So it’s nearly two months since my last post, my last chance to add an October 2011 link to the blog archive, and I’m just dashing off a brief report of a pretty momentous weekend involving a trip to Culra bothy for Carn Dearg as Jamie Bankhead’s last Munro…
Now Culra’s really quite a long way from anywhere, so I’ve chopped out a larger area/smaller scale map than usual to show that, with our MTB tracks in blue, Saturday walk in red and my Sunday morning run in green (NB all drawn since I wasn’t carrying a GPS). And we had an ‘interesting’ bike ride into Culra in deteriorating conditions late Friday (arriving c.midnight) followed by a wild Saturday afternoon on Carn Dearg, for which congrats to Jamie of course! Then, having survived the post-compleation [sic] party in good shape after the remaining half bottle of my malt whisky went AWOL (ie not drunk by me), I ran up Sron Coire na h-Iolaire and Beinn Bheoil on Sunday morning to make good my negligence in narrowly bypassing the cairn of the former on a previous Ben Alder/Beinn Bheoil circuit without realising it was a counting ‘Top’ (the things you sometimes have to do to claim a hill you’ve to all intents and purposes already climbed!). But at least I got rather better (‘improving’) conditions for this despite nearly getting blown off my feet descending north off Beinn Bheoil, and we enjoyed an altogether more pleasant cycle out (with some carrying where the track disappeared into Loch Pattack) in the afternoon before the weather turned again (deteriorating later and as horrible as Saturday today).
