Ben Nevis

Wednesday 30th May 2012

As a result of my excessive fatigue at the start of this holiday I had been taking things a bit easy while at the same time the weather was slightly poorer than it had been. The grey, overcast weather of the previous day was continuing so I decided that I would do another simple, easy walk. I’d done the final stage of the West Highland Way the day before so for the next day I thought I would do the walk that is usually done straight after the West Highland Way: Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain. The path up the Ben starts from near the youth hostel that I was staying at and is just a constant unrelenting slog all the way up, but at least you do feel like you’re climbing a mountain. I first climbed Ben Nevis in 2004 following the West Highland Way and I had rather poor weather on that occasion, now the weather was not much better. I started the walk rather late in the morning as I’d spent the previous evening listening to folk music at the nearby Ben Nevis Inn, and I was still not in a hurry to start as I first visited the Ben Nevis Visitor Centre.

I wanted to feel like I was climbing the Ben from the bottom, and the traditional start of the path is at Achintee Farm, which is next door to the Ben Nevis Inn. After a quick look around the Visitor Centre I walked up to the start of the Ben Nevis Mountain Track, beside Achintee Farm, and began the climb. On my previous ascents of the Ben I have started from the alternative starting point of the youth hostel, but this involves a very steep climb in order to reach the mountain track that is more than 150 metres up the side of the hill. The gradient is never particularly steep on the mountain track that was originally built to service the weather observatory at the summit, and was the route that a Model T Ford used to get up Ben Nevis a hundred years ago. However, a car wouldn’t be able to get up there now as the path is in serious need of repair. I spent most of the early stages noticing the things that needed to be done to the path to repair it. Water drainage is the main problem as the constructed gutters beside the path are useless. Maybe I should volunteer my services?

Near the top of Red Burn the path has been diverted from its original course and now takes a much wider route and this new path is better able to withstand the thousands of feet that climb the Ben every year. After crossing the Red Burn the path climbs up interminable scree slopes all the way up to the summit, but although it is once again a mess, there is not much that can be done about the constantly shifting stones underfoot. Since the condition of the path was no longer able to distract my attention from the tedium of the climb I started looking around at the other people going up Ben Nevis, and there was a lot, as always. Some of the people were clearly not serious walkers and were going up the Ben simply because it’s the highest mountain in Britain (and the path isn’t too difficult for them), but many of them were unprepared for the increasingly cold weather that they encountered as they climbed. There were people just wearing jeans and t-shirt, whereas I was wearing a hat, scarf and gloves. They must have been frozen!

This was the third time I’d been up Ben Nevis. The second time, in 2006, was in excellent weather, but both of those previous occasions were in July, and this year there had been heavy falls of snow just a couple of weeks before my climb. After negotiating the many zigzags on the mountain track, the gradient eased with the path becoming very indistinct on the bleak stony terrain. Blocking my path was a wide expanse of snow that I had no alternative but to try and walk or slide my way through. I kept wishing that I had my walking poles with me as these would have made things a lot easier. Elegantly constructed cairns guided me across the featureless, stony terrain until near the top I entered another snow field around the tops of the treacherous gullies of Tower and Gardyloo. The path turns left at the edge of Gardyloo Gully and a final one hundred fifty metre trek across the snow took me to the summit of Ben Nevis. 

On previous visits to the summit I was disgusted by the litter of personal mementoes left around the peace memorial, but when I got there on this occasion I found that these have largely been removed, which is a credit to the John Muir Trust for cleaning up the summit. While sitting beneath the ruins of the weather observatory, now an emergency refuge, I had my lunch, but it wasn’t long before I set off back down again as it was very cold. This was not a great walk as I don’t consider Ben Nevis a great mountain, or at least not on the path that I took. Ben Nevis does have some dramatic cliffs on its north-eastern side but you never see any of them from the ascent that I took up its dreary western slopes. The mountain track is just an unrelenting slog along a stony track past unchanging terrain.

For an alternative route down, after reaching the Red Burn and before the (shall we say) poorly maintained section, I diverted along the Coire Leis path that leads towards the dramatic cliffs that lie unseen below the summit. But soon after joining the track I branched left onto another path that I had seen being constructed in 2006. I have wondered where that path went so I decided that I would follow it and found that this path turns towards the north to the mouth of the Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe, and then stops. This may have seemed like a bit of a disappointment as this was a path to nowhere, but instead it led to a fabulous, gradual descent across heather slopes beside the Allt Coire an Lochain into the valley of the Allt a’ Mhuilinn. I was aided in my descent by the recent lack of rain and a faint path that led me all the way down to a track on the other side of the Allt a’ Mhuilinn. A steep descent through woodland took me past the aluminium works and into Fort William. This alternative route down was really refreshing after the dreary mountain track that I had been on for most of the day and greatly improved the walk for me.

Kinlochleven to Glen Nevis

Tuesday 29th May 2012

The previous evening to this walk, while slowly making my way back to the hostel from Glenfinnan, I had plenty of time to think about the dissatisfaction I have felt in recent years over my Scottish holidays. Other holidays that I’ve had over the last year, like in the Lake District at Easter or the Pennine Way last September, have been great, but when I’m in Scotland I've felt like something has been missing and I think it’s because my focus during walking has changed. Years ago I used to say that I don’t do long distance walks because I’m too interested in going up mountains, but over the last couple of years I have been doing more and more long distance walks. When I’m in Scotland though, my focus is still on getting to the top of a mountain and bagging the summit, and I don’t think that interests me anymore, if it ever did. I remember way back in 1998 really enjoying my first ever walk between hostels (and I repeated that walk last September), and I still enjoy going from hostel to hostel under my own power. I don’t think I’ve ever been a enthusiastic top-bagger, especially now.

Following my previous two walks I was really tired, but I still had a strong desire to do another walk over the Mamores. I climbed the western-most Munros of the Mamores on the previous Sunday and was desperate to return to this thrilling range of mountains. However, even from the Glen Nevis Youth Hostel there is a long walk down the valley to the foot of the range, and then a long walk back again. This is a common occurrence in Scotland and even having a car rarely makes much of a difference as the distance is always much greater in Scotland. The prospect of having to do that long walk-in again in my weakened state on top of a challenging walk like the ‘Ring of Steall’ did not feel like the sort of thing I would be able to do. Therefore, while having my breakfast I decided that I would catch a bus to Kinlochleven, on the other side of the Mamores, and walk back to Glen Nevis over the top of the mountains.

Kinlochleven is a fabulous place, even though I usually find it swarming with midges. I was first there in 2004 while walking the West Highland Way, and returned in both 2006 and 2008 to do walks in the eastern Mamores in poor weather. I was now returning to Kinlochleven with weather that was a lot better than on those occasions, but actually a lot worse than it had been earlier in the week. The sky was overcast with low clouds that covered the high mountains but this simply made the walking much more pleasant. The path I wanted up to the Mamores comes off the West Highland Way and climbs beside the Allt Coire na h-Eirghe to reach the ridge between Sgorr an Iubhair and the Munro, Am Bodach. However, as I set off from Kinlochleven up the West Highland Way, I was still feeling quite tired and it struck me that a much better idea would be to stay on the West Highland Way all the way into Glen Nevis. This is a bit of a cop-out but I really did need an easier day, and actually by the time the bus eventually got to Kinlochleven it was almost noon. To do anything else would have been silly.

The West Highland Way climbs out of Kinlochleven on an excellent path through delightful woodland until eventually levelling off when it reaches a wide track. This abominably stony track continues for miles along the bottom of a broad valley with the Mamores rising impossibly steep to the right and the lower hills of Beinn na Caillich and the Corbett Mam na Gualainn to the left. Long distance paths vary in quality and in my experience the most important criteria is good wild scenery to walk past, and the West Highland Way, for the all the negatives that can be thrown at it, does have this. It’s not a bad walk. I had a great sense of isolation and loneliness as I travelled along the valley through Lairigmòr. The valley I was walking through is completely deserted with the only signs of civilisation being one or two ruined farm houses. I was enjoying this walk even though I wasn’t going up a mountain, and since I was following my steps of eight years ago I felt like I was meeting up with an old friend.

After the valley veers to the right, the way enters dense woodland, or at least it used to. I remember it doing so eight years ago and my map indicates that it does but the whole wood, really just a timber factory, has been felled since then. There is still a lot of desolation caused by the discarded branches and tree trunks, but the feeling of openness afforded by the felled wood felt a lot better than it would have been had I been walking along a wide track through dense woodland. Further on the way narrows and enters un-felled woodland on a narrow, brilliantly designed path that threads its way through the wood. This was thoroughly enjoyable despite the lifelessness inside the dense conifer wood, and then it all came crashing down. After passing through another area of felled woodland I reached a vast forest road (presumably made to facilitate the clearing of the wood) that isn’t indicated on my map, and I’m sure it wasn’t there in 2004. There was nothing natural about this road, they may as well have tarmacked it; it was sickening, especially when compared with the excellent path that I’d just been on which I could see traces of its continuation in places. This road passes over the col before slowly descending through Nevis Forest into Glen Nevis. Bearing in mind that this was really just a take-it-easy kind of walk, it really wasn’t bad. It was a nice change of scenery, but it was at its best when the human intrusion was at a minimum.