Ben Lawers Ridge (2)

Monday 17 August

We picked the wrong day for our first foray onto the Ben Lawers ridge! Yesterday we were in cloud for three of our five tops. Today we awoke to clear blue skies. Never mind, we were off up onto the ridge again, although this time to the west side to visit the final two Munros up there, Meall Corranaich and Meall a’Choire Leith.

Starting out from the big cairn on the hillside at the north end of Lochan na Lairige, an engineered path took us the first few hundred metres, before it suddenly stopped at the remains of a bulk bag of gravel, which suggested that maybe there had once been intentions to surface a bit more of its length. There was, however, a trodden line which continued on the ground, even if we did occasionally lose it temporarily at one of the many boggy bits.

Even though a few clouds were forming, the sun shone down on us and there was barely a breath of wind. The lack of wind wasn’t necessarily a good thing: the midges were out, even on the summits.

Yesterday we stood on that lump behind me. Couldn’t see a thing at the time!

Walking along the lovely ridge between the two tops

Both of these hills proved to be excellent viewpoints over to where we had been yesterday – and in every other direction too.

Had I troubled myself to make some sandwiches to take on this outing (we decided we’d be back at Colin in time for lunch) then I would have extended the outing to nip up the Marilyn Meall nam Maigheach, but I hadn’t, so I didn’t. I did consider, over lunch, going back out to visit it this afternoon, as we were so close and the weather so lovely, but in the end I decided my time would be better spent in a campsite laundry, washing some of the bog out of my trousers (carelessly, I only brought one pair of walking trousers with me; maybe I didn’t expect to find myself sitting in bogs so often!).

This little outing, which was easier than I expected and more interesting than Mick expected (so a winner all round, really) covered 6.4 miles with 2500’ of ascent.