Over the sea to Skye

Good weather forecasts call for spontaneity so, on the spur of the moment, we set off for the Isle of Skye and its Glenbrittle Hostel, which lies at the base of the Black Cuillin mountain range we wanted to climb. The walk from Glenbrittle beach started out easy, but by the time we reached Corrie Lagan the track disappeared into snow and Tony lead on up a steep slope of it. Using ice axes we reached a ridge leading towards Sgurr Mhic Choinnich, which is a wee bit exposed in places. We couldn’t make the summit as there was ice in the Great Stone Shoot, but from the ridge we could see the conspicuous Inaccessible Pinnacle in perfect view, as well as all the other Cuillin peaks and the Inner Hebridean isles of Rhum, Eigg and Canna. Getting to the base of In Pinn was spectacular, with more snow-gully climbing that I’ve got quite used to now. We didn’t climb the pinnacle itself but a guy who we met on the summit of Sgurr Dearg did, in just 10 minutes. We couldn’t decide what to climb the following day, there was so much choice, so we nipped into Portree for a bit of charcoal-coat-and-chartreuse-jacket shopping and sweet chai at Café Arriba, and then settled on the ascent of Blaven, which called for the most exhilarating manouevres yet. I couldn’t see how we could possibly get down from this munro without tracing our steps until Tony kicked steps into a vertical wall of snow beneath us. That brought us to another slope we had to ascend in a similar way before reaching the summit of Blaven. On top we met a bare-legged artist sketching the Cuillin ridge, which we’d seen from the other side the day before. The descent turned out to be straightforward and we chatted all the way down in twilight that the Scots call gloamin. We wild-camped on the shore of a sea loch in view of the peak we’d just climbed, made a fire with drift-wood and only woolly sheep passed us by.