In reply to TheGeneralist:
Wow, just wow.
Absolutely fabulous. The dry weather on Tuesday put the ridge in absolutely stonking bone dry conditions for Wednesday. Left Manc at noon and was parked up by 11pm.
Got up at 5 on Wednesday and on my way by 6.
Pain in the arse doin the first two peaks twice, but allegedly better than going up the Gars Bheinn screes.
Took too much water, about 6kg in all. LOL
TD gap went ok in rock boots and chalk bag
Ripped big chunks out of my new lightweight rucksack hauling it up.
Put the rock boots on again for Kings Chimney, but climbed with the sack this time. Is KC the best single pitch Diff in the world? It seemed like it to me.
An Stac was quite fun, though very loose. Remind me never to walk up the screes below it ever again.
Bit fried at the Inn Pin, so baulked at the long scary easy routes. Did the short severe instead. Many thanks to the bloke that quickly belayed me.
Couldn't find the route on Mhadaidh for ages. Ended up going along some ledge of doom for too long. Knocked some rocks off, which went long long way. Eventually I concluded that if there was a path for the first 4 metres and no path from 5metres then the route must head up the cliff at 4.5 metres. And indeed it was so.
Got to Basteir about 9pm completely fried. No way I would ever solo Naismiths so started up the mod alternative. But I found it scary, alone, after having soloed almost everything else. Wisely I backed off defeated at the last hurdle.
I desperately headed down to the Basteir/Gillean coll with the intention of climbing all the way back up Basteir. But when I climbed down I could see that the col was cliffed out..
But I did see a bit of a weakness on the buttress itself so set off up there in the growing gloom. Then I saw sense and turned round, then I changed my mind and went back up. There seemed to be a good route up and eventually to my delight I arrived at the tooth/Am interface.
Bagged the tooth, headed up Am Basteir and then down to the coll.
Unloaded all my excess kit and took emergency kit only up Gillean at about 10pm. No problems up or down and I finally made it !!
The descent from the coll took around 4hrs to the car, then another half hour back to Glen Brittle. Just to make things utterly perfect it started raining on the cycle back. Just to let me know just how bad it could have been (the weather had been glorious all day)
I was really chuffed to do the full ridge on my own in pretty good style without any real pre-inspection. And the walk in and walk/cycle back to the starting point without a second vehicle. Ridge took 13 hours. In and out took an additional 7 hours.
Pissed with rain the next day, so I did very little. Then did a 50km classic Torridon mtb on Friday and Cairngorm/ Ben Macdui mtb ride on Saturday.
Then drove home.
Absolutely fecking awesome.
thanks for all your input
Post edited at 22:40