Sometimes you don’t know exactly what you’re letting yourself in for when planning a hike, even after prepping with reviewing YouTube videos of the route! There was a single day gap in the poor weather of the past week that persuaded me to book at short notice a day’s holiday with kind permission from my manager. The plan was to climb Beinn Eighe - at least to the eastern trig point, if not the eastern munro, depending on conditions.

As usual, I set off in the dark on the drive there, which was thankfully uneventful on the red deer front, and started the climb from the car park before sunrise.

It didn’t seem to take long before gaining good altitude with stunning views even at the lower levels.

The path up had varying degrees of snow, with old footprints of previous hikers from their descent. Various parts of the route needed caution with the sub-zero temperatures meaning that some of the rocks and steps were coated with ice.

As I came around into the coire that headed up the route I was taking, I was confronted with the severity of what lie ahead. Strangely I didn’t take any photos looking up the coire - by then I must have already been so tired that the effort lying ahead distracted me!!

I ended up fixing on the crampons before getting into the corrie while working out the best route up the steep mountainside as I made my way through the ice and snow before reaching the steepest section.

This is a photo I took looking back on the return home - as a record of the route. The ‘path’ I took was just to the left centre of the photo up the steep sides to the shoulder then turned right to head up to the trig point (right of top centre).

The task of getting to the top was gruelling, with the heavy rucksack with the camera gear not helping! I kept reminding myself that every step forward was one less step to go. Eventually I reached the shoulder after navigating a large sheet of ice on the final few metres. A cairn provided some temporal relief from the biting wind and then the journey continued upwards where I stopped to get on an extra layer as my core temperature felt like it was dropping rapidly.

Here’s a few images from the point I stopped. You can see the cairn in the first photo (very small from my position!) and the slope I came up from to the left of it. Even from here the views was superb.

Eventually I made it to the trig point, which with a low stone wall provided a little shelter.

The views were stunning - here is a selection looking in the different directions.

I never made it to the munro sadly. I was considering leaving the rucksack at the trig point and carefully scrambling up to the summit. However despite boiling up a cup of tea and eating plenty of calorific snacks, the cold was getting to me and the prospect of navigating ice/snow and rocks in the ever increasing wind speed dissuaded me.

The munro peak is the higher of the two shown in the photo below. The photo deceptively gives the air of calm and stillness!

Here’s some panoramics giving the scale of the views.

The cold eventually won the day and I packed up and headed back down. The wind was kicking up the snow as I headed away from the trig point and was like walking through a blizzard of razor blades against the face even with a balaclava on. It was a relief to get down into the relative shelter of the coire.

The route up (and down) under the coire followed the route of a mountain stream and I stopped off to get some photos of the picturesque ice that formed all over the rocks and around the small waterfalls. The patterns were really quite unique.