“Hill” “Walking”
Sep 23rd, 2006 by Oana
Today’s hill walk was awesome! I say that now, having almost forgotten the pain of the ascent, of course. It was 6 hours of walking, up Ben Arthur a.k.a. The Cobbler, which is just outside Arrochar, west of Glasgow and above Loch Lomond and Loch Long, about 1.5 hours’ drive from Edinburgh. If I remember correctly, the summit was at 2,900 ft. which is pretty impressive since we started at sea level (the Loch is a tidal one).
My new boots from MEC held up wonderfully and I don’t have any blisters, which is more than I can say for others in my group, some of who had flaps of skin (broken blisters) hanging off their heels and foot bottoms when they checked at the summit - ew, and poor them. I also managed to avoid being a klutz - I didn’t gash my hand on a rock, sprain my ankle, or fall right into a muddy pit, as others in my group did!
I forgot my new cell phone took photos until I got to the summit, and the photos I took there aren’t great since it was totally covered by the cloud bank and my hands were freezing. But as we came back down, the clouds were swept away and the views were just gorgeous.
Coming back down was more excitement than I was hoping for, as we lost our way initially and had to go back up to the summit to choose a different path, and then climbed down through slippery boggy streams and tried to cross a river rushing down to a dam.
The reward was a nice beer at the bottom, so that was great too. Everyone in my group was from abroad: Portugal, Israel and the US. Two of them were actually in computational linguistics and were at the same conference in Sydney, Australia last July as Crystal! Funny that.
Unfortunately the next few EUHWC trips are overnighters, which I’m not quite prepared for, and the day trips after that are the weekend of Oct 28 & 29, which is when we’ll be in Poland. Perhaps next spring!