While I’d quite fancied a trip to the western Cairngorms for the Glen Feshie Munros yesterday, I was late to bed, late to rise and the forecast wasn’t that encouraging, so headed out after lunch to mop up a couple of annoying ‘singletons’ instead. The first being Meall Chuaich above Dalwhinnie, which Irvine Butterfield described as:
A boring hill with an equally drab outlook. Its main merit is that it can be climbed quickly.
To which I can only add that his assessment’s probably about right although, with ‘boring’ (as so often) translating to ‘good for running’ and ‘quickly’ in this case proving to be 10:58 miling from van to van, there simply wasn’t time to get bored!
Now, there are Geal Charns (White Hills) everywhere, they’re typically pretty undistinguished too and the one at the west end of the Monadh Liath is typical, though I might qualify that by noting that it’s both harder work (rougher terrain) than Meall Chuaich and not at all obviously white. Choosing to attack it via Bruach nam Riodag rather than the direct ascent of Beinn Sgiath (which looked all ‘wrong’) suggested by Butterfield, my hopes of getting round at sub-15:00 mile pace were finally dashed by a tortuous clifflet-dodging descent not far south of his line taking me a good couple of minutes-per-mile over that when a little further south again would retrospectively have been far better, but I was still able to hit the remaining track down Glen Markie at a good clip to recover to 15:48 pace for the round.
All in all a good day out with clearer, drier (if also warmer) conditions than expected, and you can see in the final map why I’m glad to get those two done with the triangles, circles and squares being Munros, Tops and Deletions respectively (still stacks of uncoloured stars for Corbetts here, though). Should be my last ‘big’ day before the Devil, but think I’m in reasonable shape for that now if I can just stay sensible over the final week!
