Some fantastically runnable hills yesterday, with the Strathfarrar ridge proving a fast-moving delight despite bringing the rare indignity (outside of race situations!) of being caught by someone who was moving faster than I was…
So I’d come over the Tops of Sgurr Fhuar-thuill and was approaching Sgurr a’ Choire Ghlais at a decent, but not full-on, pace when I became aware of someone coming flying off Creag Ghorm a’ Bhealaich behind me and clearly catching me quite quickly. So (despite logically being outwith a race situation!) I thought waiting on top preferable to getting burned off between peaks, and soon discovered my nemesis to be Graham Dawson, a cheery young doctor from Inverness, who promptly invited me to continue running with him. So off we scurried over the remaining two Munros (my second 992m Carn nan Gobhar of the week + Sgurr na Ruaidhe), with Graham chugging uphill at an impressive rate and showing me up for the lumbering elephant that I am! But, despite perhaps holding him up just a little on this occasion, it seems that we both (as two habitual soloists) welcomed the company, with much enjoyable chat about our common interests in climbing, ultra races and big hill rounds.
To sum up, a good day out with the Strathfarrar ridge (at four Munros and two Tops completed road-to-road in about three-and-a-half hours) not only ticking all the boxes for ‘runnable but not dull’ but proving very much less arduous than its otherwise not dissimilar Mullardoch counterpart! :-)
