingers of Bidean nam Bian, and one of the three sisters – and our hill, leaving the path to ascend to the lowest point on the ridge (our hill being a ridge with two peaks on it). Here’s Stu in the glorious morning sunshine:
And further up, almost on the crest of the ridge, I took this photo with Aonach Eagach in the background and some pools in the foreground reflecting the blue sky:
Atop the ridge, after some properly knackering exertion, and the big herdsman is visible from a handy viewing platform of red volcanic rock:
Couldn’t tell you if it’s granite or rhyolite or if it’s a pyroclastic flow or lava or what. Of all the geology on the mountain, most prominent was this red rock and a grey and white rock, which probably is rhyolite:
That’s Stu on the way up to the first peak of the day, which has great views over Rannoch Moor, and in the other direction down Glencoe towards the sea.
Heading back down to the ridge low-point, before continuing along to the other end, we walked closer to the East side of the ridge, enjoying views of the valley between ourselves and Buachaille Etive Mor. There wasn’t much exposure on this walk, but there were a couple of mildly vertiginous views over the edge.
Here’s a nice shot of Stu dwarfed by the landscape:
In the next photo he’s like Caspar David Friedrich’s Traveller, which is partly why I took it.
And here’s me, with the high peaks of the Bidean Nam Bian massif in the background, hidden from view in most parts of Glencoe. I confess that I’ve drastically cropped this one, not for artistic reasons, but because of vanity: whether it was some freak of the light or just something strange about the shirt, I looked like I had breasts. Any suggestion that I have man-breasts, and that it’s because I’m overweight, will not be countenanced.
Stu will probably back me up on this: the sight of Bidean arouses mixed feelings. That walk, last summer, was brutally exhausting and ultimately quite dispiriting, and it leaves something of a bitter taste. It’s a big mountain and I think it defeated us. But wait. Part of this is our complacent and arrogant expectation of having a jolly stroll and back for home tea. Maybe we’re just too comfortable. How can we expect such a massive chunk of planet to fit into our schedules?
Here’s Stu beginning his ascent of the second peak of the day:
And here’s an almost abstract view straight down into the valley:
Yes it was May, and yes it was warm, and yes I was sweating so bad that my sweat was hurting me – but there was still some snow around, mostly in shadowy North-facing pockets:
One spectacular sight was a parasailor, just visible as a white blob in this photo:
He sailed from the Glencoe end of the mountain all the way down to Loch Etive, losing height all the way. When he returned to Glencoe I don’t know if it was by parachute or by foot.
Those pools again, this time reflecting the fluffy clouds.
On the way down I went for close-ups. Cracked peat, rhyolite and grass:
And finally, here’s an interesting rock:
I don’t know what it is. It’s probably native to the area, but not half way up this mountain. It was part of the path, which at this point had stone slabs for steps that the National Trust workers had hauled up there. It seems t
o contain different kinds of rock, within a medium, like a conglomerate, but it doesn’t have that rough sedimentary feel about it: it’s shiny, dense, smooth in places like marble, brittle-looking, and the rock fragments aren’t sticking out. Maybe it’s a glaciated conglomerate?