As winter moves into spring, Steg and I were expecting some warmer weather as we headed to the hills this April, however as I found myself driving up the A9 in a blizzard, I realised it was going to be a far harder day than planned.
We had set out to climb the four munros on the western side of the A9 near Drumochter, and the plans were pretty solid; I would pick Steg up at 7am on Sunday morning and we would be on the hill for about 9:30am. And in all fairness, we were.
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| Humans of Drumochter |
Visibility was pretty much nil at this point, so after we crossed the railway line, we followed a path up the hill, but we didn't pay too much attention unfortunately.
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| Crossing the railway line |
We found that we'd veered a bit far north west from where we should have been, and when the visibility cleared, we could see Geal-charn to the south of us. Lesson learned - check the map from the get-go and don't follow the path blindly.
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| Geal-Charn to the south of us. |
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We had to lose a wee bit of height to get there and we pressed on through the snow showers, and got some cracking views over to Ben Alder. We saw mountain hares and a couple of loud crows (perhaps Ravens).
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| Going uphill in the snow |
We hit the summit of Geal-Charn at 11:45am or so, but didn't hang about because we were in the middle of a squall.
We took a bearing and headed for the bealach between Geal-Charn and A'Mharconaich. The snow cleared and we could see our second hill, as well as those views over to Ben Alder again:
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| Views over to Ben Alder |
We started the hard push up to A'Mharconaich in shin-deep snow - hard work. The snow came in again:
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| High Key! |
We hit the summit of A'Mharconaich at 1:20pm, and had a quick dram to celebrate:
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| Glen Dronach - nice drop |
We decided not to press on for the other two munros since we were getting a bit pushed for time, so we headed back down, first over rocky slopes, then onto tussocky marsh, which slowed us down a bit.
We ended up at the railway line, but on the wrong side of the river, so a quick crossing was required before we got back to the car at 3pm and back down the road for Steg to have a date!
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