The giants of Torridon don't come much bigger than Beinn Eighe (below), a veritable mountain range on its own, with a ridge snaking above the upper reaches of Glen Torridon, and towering above the village of Kinlochewe. (Where there is incidentally a superb wee Caravan Club site.)

It was mid May, a favourite time of the year to be on the hills, and my parents had arranged to rent a cottage in Lochcarron for a long weekend, while I drove up from Somerset to join them, via Edinburgh where I picked up Scott. The journey north was a long one, and having left home at lunchtime, it was gone 11.00pm when we pulled into the gravel drive of Onich Cottage at Lochcarron and were greeted by my folks.

The cottage was a pleasant surprise with lovely big bedrooms and roomy public rooms. We all retired after a short while with Scott and I deciding that the morning's intended hills would be confined to Beinn Eighe with Sunday perhaps reserved for Beinn Alligin. The weather had been exceptional over the previous weeks with virtually no rain falling since early April, a marked contrast to the rest of the country which had been enduring an horrendous Spring. The forecast suggested that the weather would be gradually breaking down over the weekend so we were hoping and praying for the current spell to continue.

The morning dawned sunny and warm, and after a quick breakfast we assembled our gear and jumped into the VW to head off towards Achnashellach and onwards to Kinlochewe and Glen Torridon. Parking the car at the NTS car park below Liathach, we headed off up the path towards Coire MhicFearrachar taking in the stunning views into the northern corries of Liathach and across to the vast emptiness of the Sheildaig Forest.
Reaching Coire MhicFearrachar we stopped for a while in the heat to admire its astonishing buttresses before taking a route up its left corner and popping out on the coire lip via a steep pull up a gully with a bit of scrambling to entertain. Leaving our sacs we strolled over the rolling grassy plateau to reach the rocky promontory of Ruadh Stac Mor, the first of Beinn Eighe's Munros.

Returning to our sacs, we continued south and east along the ridge, taking a detour to visit the tops to the south west of MhicFearrachar and marveling at the views over towards Skye and the Hebrides before turning east along the undulating ridge towards the final Munro of the day, Spidean Coire nan Clach. The day remained hot and dry and we had practically exhausted our supplies of water by the time we reached the trig point just to the east of the summit. There we lingered for a while, taking our cellphones from our sacs and phoning our families - waxing lyrical about the weather and the views. Then leaving the sacs once more, we hopped up the remaining section of the ridge onto the summit then turned back to the sacs.

A distant Beinn Alligin from the top of Coire MhicFearrachar

It was then that the "incident" occurred.

We were never entirely sure what happened, but while we descended we noted a party of three on their way up. We had passed them earlier and after our prolonged rest and our phone calls, they had practically caught up with us. The guy in front was armed with walking poles, pieces of equipment I had routinely slagged off for many a year, and as he passed the sacs, it seemed that his poles set in motion a layer of scree. This led to a train of events that resulted in the stones upon which our sacs lay, shifting and rolling, and my sac started a slow and deliberate roll down towards the mouth of a gully that lay directly below.

Scott raced ahead of me trying to retrieve the sac before it tumbled to its doom, but the shifting scree made his attempts, increasingly dangerous as the sac neared the edge of the drop. I watched the sac in disbelief, its progress being so slow and stately that I thought it must soon come to a halt.

Then it disappeared from view, accompanied by a great clattering of rocks and accompanied by the smell of sulphur as the rocks cannoned off one another in their haste to accompany the sac on its journey into the hellish depths of the gully.

Then all was quiet.

"How the f**k did that happen?" I gasped.

We turned and looked at the trio above us on the ridge.

"Dunno…must've been the wind that caught it." came the altogether unconvincing reply from Jimmy with the walking poles.

After a fruitless search by us for some sign of the sac, we abandoned it and headed down to the car-park. The problem for us though was that my sac contained the car-keys. A phone call to the cottage managed to raise my parents and my dad came to pick us up.

We returned the next day to the north side of Beinn Eighe for a fruitless search of the rugged north side of the mountain but spied no sign of the sac. The car and the pair of us were ultimately picked up by a recovery truck on the Monday and transported down to Edinburgh.

It was several months later that I had a visit from the local constabulary who informed me that my sac had been found and was now residing in Ullapool police station. It had been found by a Dutch climber and handed into the garage at Kinlochleven.

Eventually I was reunited with my rucksack after another trip north the following November. Most of the gear was rendered useless by the exposure to the weather over the previous months, but a few items wee salvageable. A souvenir of my trip to Torridon!

The summit ridge of Spidean Coire nan Clach