Scottish Winter Expedition Day 1 - Stob Mhic Mhartuin

At 10am on the 16^th of December, Abel and I sat in the car at the viewpoint overlooking the Three Sisters of Glencoe whilst watching the rain hammer down onto the windscreen. Having awoken very motivated and content in our warm sleeping bags underneath the pine trees near King’s House, we had driven down the glen with the intention of following through on our plan to camp in the Lost Valley. Now, however, it didn’t seem so appealing. ‘I say we just go for it’, Abel commented. I replied that I wasn’t so sure – arriving at our wild campsite in deep snow with soaking wet gear didn’t sound like all that fun. The situation wasn't unfamiliar to me: a day that starts with sitting in the back of the car deciding whether you can really be fucked to head out in abysmal weather or not. We discussed different options, before concluding that it might be best to wait until the next night for our high level camp. Though the weather was so horrendous that many mountaineers I know would have called it a day and gone straight to the pub, we were determined to still get a good walk in. Thus we decided to ascend the Devil’s Staircase, and potentially aim for the summit of Stob Mhic Mhartuin if possible.


After leaving the car and setting out on this chunk of the West Highland Way, the weather seemed to have settled a little. However, we soon realised that the main difficulty lay not in the precipitation, but in the extremely low cloud base and subsequently poor visibility, and depth of the snow. We were soon shrouded in dense cloud, and if my motto of ‘the bleaker the better’ rings true then it was a wonderful morning. I have never climbed a mountain in soft, fresh snow quite that deep – sometimes falling in right to the middle of my waist and having to crawl out with my arms and a lot of wriggling movements. Snow worm. Though it did make the going somewhat more difficult, I also found it extremely funny.


At the point where the definition of the path underneath the snow – and any signs of grass around it – were completely hidden, we decided to take a bearing.

‘Where’s the compass?’ Abel asked.

‘In my rucksack…’ I responded hesitantly.

‘Which is in the car.’ Abel finished.

A sensible option might have been to turn round and head down, given the fact that navigating in a white out without a compass is nearly impossible. Nearly. But I didn’t want to give up that easily, so I whipped out my phone and decided to utilise the OS app alongside the map. This aided our ascent for another hundred metres (it was very slow going due to the minor obstacle of waist-deep snow) until my phone died. Abel managed to spot the top of a cairn poking out of the snow, and we decided to have a snack here before making our way down.


As luck would have it, the clouds decided to choose this moment to lift so that we could see that we were, in fact, at the col, and the summit we were aiming for was directly to our right. We ascended the soft snow slope (again with a lot of falling into it waist deep) before reaching the summit of [INSERT NAME]! Which was more than we had expected when setting off in such conditions. Though not a Munro, I was pleased to have still reached the summit of a mountain that day. We celebrated with some communist peanuts and a satsuma before descending.



The day ended with two plates of veggie haggis, a couple of whiskies, and an hour spent discussing different routes on the map before retiring to a few episodes of Merlin and a night spent sleeping in the back of the car. Luxury.