It was 6am - I awoke in a strange, but rather comfortable bed and after a couple of moments I worked out that I was in the Stronlossit Hotel in Roybridge. Steg and I had booked in a while back. The room was cheap and better than a Youth Hostel or bothy, especially with the snow teeming down outside.
The night before involved guitars, whisky and Big Jim, but was pretty restrained by normal standards - the bar was quiet and I knew I had some great walking ahead of me the next day, so I took it easy on the sauce. Steg, on the other hand decided to imbibe slightly more than he should have.....but the less said about that the better I think.
We had a lovely breakfast with the aforementioned Big Jim and left the hotel just after 9am. We drove for a short distance east up the road until we found the signs for Fersit and wound our way down the wee road to the head of the Treig dam.
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| Steg getting ready |
The weather was swinging between bright spells and heavy snow showers. Although the sun was warm, we went for full winter gear from the get-go. It proved to be a wise decision.
We wandered from the car at 9:45am and headed over the railway line and a couple of other bridges into Fersit. As we got through the hamlet, we could see no obvious way up the hill from where we stood, and it did seem to be very muddy, so we followed the highest ground we could and kept to the sides of burns where possible. We found we were drifing north of where we should be so changed tack a couple of times to keep on track.
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| Stob Coire Sgiodain |
As we climbed, the fresh snow from the last three days started to thicken, and heathery slopes were quickly being replaced with clean snow, but with no knowledge of the terrain beneath, each step became a gamble, sometimes it was a few centimetres deep, sometimes you could fall up to your waist.
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| About 450m above sea level |
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At this point we started to become more exposed to the strong easterly wind which was thrashing a great deal of snow at us. Climbing was very slow and very difficult, but when the showers cleared the views were breathtaking (through ski goggles at any rate).
The wind had blown the snow into some amazing shapes as well:
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| Blue skies, but you can't see the wind! |
As we neared the summit, we decided that going for the second Munro would probably be a silly idea, and another snow shower hit us, as if to underline that fact.
We reached the summit at 1.10pm, nearly 3 and a half hours to walk just over 3km! Looking over the plateau, we could see some massive cornices, ready to go. You can see them over to the left of the picture here:
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| On the summit. |
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| The summit cairn. |
The views down to Loch Trieg were fantastic, though I could only use the camera with goggles on, so composition had to suffer a little.
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| Loch Trieg |
We headed back to a point where it seemed like descent wouldn't be too steep and that then took us out of the way of the wind thankfully. The descent was fast, but seemed to go on forever, with yet more exhausting falling into snow. I've never really experienced snow as deep as that before - you can fall in up to your chest, but you can't really get out because your arms flail around in the snow as well and you can't get a grip. Frustrating after the 15th time or so.
We got below the snowline and it was a gentle wander back to the car, where we arrived at 3pm. We were very tired and windblown, but glad to have taken on a challenge of that magnitude.
Made it back to Glasgow just after 6:30pm for some marvellous macaroni cheese!
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