Saturday, 2 May 2015

Ben Alder and Beinn Bheoil

Been a while since the last walk (usual stuff, life etc...). Wanted to get back out and managed to get a day free. Headed out with the Edinburgh Hillwalkers group for a bike and hike.

The hills are 12km southwest of Dalwhinnie along a private gravel road, so we parked at Dalwhinnie Station then took bikes the 12km along the road and onto the hill. While the weather on the approach was sunny but cool, the hill itself had good snowcover from about 500m. We dumped the bikes along from the huts at the base of the hill, then worked anticlockwise around the ridge. This meant taking a steep scrambly route up to ridge which would have been fine in summer but turned out to be a little disconcerting in winter conditions in a number of places - proper hand-and-feet climbing in a couple of spots over rock and ice, where you really didn't want to slip.

Once up top it was straight forward, although given the large time period since my last walk, my (lack of) fitness began to show towards the end. And once we got back to the bikes, the 12km ride back to the car was painful - I'd pretty much bonked. We ended up stopping in Pitlochry on the way back to get some dinner (I'm very grateful to the Indian restaurant for putting up with a bunch of sweaty hillwalkers), that made the drive back much more bearable.




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