I remember visiting Kintail on a family holiday when I was little, and I’ve been excited to go back. Mum used to say the mountains rise right out of the sea up there. And finally – FINALLY – the weather forecast was looking really exciting.
My friend Ali was on his was up for a weekend of walking, so I suggested we head up to Kintail to catch this weather. I camped for the night on the edge of Loch Cluanie, and chose a route which happened to start right from where I had camped. Perfect! And the morning I woke up to was a beauty. For the record, the three munros for today were Carn Ghluasaid, Sgurr nan Conbhairean and Sail Chaorainn.
Ali had stayed the night in Fort William and drove up in the morning, we set off as soon as he arrived, hoping to get off the hill before dark. The first munro was a bit of an anti climax – one of those with a broad flattish top, where you can find yourself wandering around looking for a cairn.
We headed on up to the second munro. This guy was much steeper – we slowed right down on the way up to the top of this. But when we got to the summit… WOOOOOWWWW.
FULL INVERSION!! My first proper inversion since I came up here. We could see for miles and miles, with just the tops of the highest hills poking through the cloud. We stopped for a while drinking this in, enjoying the sun. A few guys we met said they’d been at this top for a couple of hours, struggling to see a reason to go down.
After a while we pressed on to walk the ridge over to the third munro, conscious of the sun moving across the sky.
Andddd… when we got ourselves between the sun and the mist…. Brocken Spectres!!
We had a nice toddle over the broadish ridge, which dropped us back down into the mist fr a while and popped us out the other side. The summit of this munro was a fair bit lower than the last one, but that proved special in its own way because we were *just* above the level of the cloud. It was so thick it looked like you should be able to sail a boat on it from summit-island to summit-island. Time for some posing.
Eventually the mist came up and engulfed us, so we started heading back up across the ridge.
And as the sun was getting lower…. wow. Maybe my favourite view of the day, and the bar was high.
The views remained spectacular until we lost the light completely, and we trekked the last couple of kilometres back to the cars in the dark.
Only Young Twice 