The Buachaille is not a single peak but a long ridge, nearly five miles end to end, almost entirely encircled by the River Etive and its tributary the River Coupall. It contains four main peaks. From north-east to south-west they are Stob Dearg at 1,021.4 metres, Stob na Doire at 1,011 metres, Stob Coire Altruim at 941 metres, and Stob na Bròige at 956 metres. Two of them are Munros: Stob Dearg, the pyramid you see from the road, and Stob na Bròige at the far end, which was promoted to Munro status by the Scottish Mountaineering Club in 1997. To the west sits the smaller ridge of Buachaille Etive Beag, the little herdsman, separated from its big brother by the valley of Lairig Gartain. The two herdsmen flank Glen Etive, watching over the river that runs south toward Loch Etive.

Climbers come for the north-east face of Stob Dearg, the steep wall of crags that gives the mountain its iconic profile from the Kings House Hotel below. Crowberry Ridge, a classic graded severe, was first climbed direct in 1900 by the Abraham brothers from Keswick with two companions named Puttrell and Baker. They photographed the ascent, helping launch a tradition of British rock-climbing photography that the Buachaille has carried ever since. Curved Ridge sits immediately to the left of Crowberry, one of the most famous scrambling routes in the country. For walkers without climbing gear, an eroded path leads up the steep bowl of Coire na Tulaich, reaching the ridge about half a kilometre west of Stob Dearg in summer conditions. Alternative routes climb from Glen Etive to the south, including a circular route that ascends via Coire na Tulaich and descends via Lairig Gartain. The choice of route matters here. Conditions matter even more.

Mountains kill people. Buachaille Etive Mòr has seen up to thirteen deaths in a single twelve-month period. A 1994 avalanche in Coire na Tulaich killed one climber. In January 2009 a much larger slide in the same corrie killed three. In 2019, Terance Rooney died of hypothermia and exposure while hillwalking. In April 2023, Royal Marine Reggie Melia fell fifty metres to his death. Each of these was a person with family, with experience, with a love of the hills strong enough to bring them here in the first place. The mountain does not punish carelessness specifically. It punishes the gap between what a climber prepares for and what the weather actually does. Conditions in Glen Coe can change inside an hour. A clear morning becomes whiteout afternoon. The Buachaille rewards humility and patience, and even those are not always enough.

The only building anywhere near the mountain is Lagangarbh Hut, which sits at the foot of the Buachaille beside the River Coupall, just off the A82. Locals call it a cottage because that is what it looks like, a small white building with a slate roof that has become as photographed as the mountain behind it. It is owned by the National Trust for Scotland and managed by the Scottish Mountaineering Club, who rent it out as accommodation for up to thirty people. Below the hut sit the small waterfalls on the River Coupall, the spot where every landscape photographer in Scotland eventually plants a tripod. The ground around the falls has been worn down by foot traffic to the point that some photographers now openly discourage other visitors from going there, hoping the vegetation can recover. The Buachaille has appeared in the 1998 Bollywood film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. It is in the music video for Nick Heyward's Whistle Down the Wind. Dominic Fike used it in his video Politics and Violence. Every few years another film crew arrives at Kings House Hotel and points a camera at the same pyramid the Abraham brothers photographed in 1900.