Not for us the richness of the lowland countryside in the throes of the climactic consummation of spring. Upwards!
On a warm and beautiful day such as yesterday, only at the top of a mountain would we get the chance to experience miserable weather, cold winds and physical hardship. Only in the alpine zone would we escape the thick masses of hawthorn blossom, the acrobatics of the newly-arrived swallows, the frolicking lambs, the pervading air of promise, and the excitement of a holiday weekend as a whole people comes out of hibernation.
Tell me again, why do I do this? Let’s see…
Stu, my brother, and I stayed at the Kingshouse Hotel on Friday night and set off at dawn to tackle two Munro peaks on the Blackmount, Creise and Meall a’ Bhuiridh (that’s kreesh and meel a voorie for all you – and I’m including me in that you – Lowlanders and Sassenachs). They’re both over a thousand metres, and the Blackmount is an overpoweringly large and complex massif with the same kind of proud unshowy stature as Bidean nam Bian. I was expecting a hard walk.
I’m glad I had prepared myself mentally because it was tougher even than I had expected. It took two-and-a-half hours longer than planned, and that had been a deliberate overestimate. If we hadn’t taken the chairlift down to the foot of the mountain on the descent (I’m not embarrassed about it and I don’t accept the views that underlie your outrage) then we would have been substantially later.
Several factors combined to slow us down, and it’s not a matter of blame. Yes, I am currently rather “geriatric” (Stu’s words), owing to bacchanalian overindulgence and lack of exercise. And I do like to take a great many photos, but I need plenty to choose from when I’m doing these blog posts, which Stu enjoys as much as anybody. So we should ignore the things we could have done nothing about. An initial outline postmortem will help.
Starting from Blackrock Cottage, we had a long walk through a peat bog to get anywhere close to the slopes of our mountain;
We didn’t actually start at Blackrock Cottage, but at the Kingshouse Hotel, meaning that we had to walk some way along the West Highland Way to get to the Blackrock Cottage;
We didn’t have a map (I sense more outrage, but again I don’t accept it)
It was very misty up there until mid-afternoon
I hadn’t researched the mountain by reading books, or online. (That we went up without a map and without doing any research is perhaps deserving of a modicum of outrage)
Owing to these failures we went the wrong way at one point. Later Stu calculated that this added nearly two hours to the walk
In the end Stu got us out of trouble, and, to be fair, he had brought a photocopy of the relevant pages of his Munro book. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We got to the Kingshouse Hotel on Friday evening, had a great meal and some great conversation over a few pints of ale at a table outside, as we looked over at Buachaille Etive Mor (a bit like bookle etiv more). I took this photo from the car just before we turned off the road. I always find this view tantalizing, looking down into Glencoe. I know what’s down at the other end of the glen and this sight makes me yearn for it: sunset over the sea.
Those who have been in this area will know that it has outstanding scenic beauty; from the vicinity of the Kingshouse, what Cameron McNeish says is one of the finest mountain panoramas in Scotland.[1] Stunning photographs of this landscape proliferate in calendars, on pub walls and in poster shops – especially of Buachaille Etive Mor – so I need not trouble you with my own puny efforts. If you’re just snapping, what’s the point in taking a photograph of the Pyramids, or the Taj Mahal, or Niagara Falls? It’s absurd: just Google it and you’ll find a better picture. My own photos in this blog support the text, and capture things that interest me and visual compositions that please me, which are sometimes transient. I’m not going to take photos of famously beautiful places that have been photographed a million times before, by people willing to spend thousands of pounds on the best cameras, lenses, filters and other paraphernalia; and willing to spend whole days, day after day, year after year, capturing the landscape in its most revealing or awesome aspects.
Having said that, here’s a picture of Buachaille Etive Mor:
Incidentally, it wasn’t the best weather for landscape photographs, so the expansive views I had hoped to capture from up high were largely obliterated by the haziness. And the quality of light at dawn was not of the highest. The cloud was just in the wrong place. It was an odd combination of summery haziness and wintery dullness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, it’s just that specifically for photography it wasn’t great. (Excuses excuses)
As we left the West Highland Way and set off past Blackrock Cottage, the unmistakeable hydrocarbon sheen on the surfaces of the pools told us that we were entering a peat bog. There are several reasons for wearing gaiters, but one of them, perhaps the most obvious one – to stop mud and water going down the top of your boots – hadn’t impressed itself upon me much in my preparations of the previous day, so I hadn’t brought them. To begin a walk with wet feet is momentarily very depressing, and later on I had blisters between my toes.
We walked round to Glen Etive and then up the rocky slopes of Sron na Creise to the ridge of peaks that leads to the highpoint of Creise summit itself. It’s described in the books as the scrambling route, and it certainly lived up to that description. The climb was very steep, much of it on stable rhyolite, which is a great rock for climbing because frost-weathering makes it form angular blocks with convenient steps and hand-holds, and it can have a very rough texture.
Polished rhyolite: http://www.howlatm.com/tumbrhyolite.html
I’m coming to realize that rock identification is more about appreciating the origin and history of rocks than classifying them according to how they look today. There seemed to be a great variety of rocks on this mountain, but I now know that the light-grey rocks, the pink rocks, the green rocks and the multi-coloured rocks were all rhyolite: they formed in the same kind of way and they have similar mineral constituents. I can now see that it’s less important to know the name of a rock than to put it in the context of its surroundings and its history. The name – the species classification – helps in doing this, but it should not be the overriding concern. This is, in a way, akin to the change in biology when taxonomy came to be based on evolutionary ancestry rather than on the arbitrary classifications of old (has wings = bird, has fins = fish, and so on.)
So the rocks on this mountain are mostly volcanic and magmatic, with great variety of colour and character even amongst the same rock species. Glencoe is what’s left after millions of years of glaciation and weathering have acted upon the remnants of a caldera that was eight kilometres across.
The signs of spring are everywhere, even high in the mountains. This young frog would have remained unseen had it been able to resist leaping over Stu’s boot. Even after Stu pointed it out to me I struggled to find it. But as you can see, I managed to convince it to pose for the perfect shot.
I didn’t see a water vole, but I know there was one close by, because its droppings are unmistakeable.
I discovered later that I had rather too many shots of Stu’s arse, so I’ll try to keep them to a minimum in this post. In this shot he’s tackling a steep gully.
Sorry, here’s that arse again. You can see what we were up against, and looking at it here it does look daunting, but rocky ascents are actually energizing, if you are the kind of person who is comfortable on rock and unafraid of heights. The stimulation of scrambling more than makes up for the greater physical effort it requires: it really does seem easier. The picture shows a lot of fallen rock, but much of the climb was on good solid stuff.
It’s good when you see you’re gaining some height. The sweeping slopes of Buachaille Etive Mor looked very fine from this vantage point, shrouded though they were.
It didn’t seem long before we gained the ridge. As we climbed its gentle gradient we crossed the uppermost extent of the last glacier, above which the rocks are shattered by weathering into fields of rubble. After a kilometre or so we reached the 1100 metre summit, but without a great view to show for it, as you can appreciate from the picture above.
In lieu of a breathtaking view, here’s another rock.
After the summit of Creise we continued along the ridge. Along it there were substantial walls of snow in the north-facing corries.
Thinking about it afterwards it’s clear that it was when we set off from Creise that our bad navigation skills got us into trouble. I think we both just expected to be able to follow an obvious ridge, so we followed the obvious ridge. One of the things I learned yesterday is that with visibility in some directions better than in others, without a map you cannot just make assumptions about where to go from what you can see. If we had had the map we would have known to look out for a junction of ridges, where we would have had to turn left. And if we had been able to see in all directions we would have seen Meall a’Bhuiridh’s ridge sweeping upwards in an arc.
I was too relaxed, and happy to leave all of the navigation to Stu. He presumed that I would have a map, because I usually do. Knowing this, and in those conditions, I should have been far more alert than I was. I even caught glimpses of other mountains and didn’t stop to wonder what they were, which is uncharacteristic. I was having fun, and perhaps I was complacent because of the mildness of the weather and the security of another nine or ten hours of daylight.
After what seemed like an oddly easy second Munro (because it wasn’t the second Munro), we continued on the ridge, which began to curve round to the left and east towards Rannoch Moor. After following this for a while the clouds began to lift, and I was happy that we would be returning in the afternoon sunshine. But Stu had some nagging doubts. He couldn’t work out where we were, and kept asking “what’s that ridge over there?”
“That ridge” could only have been the ridge that we had been walking along, which he found incredible: “did we really walk along there ?” He was troubled that he couldn’t recognize any of its features. As it turns out, there was a good reason for its unfamiliarity. In the left-hand picture above he’s thinking “wait a minute, so that’s…no, it can’t be…but it must be, cos…well, the only alternative is…”. In the right-hand picture the truth has dawned and he’s just about to say “we’ve come the wrong way – that’s the Munro over there.”
This was a crushing blow. For a few moments we considered continuing, and descending by this unfrequented, unknown route. But in any case it would have taken us many miles away from our destination. The only option was to backtrack, to retrace our steps back to the junction of ridges that we had completely missed, and the location of which we still at this point could not understand.
I didn’t accept for a long time that I would have to climb another Munro, after thinking that I had already done two, but in the event the climb was easy, over boulders, rubble and rocky steps. I found I had more energy than I had expected, and here I would again like to thank Cadbury, the makers of the Chomp, the best – yes, I’ll say it again – the best chocolate bar in the world. I don’t even begrudge them that extra 5p they’ve added to the price. 15p is a small price to pay for – well, anything really. And please don’t mistake my ingenuous enthusiasm for product placement or anything base like that. I don’t get a penny from Mr Cadbury and I wouldn’t take it if he offered. I would say, “No Mr Cadbury, I believe in this product.”
Because I wasn’t paying much attention to anything except nice pictures, and hadn’t done any preparatory reading about this route, I didn’t know that the descent would take us down through the ski centre – the Glencoe Mountain Resort as it’s now called. It has been diversifying recently into mountain biking and various other summer activities because of climate change, and while there is still some very good winter sport to be had, it seems to be quite variable year-to-year. The actual ski slopes certainly looked run-down and abandoned, but they probably always do out of season.
Even down here there was still some snow. In this picture you can see the trail of my bum – I couldn’t resist a bum-slide. To give you an idea how fast I was going, this photo was taken from the spot where I finally came to rest.
I’m sure that most hillwalkers would agree that the descent is, all else being equal, the worst part of a walk. I find myself saying things like “wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could paraglide all the way down.” This time I had been saying “wouldn’t it be amazing if we could take a chairlift down.” Stu said he wouldn’t do it because it wouldn’t be right: it would be a kind of cheating. But we didn’t think for a minute that it really would be operating, and when we saw that it was, Stu ditched his principles without any hesitation at all.
Partly because it was so unexpected and bizarre, partly because it was intrinsically exciting, and also perhaps because deep-down we knew we would remember it with fondness for the rest of our lives, it made us irrepressibly happy.
Birds seen on or around the mountain: ptarmigan, raven, buzzard, golden plover, wheatear, grey heron
