Adventures in Scotland: Day 1 - Buachaille Etive Mor

It's been coming for some time, it's been planned, everything had been bought and now finally, after all that, it is winter and I am in the Highlands.

Today is a good day.

We arrived last night at about 6 having driven past the snowy highlands in absolutely beautifully bright moonlight and clear skies, and got set up in our (frankly for the price, palatial) B&B and got a good night's sleep. This morning, it was up at 7.45, a full cooked breakfast and then to the mountains (with a quick detour to Kinlochlaven to get me some crampons).

As today was my first day out on snowy hills, we decided to take it easy and do a simple route on a mountain we'd seen on the way in the night before. It wouldn't be too taxing - conditions aren't perfect but they are far from truly awful - but it would give me a chance to get some solid practice in on a proper ascent and a summit on my first day. We didn't get onto the mountain proper until around 11am, which we would later work out was far too late.

As it turned out it wasn't quite like that, with my inexperience, complete lack of technique and initial lack of fitness and confidence slowing us down quite significantly. One section on the walk-in was rather sketchy and after vainly scrambling on verglassed rock and frozen turf, experiencing a couple of slips and being absolutely 100% convinced I was about to die I grabbed out my ice axes and hauled myself up. Trapsing up to where Charlie was waiting I was met with a little bit of abuse, which to be honest I probably deserved, but it was time to do some proper winter stuff. Now it was onto the first snow field on out chosen route (Curved Ridge, for those wondering), a wide vertical band of snow maybe 150 meters from bottom to top, where we donned crampons and had some practice at self-arrests, ascending, descending and traversing with crampons and ice axe technique.




After all that and having climbed the height of the snow field, we decided that the delay we'd experienced would prevent us from summiting and descending safely before last light. As such, we said we'd do a single pitch route then descend and head home. The route itself wasn't taxing, but climbing with axes and crampons is a new experience, and it was initally a bit uncomfortable using tools on bare rock, but we eventually made it to the top for pasties and a glug or two of hot ribena. Then it was an abseil back down the route which unfortunately a little bit short, necessitating some incredibly sketchy down climbing. After that it was a front-pointing escent of the snow field, crampons off, down the footpath and home for hot ribena and dark chocolate hobnobs.

Looks like we're headed for the Ben tomorrow.

Keen.

Glorious.

(The Adventures in Scotland series is a collection of all my posts from my first foray into winter mountaineering. Find all the others here)