Having recce'd the route, I posted The Brack and Cnoc Coinnich as an event for my Meetup group. Nine of us went, all people I'd walked with before. Unfortunately two people were excessively slow on the walk up The Brack. I tried to wait for them, but the others in the group were starting to get cold from standing around waiting. Eventually the others started shouting at the slow people to hurry up.
It took us three hours to reach the summit of The Brack, and it was clear that these two would not be able to make it to Cnoc Coinnich. Luckily one of the other walkers said he'd climbed Cnoc Coinnich many times before, and he offered to walk back with the other two. I felt very grateful to him for this.
By this time the weather had become very cloudy indeed. I was so relieved after the slower people left that I walked at quite a brisk pace to the summit of Cnoc Coinnich, completely unaware that the others were now having difficulty keeping up. Just a few months earlier, I had been very unfit, due to subclinical hypothyroidism, and once my fitness improved it took a while for me to accept that I really was faster than many other walkers. This was a bit of a lesson for me. Anyway, we all made it to the summit, and made it back safely.
Area :
Loch Fyne to Loch Long (Beinn an Lochain)
South of the A83 as far as Dunoon and sandwiched in between Loch Fyne and Loch Long are a number of peaks, none of which qualify for Munro status. The southern half of the Arrochar Alps includes Beinn an Lochain, which at 901m was wrongly included in Sir Hugh Munro’s original list of 3000ft peaks in Scotland. The mountains list contains all peaks above 600m.
