Liathach day. We got up early-ish, had breakfast, and drove to the starting place for Liathach. We set off at 7.50am. I tried to keep my trepidation under control – I had always looked at Liathach with a little fear, and reading descriptions of the route we were taking that day had never changed this. As we worked our way up the surprisingly good path, we saw someone further ahead; I had no desire to catch up with anyone on this route, but we passed D as he was returning from his detour to Stuc a’ Choire Dhuidh Bhig to continue along the rest of the ridge. He was doing the walk on his own, and we ended up chatting to him as we passed each other a few times on the ridge that day. We also dropped our packs to do the detour to the eastern top, and picked up our packs on our return to the point where we had joined the ridge.
There was a little wind and a bit of mist on the ridge earlier on, but these cleared. We passed over the first Munro, Spidean a’ Choire Leith, and carried on towards the Am Fasarinen Pinnacles. These pinnacles that we had been fearing turned out to be fine, at least on the day we were there. There was one tricky bit, the direct ascent of which is described as a grade 3 scramble, which we negotiated by carefully scrambling up an easier but somewhat steep rock ‘ladder’ to the left. We found the rest of the pinnacles straightforward. Once past this section, we continued at a relaxed pace, taking our time to look at the views and take photographs.
Before too long we reached the second Munro of the ridge and our last top of the day, Mullach an Rathain. B went off to explore the eroding north ridge extending from this top a little way, while I read the ‘Danger’ notice about work being done on the path from that point downwards. We saw no “site manager” to advise us any further, so after a short stop we started down the steep scree slope of Toll Ban, with D. The description of this descent as ‘knee-jarring’ had put me off in the past, as I can have a bit of trouble with my knees, but although not particularly pleasant, it was not as bad as I had imagined. Once we reached the road, we walked along it to get back to our vehicles, being bothered by midges and clegs in the still atmosphere. We passed a man and his dog going in the opposite direction, whom we had first come across on the ridge as he was approaching the pinnacles; he had asked us for our opinion on how his dog might handle the pinnacles. Back at the ‘car park’, D continued on his 3-day jaunt of the north-west highlands, and we drove back to the Torridon campsite to stay another night. We were very pleased to have got to do two of the three top priority routes on our wishlist!
