Part 1 of Highland Adventures

It's been a little while since my last posting. We're all moved in to our new apartment, but we just got the phone today, and the internet will take 2 more weeks! We do have a temporary internet solution - courtesy of Matt, and some gear that Amazon needed to have 'tested'... Things move a lot slower here. No one 'overnights' anything. 2 weeks is your standard wait time to do just about anything. We're slowly getting used to a slower pace of business.

NOTICE: The story below was long enough that I divided it into 3 postings!!! Feel free to read them all at once, or at your leisure. I was going to be mean and leave you with a cliffhanger at the end of each one, and then not post the next one for like 3 days, but I decided that I just couldn't do it...

Last weekend, we went on our first backpacking trip! We drove about 4 hours up into the Scottish Highlands and spent Friday through Monday hiking all around. Let me tell you how it all began...

Our friend Aaron (remember him from my last blog?) is quite the outdoorsman. He goes a step beyond what we ever do – he ice climbs, and hikes in white-out blizzards, and cool (i mean cold) stuff like that. Well, he and a friend were planning a trip and invited us along. They were planning some pretty long, tough days, so Matt and I just camped with them in the “bothy” and did our own thing while they were out. I'll explain about bothies later.

The first night was rather unforgettable. We left Greenock after work on Friday – about 6ish. We stopped to pick up Aaron's friend Grant, then drove up into the highlands. As I said, it was about 4 hours, so we got there at close to midnight. The last 10 miles or so were on a one lane, extremely twisty road that more-or-less followed a loch. I got really carsick in the back seat, but made it alright. We unloaded the car, got our gear on, and we were off! It was only about 3 miles to hike to the bothy, so we were anticipating about an hour's hike. For a while, we followed a graveled road that lead through some fields, but then we turned into a field to follow a smaller trail. This is where it got interesting. Suddenly we were sinking about 6-8” deep! It was dark, so we really weren't sure what we were sinking into. Aaron and Grant were plowing ahead like there was nothing wrong, and we followed as well as we could, but we had never encountered ground like this before.

It turns out that the Scottish Highlands are pretty well covered with moss and lichen. It's cool and wet most of the time, and the stuff grows well. I mean REALLY WELL. It grows so well, that in most places it's 12-18” deep. Litterally. So, where on “normal” American dirt, water will either puddle or run off, here it just hangs around in the lichen. Even on slopes! The lichen sort of acts as a sponge – holding the water until you step on it. Then you squash the soft mosses and you're standing half-way up your boot in water! Now, the good part is that it's just water – not mud. Which is kinda cool for a giant moss-puddle. The bad part is that if you step in the wrong place (between clumps of moss, for example) you can easily sink up to your knee.

We didn't figure any of this out until the next morning – with daylight – so we just did our best to follow our leaders and not get wet. The next adventure we had was where the map said we were supposed to cross a small river via a bridge. But the bridge wasn't there. Aaron searched upstream and Matt searched downstream, and no where was a bridge to be found. We decided that the map must be out of date, the bridge must have washed away, and we were just going to have to cross the river anyway... in the dark... with our gear...barefoot.