The Cuillin on Skye

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The Cuillin on Skye (May 2003)

A waking time of three-ish becomes a waking time of four-thirty or so; we have overslept! We gather the bits and pieces together for the day and ship out. At five-thirty we are walking between the quietened tents in the campsite at Glen Brittle.

The path we take goes basically up to 230 metres and southwest for a long way, about four miles, half of which is pathless bog, it’s long and it’s tedious but a necessary evil to get to the first peak, then it’s straight up the hillside towards that first summit. In total it takes us five hours to get to Gars-bheinn (895m), much too long! The terrain has been awkward finishing in loose rocks to the top. We move away from the top down more loose rocks to the path along the ridge, following it to Sgurr a’ Choire Bhig (895m) with a short stop off to put on hard hats.

Away again to Sgurr nan Eag (924m), the ground is fairly easy to follow but I know it will become more difficult especially as we only have visibility of up to fifty metres. The visibility drops to maybe twenty metres or less as we approach Casteal a’ Garbh-choire (the castle), a point we’ve seen before from a distance and extremely impressive sitting upon the ridge. It is passable from either side so I have been told, but on searching for a while we can only find a way around it to the right (anticlockwise), this takes some time to locate and even longer to traverse!

It’s just after dinnertime now and we are really going slowly, I can’t really put my finger on why but relying totally on compass work with little or no visibility can’t help. We ascend a small series of tops, all in a line to the final one with a name, Sgurr Dubh an Da Bheinn (938m), we have already decided to do the outlying peaks as well as those on the ridge so we head down into the col. Here we meet the first people we have seen on the ridge as we deposit our kit in a safe and re-findable place then head out onto the thin band of rock separating the two peaks. There is only one way up and we find it reasonably easily, scrambling at grade 3, un-roped, to the summit of Sgurr Dubh Mor (944m). On the way back down we have a real problem as we loose the path (not really a path but a maze of sorts), we have sort of forgotten where we turned left, where we descended and where we turned right. It’s found eventually but it has taken another hour and a half for such a small distance and such a small ascent. Back at the rucksacks we take a drink in the misty afternoon gloom before heading off again.

Visibility is getting worse and the cloud we are in is very wet. (Use of compass on Gabbro necessitates holding the device as high up as possible to reduce any magnetic effect; in a little test we could make the compass deviate 180 degrees) We start to skirt again the last part of ‘Sgur a do dar benn’ as we have called it, finding it difficult in places but on climbing higher on its flanks we find a reasonable path that should be heading towards the TD gap, the compass proves our direction. On the way we meet up with a group of four, two of who are Cuillin Guides. I ask where they are heading as a pleasantry and we are told they are going to the TD gap, strange that they are going the opposite way to us! Like an idiot I decide that I might be wrong and decide to switch on the GPS to double check our position and direction of travel; after the five minute warm up time for the GPS, it tells me we are where I thought we were… I was right, the guides were wrong. It makes me feel a bit better now as I write this, but at the time I was annoyed that I doubted my own abilities, even if they were professional guides.

As we get into the col before the TD gap and the first climb, we catch up with them again and one of them mentioned that they went slightly too high up and too far around on their traverse of the last hill. We have some dinner in the lea of the wind then follow the guides and their two charges towards the TD gap. The initial climb is pretty good even though it is extremely windy and wet. Then we get to the abseil at the gap, I set up a safety line for my two partners. Whilst they were abbing into the gap, I have a chance to spy out the route to come, the climb out of the col; it’s wet, slimy and horrible. The oppressive gap contains the wind in its superiority. The Guides are making a real meal of it, moaning about how hard it is; their charges moan and fight their way up held onto tight ropes and using kit to assist ascent. I try to let it all not affect me… I fail.

When it gets to my turn to lead, after helping them get their last man off the ground with his rucksack taking a separate rope, I slide and slime my way up a large cleft that’s meant to be Very Difficult at worst, It feels a lot worse. (In dry conditions I would say Hard Severe), I wonder how I am going to get any further without some really nasty moves. Eventually, about twenty feet above the col floor I decided it is too dangerous; I can’t put the riskiness of the situation to the back of my mind any longer. I get myself lowered back to the floor off a nut and a quickdraw. (Now in someone else’s pack but not mine).

We sit in the TD gap and a decision has to be made. We know that the traverse is over for us, the weather is just too bad and the visibility decaying with every breath. We should be on top of the next hill looking for the great stone shoot and a quick way down, instead we sit in this claustrophobic gap surrounded by sheer cliffs and below us loose rocks, some as big as a car.

It is six-thirty, thirteen hours after we had set out, full of high hopes, I ask for opinions of the other two and there is only one answer, we have to try and escape down the gap itself… maybe it’s possible with the rope even though we hadn’t been told it was a plausible escape route; it has to be tried!

We head down trying to give each other support and trying not to kick down big rocks onto each other. At a few bigger drops I belay off spikes of rock then abseil in to meet the other two, the rope jams once and we have a right game getting it back. Escaping the stone shoot, eventually, we head towards Loch Coir’ a’ Ghrunnda and skirt too low on the right hand side causing us to use the rope again, again it jams in one instance and it takes a good quarter of an hour to release, all I want to do was get the knife out and cut what we can retrieve off, but we manage to free it after a bit of effort. We find ourselves a long way from Glen Brittle and we hasten towards the car there, dreaming of that pint in the Old Inn, worrying that we will miss last orders. At ten-thirty we arrive back at the car, it’s still light as we drive away to Carbost. Back at the Inn we enter sock footed and order multiple beers; just the way a long day should end!