eBothy Blog

Just heard a very rare visitor indeed to these parts. It’s a looooong way from home, which is central and southern England but in the meadow opposite is coming the unmistakable sound of a Reed Warbler.

Just back from a fantastic week guiding in Glencoe for HF Holidays, staying at Alltshellach on the shores of Loch Leven. We had about 30 guests split among 3 leaders and the way it worked out, I managed to lead 4 out of the 5 harder days, which was superb. The ones who chose the harder routes each day were really fit and keen to do as much as possible. The weather on the first walk on the Sunday was iffy but not too bad, with us going over Mam na Gualann and Beinn na Caillich and down the West Highland Way to Kinlochleven for a pint in the Tailrace but the weather on Monday was pretty grotty. I lead a party up Gleann Cia-Aig for a tour of the cliffs around the big munros up there but the higher we climbed the lower the cloud went and the colder it became. By the time we reached the unnamed 907m top it was blowing a gale with 50m viz. The navigation down the rough ridge to various spot heights to reach the only safe way through the cliffs to the forest was interesting to say the least and immensely satisfying! Tuesday was a complete contrast though. Bright blue sky, not much wind and very very warm indeed. How the weather changes here. It was almost winter the day before. I led the fast party up “The Ben” (Ben Nevis) via the main track. We were thinking of offering the harder Carn Mor Dearg arete but folk weren’t quite ready for it.

Graeme is here, on his way further north to finish his Corbetts and he’s brought along his new book, “101 Best Hill Walks in the Scottish Highlands and Islands”.

It’s different from the normal format in that it has 3D style maps of each route and the pictures are rather good. You can get it from Graeme’s website and and you can also order prints of all the pictures in the book, from the book’s section on his site. I helped out with the Gaelic translations and the pointy bits of the Skye walks when we went along the Sgurr na Banachdich to Sgurr a’Ghreadaidh part of the Cuillin ridge.

Graeme describes less frequented routes to some of the more popular hills. Have a look at Ben Lomond via Comer (where Rob Roy’s wife lived) and Ben Nevis via the gorge. Well worth a read.

Hello eBothiers! I’ve just noticed that Feedburner have been taken over by Google, who have destroyed access to my account:

“Unfortunately, there is currently no way to restore access to the account XXXX. We plan to offer a process for recovering accounts without email addresses or Secret Question/Answer combinations, like this one, eventually.”

Is that right? eeee-ven-whaa-leee? OK, I don’t want to know. Literally. I haven’t looked at the Feedburner stats in months and months. So I’m going to turn off the Feedburner plugin at the end of June 2009. If you want to keep reading the witty banter to be found in the scribulations of the eBothy pages, please point your RSS reader to the normal RSS feed, which will come online on June 30th 2009:

http://stravaiger.com/blog/?feed=rss2

If you’ve just stumbled across this blog, please use the above URL to subscribe via RSS. Using the normal RSS URL won’t make the output of the eBothy seem any more normal though. It’ll still be the same ranting rubbish as before!

If your RSS reader detects no signs of life at the eBothy after June 30th 2009, it’s prolly coz you haven’t updated to the normal RSS URL. Either that or I’ve managed to stuff the whole thing up. A quick check of the site will clarify matters, though not the meaning of most of the content!

Came across this superb online plant book from 1952. Liked it so much I found the book on Amazon for a fiver. Came today. Really well written and fascinating. Did you know Purple Saxifrage exudes chalk to stop it losing too much water when it gets too hot? Too hot in Scotland? Don’t be ridiculous man!

Plant Life in the Scottish Highlands

This is ridiculous! I got an email from Tower Ridge this morning, around 8am, saying the bag had just been posted first class. It arrived with the post today! They’re based in Perth so that’s pretty impressive. Perth to Skye by 2pm. Superb service. What was the first thing I had to do? Get in it!

A Mexican wave is currently churning the waters of the Blogosphere. The Ramblers have gone mad, or so says Cameron McNeish. Chris Townsend is also dismayed by events down south and bloggers such as Darren are taking up the cause. It all boils down to the Ramblers rebranding themselves as an urban walking outfit, presumably at great marketing and consultancy expense, consequently going bust and having to close their Scottish and Welsh operations as a result. Well, that’s how I see it but I tend to see things in very simplistic and non political terms. Black and white is best I say! (more…)

With all that gear stuff out of the way, I’m now free to stare at the clouds again and what superb Cirrus we had yesterday afternoon:

I Googled, read, cogitated, read lots more, saught advice from the outdoors bloggers, cogitated even more and late last night came to a decision and ordered one online. I’ve often ranted about blogs that just blog about gear but my attitude has changed somewhat now that I’ve used those blogs quite a lot to garner opinion. In fact I garnered so much opinion from the likes of PTC, Alan, Andy, Robin, Darren, Duncan, John, Marcus, Chris Townsend and some others that, really, the name’s Garner, James Garner! Perhaps I should do a bag review to give something back to the blogoshphere. (more…)

Not really sure on this. The Minimus is 465g and rated to 5C, which is pretty chilly but I can expect that sort of temp in the mountains on a summer’s night. They say it’s actually warmer than most 0C rated bags, which Andy Howell seems to back up. The biggest problem is the lack of a zip so I know I’ll overheat in it. Going for the 900 fill power down and a full length zip takes the price to 212.00, which is a lot. The Cumulus has 870 down and is about 180.00, so there’s prolly not much between them. The extra price of the PHD prolly reflects the 900 down in it. (more…)