| I then made the long descent and reascent to the col, pausing briefly to paddle my tired feet in the Allt Breabaig. Once at the col the tent came into sight. I came down, packed up, and started the long trudge back to Braemore. By this time I had abandoned any thought of doing the Deargs and was planning to get the bus back to Inverness. I arrived at Braemore a full two hours before the bus was due and soon found that the freezing wind had been a blessing in disguise - here with almost no wind and beautiful sunshine the midges attacked with a vengeance. I visited the Corrieshalloch Gorge to escape them, stopping at the roadside car park for a hamburger, and walked back by a woodland path. A friendly Rapson's bus driver took me to Ullapool (I explained about the midges) but the ferry from Stornoway was late and since the bus was waiting for that we got to Inverness 35 minutes late which meant that I missed the train. Thankfully there was one more train, which didn't get back to Edinburgh till midnight, but at least I was home.
This had been my first Munro-climbing expedition involving camping. During the previous few months I had spent quite a bit of time planning all sorts of ambitious exploits involving carrying a full pack with several days food supplies over multiple Munros, and camping on the tops of ridges at 800m, etc. I decided after this modest debut, firstly, that a full pack was too heavy to lug around in this way, and secondly that camping at high altitudes was probably not much fun anyway. On the positive side, however, I had used the tent to great advantage and done what I probably could not otherwise have done - climbed the nine Fannaich Munros in only two days. I spent a good bit of time during the following year re-thinking the expeditions I had already planned and now rejected as being, if not impossible, at least such torture that they wouldn't be worth doing anyway. |