Quite a few cars in the National Trust of Scotland car park. Up past the farm house, which seems to have a mountain rescue post attached, and on to one of the best paths I have been on. You have to go about 2 or 3 miles on a slow climb before you reach the mountain and where the path goes over boggy ground they have put down railway sleepers to make it easier to walk. Really pleasant. It is also a nice walk in its own right curving round left so you get a good distant view of the Window and then marvellous views of the huge cliffs of Coire Ardair as you walk into it. Before the trip I had wondered why they called it the Window but it is obvious once you see it. Coire Ardair is steep sided all round apart from the entrance but slightly to the right of the path there is a sharp cleft in the cliff, an opening so to speak. Actually if it had simply been called a col or saddle you would never have thought of it as a window but because of the name
you recognise it the instant you see it. A break by the stream and then off to a lochan right under the cliffs and at the start of the real climb to the mountain. The walk up to the Window looked steep and very rocky but was not too bad and although slow as usual we got up to the col with no problems.
Although the main purpose of the day was to climb Creag Meagaidh it seemed rather pointless to ignore Stob Poite Coire Ardair, the top of which according to the map was only a short distance to the right. To have left it would have meant revisiting Coire Ardair so we decided to take it today. At the col you get marvellous views off to the North. I'm not sure what area this is lying behind Creag Meagaidh but it does look like a very attractive, desolate wilderness. The climb up to the summit is very easy. A path most of the way but it really is unnecessary. The hill is very convex so the going gets easier the higher you get. At the top it is a bit stony and you are obviously getting on to a ridge, which sweeps round past another Munro if you want to go that way. The summit itself is pretty dismal, and only identified because a cairn has been placed there. Otherwise you would walk past it. Even the views are not particularly outstanding so it was just a quick photo and down again. The whole walk from col to summit must have been less than half an hour.
Down at the col again all of a sudden there seemed to be people coming from all angles. Talked to a guy who was on his 276th munro and was leaving Ben More on Mull as his last one. He had two dogs with him, Italian Pointers or Spinozas, I think he called them. Told us to do Skye sooner than later as too many left it to the end and then didn't have the courage to do them. The walk up to the ridge of Creag Meagaidh looked steep but I knew from experience we would be up it in no time and this was the case. An easy climb then following a path along the ridge to a very strange cairn called Mad Meg's cairn. No idea how it got its name but it is quite big and looks very old, part of it being covered with a type of moss. In some ways it looks more like a natural rock formation than a cairn though it definitely is a cairn. If you didn't know better and were in mist you would believe this was the summit. The latter, however, is a few hundred yards on, though not a great deal higher and for such a pleasant mountain the summit is nothing special. No Guinness or Fosters ( we had those down at the col) and straight back down to the col. By now Graeme was complaining badly about a pain in his knee. He had had it on the way down from Stob Poite Coire Ardair and it was hurting again. It was only on downward slopes it hurt and it sounded to me a bit like the trouble I had had on Carn Aosda. Whatever, it gave him a really rough ride over all the rocks back down from the Window to the lochan. From there the way back was very easy but long, and the railway sleepers were very welcome. I was ahead all the way because of Graeme's knee but he made it alright to the car park where only three cars remained.
