Weekend 19/20th March

Buachaille Etive Mòr

This weekend I decided to put both my arms and my legs through a workout for a change and went winter-climbing.

On Saturday, my friend Elise and I climbed a route on Buachaille Etive Mòr called D-Gully Buttress. The route is a winter grade III,4 and feels quite long, because when you reach the top, you have to cross over to the neighbouring ridge (Curved Ridge) and finish up this before you reach the top of the mountain. Overall we climbed 9 pitches that day and then walked back to the car via the north ridge (west of Coire na Tulaich). It felt like a long day but the route was a really enjoyable and had varied climbing with a few interesting cruxes.

On Sunday, I walked the Ballachullish Horseshoe on my own. I started my day at 8:45am by scrambling up the East-North-East ridge of Sgorr Bhan (the so-called School-House Ridge) and finished by dropping off the horseshoe into the forsest of Glenachullish (3pm). The route was 12.2km in length, with 1420m of ascent. The weather was claggy, rainy, windy and generally not great! This added to the duration of the day (I had to keep checking my map and also the snow slopes to check they were safe enough to walk on).

Gaining the summit of Sgorr Ban was fairly staright forward due to good firm neve underfoot and crampon tracks from walkers the previous day. Tackling the ridge from here to the summit of Sgorr Dhearg (1024m) was rather more testing.....

Sgorr Dhearg on a nicer day!
[Inspire Mountaineering]

In white-out conditions I was wary of a potential cornice on the northern slope and so dropped off the southern side slightly, where (surprisingly) the top 4 inches was quite firm windslab, which sheared-off easily. Therefore I moved up to the very crest of the ridge, where fortunately the coverage of snow was thinner and had also been tramped into a nice firm track by previous passers-by.


Sgorr Dhonuill on a nicer day!
[Inspire Mountaineering]

I then dropped quickly to the col at 757m before starting the slog upto Sgorr Donhuill (1001m). I didn't expect the summit ridge to be so impressive. It is rather narrow and bouldery, with steep crags dropping away on your right.

From here the ridge loses much of its charm (in my view) and the rest of the horseshoe is made up of endless knolls, spurs and smaller summits. This sunday there was a lot of deep, drifted snow which was old and soft. This meant that progress became very slow with me constantly sinking up to my thighs! Very tiring.

Eventually I had enough and dropped of the ridge (033572) and managed some excellent "bum-sliding" in my waterproof trousers, which helped speed up the descent considerably!! I was expecting a horrible battle with thickly-forested trees to reach the track in Glenachullish but actually it worked out rather well, with only about 200m-worth of trees to pick through before reaching the huge track (yeeha!) and a straight forward walk out to the car park.

An excellent training-day but most definitely a slog. If I did this route again, I would try and descend to Glenachullish much earlier after Sgorr Donhuill and try and miss out some of the miserable terrain on the western most part of the horseshoe!