Day: 014
Date: Tuesday, 14 June 2022
Start: Fort William
Finish: Kinlochleven
Daily Kilometres: 25
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 385
Weather: Overcast all day with very light rain most of the time.
Accommodation: Hostel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Egg & cress sandwiches
Lunch: Ham & cheese sandwich/Chicken salad
Dinner: Savoury mince and rice, icecream.
Aches: Dave - feet sore, especially one little toe, but improving. Julie - feet sore after a day in her new hiking shoes.
Highlight: Some awesome Scottish highland scenery - steep heath-clad mountains disappearing into the clouds, rushing streams and waterfalls descending, sheep grazing on impossible slopes, old stone fences and derelict farm buildings - seen, as it should be, on a cold and drizzly day.
Lowlight: Julie found her new shoes a bit hard on her feet, though the trail was particularly rough today.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
Given we only had 25km to walk today, we didn’t need to leave early so Julie went for a 5km run, stopping in at the supermarket on her way back to buy supplies for the day. We left around 8:20am and passed the official northern terminus of the West Highland Way (WHW) shortly after. The first 6km involved a steady climb up the southern side of Glen Nevis on a forestry road from which we had good views of the lower slopes of the cloud-covered Ben Nevis. We could see the main hiking trail to the summit which we had climbed almost exactly four years ago while on a driving tour of the UK. You couldn’t see anything from the summit that day either.
We left the forestry road at a pass and joined a technical single track trail leading away from Ben Nevis across open country and overlooking a bleak-looking farm valley. We stopped for a late breakfast beside the trail at about 10:40am, but we soon got cold in the spitting rain and breeze, and kept the break short. Julie put her rain pants on when we continued but Dave persevered with his shorts.
We soon began meeting a lot of hikers going the other way, probably more than 100 in the next few hours. Most people walk the WHW from south to north and, today, most would have left Kinlochleven, our target for the day, this morning. Before and after those few hours in the middle of the day we saw no more than a handful of hikers and we saw nobody travelling in our direction all day. The great majority of the people we met today would have been completing their WHW hike and those we spoke to were very happy to be finishing.
It can be quite a tough trail as we found out when, soon after our breakfast, we joined the Old Military Road, constructed 300 years ago by the English to help move troops needed to control the Scots. It was a very rocky trail and hard on the feet, often covered with water, both running and standing, a product of the rain. Julie was glad to have her new Goretex shoes keeping her feet dry, even though her feet were being hammered a bit by the hard Vibram sole.
We made a stop for lunch around 1:15pm in the lee of some farmyard ruins after the crowds had passed, but again the constant light rain and cool breeze kept our break short. From there, we crossed a low pass and then descended steadily until we reached the village of Kinlochleven, originally an aluminium smelting centre but now trying to remake itself as an outdoor sports centre after the plant closed. We found our way to our hostel around 3:30pm, happy with an early finish after a scenic, if somewhat damp, day.
Big day tomorrow (44km) and we’ll be making an early start and hoping for no foot problems and less rain.
No comments:
Post a Comment