Dinner Meet 2013

This weekend was the AMC’s annual dinner meet – held this year at the MacDonald Hotel in Kinlochleven where we’d booked a number of cabins for the weekend, as well as arranging what promised to be a slap up feed in the hotel for Saturday night.

Feeling we should really do something to warrant the meal to come, Juliette and I headed of bright and early (well, quite bright and reasonably early) and after a couple of false starts in the woods behind Kinlochleven were on our way out towards Binnein Mor in the Mamores.

The bright crisp morning was perfect for slogging up the slopes from sea level kinlochleven towards loch Eilde, with the reward of views like this down the loch

Following the excellent stalkers path up the flank of Eilde Beag, we were caught up by Roddy and Austin who had applied brains rather than brawn to the morning and had a longer lie, followed by a drive up to Mamore lodge to start the walk in.

Continuing as a four we followed another stalkers path up the Southern ridge of Eilde Beag to the 956m spot height, we got lovely views of the Glen Coe hills from here from an unusual perspective.

Buachaille Etive Mor

Bidean Nsm Bian Group

Aonach Eagach

We continued up from here to Binnein Mor via its south summit, along a ridge made lovely and almost knife edge in places with some delicate and interestingly sculpted cornices by the recent snowfall and light winds.

Coming back the plan had been to continue along the ridge to Na Gruagaichean and hence down to the landy track coming up the glen, but just after the south summit of Binnein Mor, the cloud dropped and wind picked up leaving us in whiteout conditions with lovely stinging spindrift.  After traversing a couple of hundred meters along the corniced ridge we decided to turn back as it was taking so long to safely negotiated the ridge’s narrower sections due to the cornicing and rapidly forming windslab on the windward side of the ridge.

We re-traced our steps and dropped back down to the glen via Eilde Beag, and hence back to Kinlochleven. 

Back at the hotel we settle down by the fire with a pint in hand to watch the 2^nd half of the rugby as the weather closed in and rain started to drum on the windows.

Luckily the rest of the teams out also had cracking days and managed to dodge the worst of the weather too.  More of their days exploits to come I'm sure!

Dinner in the hotel was a find social affair, with three courses filling us up nicely, with just enough room left over for a wee deoch an dorus (well maybe two....) in the snug before we drifted back to cabins.

Slàinte!

Stu