April 10 & 11: Our First Munro & lots of snow
Nicholas being The Man With The Map and plotting our journey
It’s been a while since I updated you,
because we’ve been busy, exhausted, camping and frolicking in freezing lochs (more on
that later). Let’s ignore the fact that
it’s the evening of Friday the 17th and scurry backward in time to
last Friday, after we’d spent the day hunting wildcats in Newtonmore. Let’s start where I left off: Our First
Munro: or, the Munro we probably should never have been able to successfully
climb.
According to the all-powerful meteorology
department, the 10th was supposed to be the last day of magical,
Munro-climbing weather, so we popped up to Aviemore for a map of the
Cairngorms. We’d picked up a nifty
little book of Pocket Mountains, written by a gem of a man named Nick Williams. We owe him a lot. We’d picked that up, but needed to grab the
corresponding OS maps because – apparently – maps are important. I learnt this later in the day.
The first mini-summit
Before I’d head to Scotland, I’d got Ross
River. We know this. One of the things I was told to watch out for
was a chest infection. Apparently, because
of the pleurisy I experienced with the fever, I’d be super prone to bronchitis
and pneumonia. I started getting a pang
in my chest when I inhaled, so nipped off to Boots while Nicholas sorted out
the map situation. I had the beginnings
of bronchitis so was put onto some Chest-Eze by the pharmacist. This probably should’ve been the first thing
that deterred us from climbing the mountain.
It wasn’t.
We followed the directions to the spot
where we were due to start our walk, spent a good hour packing our daypack with
our emergency shelter (a big orange sack with a drawstring that was marketed as
‘lifesaving’. At the time I didn’t
believe this, but have since been converted), sufficient snacks and plenty of
water. A+ hiking skills exhibited by us,
except not really. We set off to the
place where we figured the walk was supposed to start (it looked kind of like a
clearing near a bridge? Maybe?), realised we were wrong, headed back to the car
and kept driving until we actually found the right spot. It looked much more like a clearing and we
could see a discernible path. This
should have been the second thing that deterred us from climbing the mountain,
especially given that it was already after 1pm.
It wasn’t.
After the second mini-summit, Nicholas got a call from his buddy, Craig. There wasn't quite enough reception on the mountain to receive the call, so we sent him this selfie. Even if we'd been able to receive, he'd only be able to hear the wind anyway.
After about an hour of walking along a
relatively well-worn path, we found a cairn and any sense of a path. Apparently this is normal in Scotland and they
don’t trailblaze their paths- you just keep walking through the heather and
hope that somebody in your hiking party has map skills. Needless to say, I wasn’t the one with the
map skills. As we trampled through the
heather, we started to feel a pretty solid breeze coming up beside us.
“I think I read there might’ve been some
wind today,” Nick said. “We’re probably
in a bit of a wind tunnel right now, given we’re between two mountains.”
I agreed (naively) because my understanding
of geography is, unfortunately, lacking.
“It’ll probably get better once we’re out
of this pass,” Nick said. Within thirty
minutes, we were up against 50mi/hour winds coming at us from – and this sounds
impossible, even to me – multiple directions.
I could stand forward on my tiptoes with all my weight behind me, and be
held up by the wind. This should have
been the third thing that deterred us from climbing the mountain. It wasn’t.
We came to an almost vertical wall of
rocks, which we were expected to climb.
We did. It was scrambly and
Nicholas hopped his way up like some kind of mountain goat while I clung for
dear life to the rocks. In the distance,
some snow hares hopped away from us, hearing my noisy, clamouring ascent.
I’ll skip the boring details, because the
next four hours were primarily a lot of walking. Some scrambling, a couple of bogs, lots of
little lairs for bunnies. I only fell
over twice, which I think is something of an achievement. One fall, I landed on a big mound of red
spongey moss, which was actually quite nice.
It was a welcome relief to find a patch of the moss and I’d savour every
little step on the soft stuff between all the rocks.
The walk was supposed to take something
like 6 hours for the full circuit. I
think we’d racked up a good seven before we hit the peak, because of all the
wind we were up against. There were
times you’d be lurching yourself forward through the gusts and not moving at
all. It was pretty gruesome.
“Do you want to go back?” Nick would
ask. I figured I’d done all that
horrible scrambling for something and a) wanted to see a peak, b) didn’t want
to scramble back down The Hell Rocks.
We got there in the end. It was pretty worth it.
Nicholas at the peak of Sgor Gaoith, our first Munro! (update: I later found out that Sgor Gaoith means "peak of the wind" in Gaelic. Apt.)
There was quite a lot of snow by the edge, so we stayed well clear of the edge. If you do a quick Google of "Sgor Gaoith" you'll find it looks quite different in the summer!
The peak overlooked a loch called Loch Einich.
I'll tell you a story about this panorama. You can't tell here, because it's compressed, but this is a very high quality panorama. I asked Nicholas to just take a few pictures and I'd stitch them together in photoshop so we had a pano better quality than an iPhone. Long story short: Nicholas shouldn't be trusted to take such images, and I spent multiple hours stitching this together.
I think the pharmacist would’ve kicked me
in the face if I admitted to her that I breathed in genuinely icy gale force
winds on top of a mountain. Even posting
this now, I’m sure someone will berate me.
Those views, though!
We trudged back to the car, my big toes
were numb with pressure from the steep descent and the sun was setting as we
fell into the car. Ok, I fell into the
car. Nicholas had run off to the collect
the teal woolen beanie we’d seen at the entrance to the Caledonian pine forest
where our walk started and finished.
“You should wash this and wear it!” he
said. He picked up a left mitten for
himself for a reason unbeknownst to me.
The story of us finding accommodation (it
was far too late and cold and dark to find a campsite) is a sordid one, so I’ll
skip it and just say that we reappeared at The Glen (old faithful) 10 minutes
before the pub closed.
The following morning we were greeted with
a new version of Newtonmore, as if somebody had taken a very large sieve and
dusted icing sugar over the whole town and the surrounding mountains. We decided it was not a good day for another
hike through the Cairngorms (which, I found out, literally translates to Blue
Mountains!) so made a beeline for Loch An Eilein. This loch is aptly named and means Loch of
the Island (pronounced more like Loch an Isle-an, not Eileen, we found
out. We’d previously been bastardising
the Gaelic by singing the name to the tune of Come On Eileen). It features a castle in the middle and this
is another case of our tourist photos looking very different to the ones on the
postcards. We saw one postcard at the
Aviemore VisitScotland Centre where the castle was surrounded by autumnal
foliage and looked like it was going up in flames, which was quite nice. Our picture featured a lot more snow.
Our very grey picture of Loch An Eilein
We did a short walk by the loch, but my
chest was a painful mess from the day before so we decided to reduce my risk of
a full-blown infection and check ourselves into the only reasonably priced
accommodation that didn’t include sharing with other smelly hikers: The
Glen. They gave us a good deal because
we’d made buddies with the owners the night before. Also, they serve veggie haggis as hot
breakfast. We got upgraded to a better
room too (with a bathtub!) so I used my achy chest as an excuse to sit in a
bathtub for about three hours.
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