Back in December, I met up with Jamie – my new walking partner from the last post – to squeeze an extra couple of munros into the bag before Christmas. Days were pretty short, so we chose Buachaille Etive Beag – a smaller ridge in Glencoe which offers two munros for the conquering. Buachaille Etive Beag means in Gaelic “the little herdsman of Etive”. There is also a Buachaille Etive Mòr, which is “the big herdsman of Etive”, and involves decidedly Mòr walking – one for another day.
We set off bright and early despite the dreich morning, layered up to the nines. I’d seen a group of walkers set off ahead of us, thankful for the knowledge we wouldn’t be the only idiots up there.
The hike up was relatively uneventful, apart from the weather trolling me – bringing on the rain *literally seconds* after I decided I was hot and put my waterproof in my bag, and stopping the minute I had it back on again. We played rain hokey-kokey a bit more until I ultimately accepted defeat and discomfort.
We made it up to the ridge, paused at the welcoming ridge-cairn, and headed along to the furthest peak to claim munro number one of the day.
It was getting decidedly chilly on the ridge so it was silly-but-windproof hat time – as modelled in next photo. Soon enough we made it to the next cairn, and caught up with the hikers ahead who got there a few minutes before it. Someone kindly took a group shot, and we admired the view and our achievement. I was duly conducting the process of cairn-selfie-taking, feeling very pleased with myself, when Jamie tactfully broke the news that this was in fact not the top, just a waymarker, and pointed into the distance. I tucked my tail quietly back between my legs, put the phone away, and sheepishly carried on.
I think that waymarker cairn was actually intended as a warning, because once we passed it the weather really upped the ante. The wind picked up, and brought with it sharp hail which it obviously thought would be great to slap us in the face with. We waded through some knee-deep snow drifts and soldiered on until we finally reached the summit cairn. We didn’t stop for long at this one – took one look at the ominously worsening blizzard and hastened back the way we came.
The sky opened up for a wee while on the way back to t’other peak, while we cowered in semi-shelter with our sandwiches, just to remind us what we could have had on a nice day.
Don’t be fooled by how nice it looks. Thanks to the piercingly sharp hail and 40+mph wind, by the time we were at the second peak we had faces like smacked arses. If you can imagine being slapped in the eyeball with sandpaper, you’re getting close to an idea of how unpleasant this was.
I did a pretty feeble attempt at a snow angel in what looked like soft snow, but was in fact hard packed ice. Lovely. And what a masterpiece.
Anyway, we made our way back down and as per usual the mountain put on a beautiful show of lovely weather once we were off it. So thoughtful of it to give us a nice send off.
Only Young Twice 