Climbing Scotland's Munros

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Outside Magazine, April 2005

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Scotland
The High Hills of Freedom (cont.)


	THE LAST MUNRO: the dreaded Inaccessible Pinnacle, on the Isle of Skye (William Huber)

IN THE MORNING I awake to find my thigh muscles in a state of gridlock, and both big toenails beginning to turn an ominous shade of purple. Much worse, though, is the hangover I've acquired courtesy of the Sconser Lodge Hotel, a Fawlty Towers–type establishment whose eccentric staff and roster of guests—some climbers, some not—insisted on celebrating my conquest of the In Pinn well into the wee-est of hours. Still, a Munro-bagger's list is never complete—or at least mine isn't. And so, slipping on a pair of very un-Scottish flip-flops, I climb into the car and head north.

Beyond Skye, the Highlands grow progressively wilder. My first stop is Liathach, a famously steep four-mile-long ridge that, according to the Scottish mountaineer W. H. Murray, "certainly does fire the heart of a man too long accustomed to rounded shapes and long slopes of grass." It takes a while to fire mine—at first my objectives, Liathach's two Munros, are completely invisible, as is everything else. But after an hour's climb, I pop out of thick fog into an unexpected world of rocky pinnacles, bright sun, and blue sky. Scotland is nowhere to be seen; in its place, a gauzy white sea rolls away to the horizon.

A day later, I'm 50 miles north of Torridon, near Dundonnell, going for one final twofer, on a mountain called An Teallach, "the Forge." It's another airy ridge walk around a gaping glacial corrie—the finest such ridge, according to the guidebooks, outside of Skye. There's fog again, but this time it doesn't relent. I lose the trail repeatedly and then, on one of the forepeaks, get totally turned around and nearly walk off the back of the mountain before I remember the compass sitting in my pack.

What I'm looking for up here, beyond the two Munros, is a famous rock pillar called Lord Berkeley's Seat, where one can supposedly sit and wiggle one's toes over a thousand feet of air. It seems like an appropriately Byronic note on which to end my holiday. I traverse three increasingly steep and scary towers, made all the more slippery by the dense mist, but somehow I never find the seat.

The descent is painful, with my muscles now in full rebellion and long boggy passages threatening to suck my boots off. I keep my mind occupied by adding up the totals: seven climbing days, almost 30,000 vertical feet, 11 Munros, and two completely dead big toenails. True, Charlie Campbell, the speed-bagging-record holder, collected 52 Munros in the same space of time. But my totals aren't bad for a first-timer. Eleven down, 273 to go.

Naturally the skies over An Teallach begin to clear just as I reach the car. As I drive south toward the strawberry farm, I keep glancing in the rearview mirror for one more look at the teetering spire of Lord Berkeley's Seat. Someday, I realize, I'll have to go back and climb An Teallach again. I've ticked it, all right, but I can't quite cross it off the list.

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