The southern side of Glen Coe includes some very well-known mountains and can be split into two groups; the ones you can see from the A82 and the ones you can’t. Included in the former group is Buachaille Etive Mor, Buachaille Etive Beag, the Three Sisters and the Ballachulish Horseshoe, and in the latter, three Munros between Glen Creran and Glen Etive (Sgor na h-Ulaidh, Beinn Fhionnlaidh and Beinn Sgulaird). With huge amounts of climbing and walking in summer and winter, this area is also home to a large cairn built for Queen Victoria, or so the story goes. Includes all major peaks above 600m.
Another day spent battling through deep snowdrifts with no sign of a path anywhere! I teamed up with a friend of a friend today to tackle the NE ridge of Coire nan Lochan, a grade 1 scramble at the top of the ridge. The main difficulty was, yet again, breaking trail through the very deep snowdrifts that filled the valley. At times we resorted to crawling to get through the 5 foot drifts! It was as amusing as it was tiring! After 4 hours we made it to the tarns, had a quick bite to eat, donned our crampons, grabbed our axes and set of up the magnificent NE ridge. The cloud thinned for long enough for us to get a view of the ridge to the summit before the cloud swallowed it up and any hope that we had of a view. It was very cold on top and quite windy (20-30mph) on the summit but not as bad as forecast. Visibility was very poor on the top and our tracks were filled in by the time we started descending. It was another long and very tiring day, but great fun and nice to have had some company again.
