April 15: Bagging another Munro & the whiteout
We woke up from our night in the car with
slightly stiff necks, but we were shielded from the cold. Frost had collected on the windshield, and
there was warm condensation on every surface.
We had started listening to an audiobook of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman
and Terry Pratchett the night before, and continued listening while we ate a
breakfast of fresh raspberries and (untoasted) toaster waffles. We had to get our energy up before the long
walk we had planned that day.
Apparently, the weather was going back to blue skies and >50% chance
of snow, so we were going vertical. We’d
planned a walk up Carn Bhac in Inverey, that followed a few ridges up a
mountain called The Battery. It looked
pretty difficult and, as usual, we had 0 idea of what we had lined up.
Nick’s childhood friend Craig (who we met
up with in London a few times) had got a new job and decided to nip up to
Scotland in the downtime. Craig rides
motorbikes and works in motorbikes and generally loves motorbikes. We were hoping he’d meet up with us in time
to do the walk, but it wasn’t meant to be and we set off without him. I’ll spare you the gruesome details (the ones
pertaining to blisters) and the arduous ones (think climbing up a wall of scree)
but I’ll tell you the good stuff. We
were only an hour or two into the walk when we saw a herd of red deer running
across the snow. When we looked over,
they looked back, but weren’t too interested in us and continued running across
the icy expanse. Super cool. We also saw many, many, many white hares. We saw even more homes for white hares, and
tried to avoid trampling them.
A herd of deer, running through the snow
The next part gets a little gruesome but
here goes: when we went to the Wildlife Park, the keeper who fed the wildcats showed
us some ‘pellets’ from the owl area.
They weren’t poo pellets, but little furry vomit sacks that were filled
with indigestible bits and pieces, like claws and hair and bones. We started finding them on every cairn, on
lots of large rocks, and generally scattered about. We kept our eyes peeled for ospreys and
golden eagles. Spoiler: we found none,
but found more evidence of them, which I will get to.
Once we got to the top of our first summit,
we found a scenic spot and sat for a Scottish lunch of oatcakes, which are
basically porridge Ryitas. We’d been
sitting for less than five minutes and discussing the advantages of having our
emergency shelter (which we bought at the recommendation of WalkHighlands.co.uk)
and how we probably should’ve pulled that out during our climb of Sgor Gaoith.
“That wasn’t really an emergency,” I
said. “We did pretty well on our last
walk, anyway.”
“I guess so. Lucky we didn’t have a whiteout or
anything. I really want to give it a go,
though,” Nicholas replied. “Let’s just
try it out now.” He had a point. It was starting to get a bit windy and
chilly.
He was just pulling the orange sack out of
the daypack when it started to snow.
Like, really snow. We peered at
the white world around us through the clear window in our shelter. Not ten minutes had passed when it started to
get uncomfortably warm in our little shelter, and we lifted it to find an
almost cloudless sky. We kept walking.
After the snow had passed Nicholas demonstrated the use of the emergency shelter. In the background you can see the view we had while we lunched.
At the top of the second summit, we made an
exhausted beeline for the cairn and were pretty shocked with what we
found. This is the additional evidence
of the birds of prey and it’s a bit gross (depending on your definition).
“An osprey left us a lucky rabbit’s foot!”
Nick yelled as I scrambled over the rocks.
I thought I’d misheard – but there it
was. Sticking out of the rocky cairn was
a whole rabbit’s foot, bone and all.
“We couldn’t take that back to Australia,”
I commented.
“Maybe we should take it back down for
Craig?” Nick suggested.
We still had 5 hours left of our hike, so
we left the foot where it belonged. This
isn’t the first rabbit remnant we were to find, but I’ll get to the rest. Don’t worry, there aren’t any more pictures
though.
The lucky rabbit's foot
Shortly afterwards, we found the first
other walker out on the trip. I yelled
out hi and waved, then realised Nicholas was doing a wee when he looked
over. Oops. The summit wasn’t far off, and we sat,
genuinely exhausted, at the top. Nick
started doing what he does best, which is adding rocks to the cairn. I don’t know why he does this. It must be an engineer thing. I started taking pictures instead.
“Oh, it’s starting to snow again!” I yelled
to Nick. Snow was a bit of an
understatement. Shortly we were
surrounded on all sides by a thick blanket of white and could see little in
front of us. We were sitting atop our
second Munro in a total whiteout. I was
glad Nicholas hadn’t completely packed away the emergency shelter, because we
had to break it out again.
Me, settling into the cairn, to wait out the impending whiteout
We probably sat in the snow, blowing on our
hands to stop them numbing and continually wiggling our toes, for half an
hour. Nicholas started insisting that we
keep on going and the topographical map didn’t look like we were near any sharp
descents. I wasn’t too keen to become a
naïve traveller statistic though, and we stayed put until it had cleared. The views were pretty worth it though. These pictures don’t really do anything
justice. They don’t give you any sense
of how big and wide and expansive the landscape was, or how strange the
juxtaposition of sun and snow was, or how quickly the clouds were moving
overheard. It was something else.
The direction of The Top of the Battery
I’m glad the view was amazing, because the
next two hours were genuine hell. The
book we’d picked up mentioned that the ridge to the Battery Top can be ‘boggy
at times’. I didn’t interpret that to
mean ‘prepare to be ankle deep in bog for 120 minutes’. That’s what happened though. We were twenty minutes in and I had composed
a catchy ditty that I would notate for you if I had any musical ability. The lyrics were,
“Ana hates the bog,
And the deer hate the bog,
But the bunnies hate the bog most of
a-a-all.”
Another twenty minutes and I had another
verse up my sleeve,
“But the osprey loves the bog,
And the eagles love the bog,
But the bunnies hate the bog most of a-a-all.”
When I relayed the lyrics to Nicholas and
he got it stuck in his head, he didn’t question the second verse. I assumed this is because he had been
following the path I forged through the bog.
He hadn’t, and I had to clarify.
“Didn’t you see all the rabbit bits in the
bog?”
“What?”
“The rabbit bits.”
“The rabbit bits?”
“The ears and feet and bits of tail? All the pellets beside them?”
“What?”
“That’s why the ospreys love the bog. I guess it makes the rabbits easier to
catch.”
You’ll be glad there are no pictures,
because it was something out of a rabbit horror film.
I think I repressed the final hours of the
walk, or I walked in an exhausted daze, my legs aching from tripping through
the bog and heather, but we did see a majestic stag on the last leg.
The majestic stag
Craig had done the hard work when we met
him close to 8pm and found us a decent place to camp. He and Nick compared camping gear while I sat
in the heated seats of the car and drank my Lemsip. I didn’t even care how freaking cold it was
when I finally got into the tent, because we were so exhausted and I was
genuinely glad to be sleeping out of the car.
It was a really nice campsite but I was too knackered to get a picture. It was in pine forestry commission, so I’ll
let you picture your own idyllic camping spot.
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