Of Injuries and Victories: Or Hiking Glen Orchy

I meant to post this Saturday night as soon as we got back but I was so exhausted that I fell asleep and spent all of Sunday recovering. It has been a seriously long time since I went on a solid hike and this was so much more, but totally worth it. As evidenced by the rocky pose.

I look like crap but I *earned* looking like crap.

Anyway so here's my story.
I wake up at 5:30 Saturday morning (after skyping the lovely Sarah & Karis until 1am, totally worth it) and get a cup of tea and make peanut butter toast. I then promptly fall back to sleep and have to scramble to get out the door at 6:30 with the rest of my flatmates. So Kaia, Kristine, Martin, Emanuele and I set off for the art building where we are supposed to meet the rest of the Rucksack club to head to the Bridge of Orchy. Everything goes to plan... sort of, Kaia's seat in the van is literally no longer attached to the floor and after Emanuele has spent 15 minutes attempting to beat it into submission Martin switches seats with her. But then we are on our way. It's actually a huge nice Mercedes van that seats us the driver, Thomas, and one other girl.

The drive alone is spectacular. I've been taking trains and buses the whole time I've been here so I've only really seen main roads but we were way out in the sticks of Scotland and it was amazing. There was, of course, the scenery as well as random huge, beautiful, stone homes.

Then we got to the glen Orchy/Glen Lochy region and it was heart-stopping. It reminded me of Utah and the area around the grand canyon in that there was stone looming everywhere but it was all green scrub land with Highland Sheep all the way up the mountains. I hesitate to call them mountains because that to me means jutting rock covered in pines... they were that tall but they almost look like grassland all the way up like if someone took a patch of the great planes and just yanked until they were as tall as some of the smaller Appalachian mountains.

So we get to the meeting point and wait.... and wait and wait. Everyone has to put their number down and where they are going (because they just drop you off to find your own hike, which I like) and the color of your outer. All good safety things but couldn't we have just done that on the 2 hour ride?

I was not happy standing around in the freezing cold when I could have been hiking and warming up, but whatever. Kaia finds some guys that are club vets and know the area so we take another short bus ride with them to hike the Blacks. It would have been a spectacular hike all around if we hadn't been with these guys. They were all about A to B at a double march, which is fine but most of us wanted to just enjoy the spectacular scenery (not such a huge thing when you've done the hike several times but I wanted to absorb). Then we get to the base of the mountain and the guy stops and says "We are going up this way you can do something else if you like" and just heads up. Like any of use have been before and know where to go. Which granted I should have been responsible for my own route and I did have a map so I could have... and did later... find my own way but when someone who knows the area is like "this is the best way" it's usually good to follow. WRONG.

We scrambled (which is the official term for just hoofing it up a mountain at a random place without a path, which I was slightly uncomfortable with for ecological reasons) up what was literally at least a 70 degree incline (steeper in some places, we actually climbed this was no hike in some places) and had about a foot of boggy wet peat everywhere so it was like walking in sinking sand. I feel like my calves should still ache (kind of proud that they don't, actually). Danika (we met her and her friend Robin recently, they're Canadian and  live upstairs) and I lost everyone on the first leg. During this hell of a boggy hill my freshly waterproofed shoes proved themselves incontinent and we saw a switchback on the hill next to us that was the *actual* path we were supposed to be taking (I was too determined to beat the fraking hill to be angry at our guides).Robin and our driver Thomas waited for us (he may have been worse off than us). Then Robin took off while we rested to find every one else and we caught back up to her with Martin an Emanuele on the next plateau. Just before we got to them it turned into a real stone mountain and was a completely fabulous hike. With the our guides long gone and Martin pushing to climb the next peak (we weren't really at the top at this point just a sort of leveled off bit that connected to other peaks)  we were told that Kristine and Kaia had headed across the ridge to the switch back we had seen. After momentary deliberation Danika and I decided this was the most sensible thing we had heard all day and followed.   The way to the top was rocky and nice but the wind was absolutely *howling* (I was using my bandanna as an ear-band) and we could see this idyllic, sun soaked, sparkling pool dotted paradise just a bit below us the way the other girls had gone so it was a no brainer.

Best decision all day. As soon as we tuned to follow Kaia and Kristine it was one of the best hikes of my life... I'm still fascinated with the vegetation and how the  little pools of water formed with absolutely no edge.... it was grass then water, no transition. And the sun was out. That's the best part of Scotland one minute you can be frightened for the continued attachment of your ears and the next you are stripping back down to your sports bra in the sun.

So we tra-la-la-ed along in the sun and ran into an older couple that helpfully pointed out the switch-back and found Kaia and Kristine lounging on the grassy side of the mountain munching lunch. Then followed the path (which was kind of treacherous but nothing after the hike up) the rest of the way down and back to the original drop off (we didn't want to wait for everyone else to get down the mountain to get back to the drop point, which had a hotel with a bar ;).

Actually now that I think about it the hike was a perfect microcosm of Scottish weather in general... hellish to Idyllic almost instantly and without warning.

There were a few other bureaucratic bungles on behalf of the club (the police were called from Denmark) but I want to remember the hike, not the drama.

And you can see why...

Almost forgot the injury report: 

        -Hit by falling rock on the way up, I now have a tiny annoying scab on my cheek that I kept picking in Lecture

        -Knee gave out on the way down, my knees never do so well with down

        -When I got home and took off my shoes my entire right pinky toe-nail was hanging by a corner so I yanked it off

...not too bad off for a hike like that