Prior to the club meet in Glencoe over the Bank Holiday weekend, Carmen and I took a week off to explore the far north of Scotland.
It was pouring with horizontal rain for most of the journey, getting gradually worse the closer we got to our destination. So we decided we couldn't face camping, and stopped at the Craske Inn, a small hotel/pub/hill farm in the middle of nowhere. It's a great place, just 3 rooms, and bags of atmosphere, highly recommended. And the landlord/farmer, despite having been up there for 40 years, turns out to have been brought up in Malton!
Next day it was cloudy but expected to improve, so we went for Ben Klibreck (a Munro). The normal route seemed to have little to commend it, apart from being short, so we did a longer route from Altnaharra to the north. Altnaharra may be familiar from the weather forecasts in the middle of winter when it is often the coldest place in the UK. The sun did indeed arrive, and we had a great day with excellent views, loads of lapwings, and even more baby baa lambs. We took a detour to the east ridge where there was a surprisingly large monument to two airmen killed in a flying accident in the 1950s. Despite being a sunny Sunday we only met 3 people all day, all of them on the 'tourist route'.
After a very nice night camped by the road (the sort of road with grass up the middle), the next day we went for the other Munro in the area, Ben Hope. Again, this is usually climbed as a quick there-and-back from the road, and is often done in the same day as Klibreck, with a short drive in between. Again though we wanted 
to make a full day of it, so contoured round the hill to reach the north ridge. Once we'd left the tourist route behind, there was little sign that anyone else had ever been there, despite this being the finest way up the hill. A little easy scrambling and a deer-path up the fine grassy ridge was followed just below the summit by the 'bad step' , and easy-ish (about Diff) but dirty and extremely exposed 10m section. On my last visit, I was on my own, and bottled this bit in favour of a dirty gully off to the left. But this time we had a scrambling rope and a bit of gear, so were successful. Passing a handful of people on the summit we set off to the south-east (the tourist path goes south west), heading for the south ridge, but soon abandoned this plan as heavy rain arrived and sent us running down the normal route to the car.
We set up camp in the site at Durness, on the top of the cliffs overlooking sandy beaches, idyllic. Next day was forecast to be wet, so we took the ferry across to the bird sanctuary of Handa Island, where we wandered round taking photos of puffins. Not surprisingly, it was the sunniest day of the week, so when back on the mainland we took the opportunity to do a few climbs on roadside outcrops. Mostly fairly ordinary climbing in a stunning setting, but one in particular was superb, Updraught (Severe **) on Creag an Dubh Loch, overlooking Handa and the tiny port of Tarbet. There was no sign that anybody had ever been there before, let alone climbed the route.
After the usual dithering, we decided to have another mountain day after this, and went for Foinaven. This narrowly escaped being promoted to Munro status recently, but fortunately turned out to be a couple of metres too short, and so nobody ever goes there. A controversial new landrover track up the glen made for a quick if blemished approach, but it was still a couple of hours until we left the track and took to open country to approach the top of A' Ch'eir Ghorm. This is largely composed of scree, but has a series of relatively solid buttresses on one side, and our intended route was up one of these.
The guidebook offers three routes, at Mod, Diff, and VDiff, and the total description given is that there is a cairn at the foot of each route. We meant to do either the Diff or the Mod and so had left rock shoes behind in favour of climbing in walking boots. It took forever to cross the loose scree slope to reach the rock, and by this time, the increasingly threatening weather had unleashed some heavy showers, so the rock was dripping wet. We found what might have been the remains of one cairn, but there was no sign of any others – as it was probably several years since anyone else had been daft enough to come up here, they have probably merged into the scree by now. As we debated whether to head up into the unknown, another heavy shower intervened, and we headed back along the scree, where we opted for the easy-but-tortuous way up, a 300m 45-degree scree slope.
After admiring some spectacular rainbows, we headed along the shattered ridge, mostly bypassing some rather fragile pinnacles, and up into the cloud, where we stayed. We had to imagine the fine views, with steep scree falling either side of the ridge and even the vague hints of a path, as there was nowhere else to go. From the summit, we decided to miss the final top (the inside of one cloud being much the same as the inside of another), and headed down the seldom-visited NE ridge of Ganu Mor. I picked up a discarded sweet wrapper on the way, with a best before date of 25th December 2005.
After picking our way slowly down the craggy hillside to the Skye-like corrie of Glass-Choire Granda, we contoured to the next bealach before cutting across open lochan-studded moorland back to the car. A fine day on a fine hill, and plenty of failed plans to return for!
The next day we took things a bit easier, broke camp, and drove to Sheigra (near Sandwood Bay) for some sea-cliff climbing. A seriously good crag, with dozens on 3 and even 4-star routes at all grades from Diff to E-silly, but despite unbroken sunshine all day, there were no other climbers to be seen, just a handful of people walking their dogs. The need for abseil approaches limited us to just 4 routes.
Tall Paul *** Severe – fantastically exposed with huge holds
Flamingo *** Severe – a superb line up a pink ramp. Carmen led, and I narrowly missed being submerged by the incoming tide.
Shark Crack *** Hard Severe – unfeasibly overhanging for HS but with climbing-wall-sized holds in strange black crystalline rock
Blackjack ** Diff – a bit of a sandbag at the start, but a jugfest above.
Friday was our last day before the long drive south to Glencoe, and on the strength of an excellent forecast, planned on climbing the triple-Corbett mountain of Quinag. Sadly it was not to be, the rain was heavy and the cloud down to road level, but as we drove south conditions improved, and we stopped off to bag the Munro of Ben Wyvis. A newly built path was more like a staircase and took us quickly to 800m, from where a nice grassy ridge led to the summit. Everyone else we met just turned round at this point and retrace their steps, but we continued over a subsidiary top and down a pathless ridge before picking up a forestry track, and back to the car 4 hours after setting off.
We arrived at the hut half an hour before Nigel, and an hour before Margaret, in glorious sunshine – almost the last we saw until the drive home, 3 days later…
Lots more photos here
