Beinn Eighe

Bit of a gap in walking over the past few weeks, everyone is busy with work. As we've done most of the easily accessible southern munros, there is a desire to venture further afield - plenty more hills up North, but they take a bit of planning and preparation to get to. A plan was formed to do Beinn Eighe whenever we could co-ordinate spare time. After putting it off for a few weeks, a weekend finally arrived and we set off, on Friday night, up to Kinlochewe to stay in a bunkhouse for the night. On the way we almost, almost, hit a deer! Driving along the road at 11pm when the headlights picked out a deer standing on the road. Matt slammed on the brakes and the deer darted out of the way... but then a second Deer jumped from the right into the middle of the road, trying to cross before we got there, ABS was kicking in at this point but we were getting ever closer. The Deer realised it wasn't going to make it by crossing the road so turned and tried to run away from the car... Finally we stopped, I have no idea how close we really were to the deer - its legs were beneath the height of the bonnet at the closest point so it can't have been more than a couple of meters, maybe we even nudged it, who knows.After our close call, Matt we were pretty paranoid about hitting other Deer, but did make it safely to the bunkhouse at about 11pm. The owners were still awake and asked when time we planned to leave, I tried to suggest 6am or 7am, but Matt kept coming out with 6am. So, after getting to sleep at about 1am (should have used earplugs), we got up at 6am, got ready, and headed out to the hill. Only a 5 minute drive later, we were there! Quite a change from our usual 2+ hour drive to the start of the hill.


Matt was feeling up for a challenge, so he decided to park at the Eastern-most part of the ridge, so that we would be able to walk the full length of the Beinn Eighe ridge. Great, good choice, I thought. We ascended up a increasingly steep scree slope until we hit a small top, Sgurr non Fhir Duibhe I think, at 963m. From there, we had a jagged and sometimes narrow ridge walk along to a second top, Sgurr Ban at 970m, then finally to the first Munro top of the day, Spidean Coire nan Clach at 993m. While most of my photos show reasonable weather, it was actually a very changeable day, with equal amounts of rain, snow, sleet, hail and sunshine. And when it wasn't precipitating in some form and the views opened up, they were very impressive! Unfortunately my point and shoot Olympus can't really do the views justice, and I gave up taking the SLR hillwalking a long time ago, after the second attempt. I think I'll need to revisit that decision for future Northern hillwalks though. As a stop-gap measure, I took a few shots using my phone camera which has a Panorama mode, which really shows the "bigger picture" in a way that photos from the Olympus can't... Here are a couple, first looking North-East from a belach between Sgurr Ban and Spidean Coire nan Clach, and second looking towards the western ridge of Beinn Eighe and the Ruadh-stac Mor (Munro) top.

At the top of Spidean Coire nan Clach, we came across hordes (well, maybe 10-12) other walkers, all in separate groups of 2-3, who seemed to have all walked up the stalkers path and coire below Spidean Coire nan Clach, which seems to be the guidebook route... Those guys (and gals) don't know what they missed by not doing the whole ridge! So we continued on over to Ruadh-Stac Mor, on the way stopping for photos of Liathach (that looks like a beast of a mountain) and the Coire between Ruadh-stac Mor and Sail Mhor.Finally, we hit the top of Ruadh-stac Mor at about 12:45pm. Awesome, we'd been walking for what seemed like the whole day, and yet it was only lunchtime! Kudos to Matt for suggesting the early start time and the longer route rather than the guidebook route! We stopped for some lunch in an area sheltered from the wind, took some more photos, then started the long walk back to the car. We reascended Spidean Coire nan Clach, then headed down the coire and followed the stalkers path back to the road, then a couple of kilometers walk along the road back to the car. Then it was a long drive back, with a stop in Aviemore for a burger (they are still doing Skiing in the Cairngorms, with good snow coverage!). An awesome walk! The numbers: 16km horizontal, 1400m ascent.