I was contacted the other day by the company handling the promotion of UNIQLO products in the UK, letting me know about their Ultra Light Down Jackets and the chance to review one of these very light bits of kit. I’d seen a few reviews across the internet so I was quite keen to help out and in the next post I’ll be describing it in a little more detail, plus a more in depth post once I’ve had a chance to use it.

Decreptitude comes to us all! But I thought, surely these buns of steel are still steel-ish and to pop out on an Audax wouldn’t be asking too much of them. You see, Audax UK (AUK) have a groovy new ‘permanents’ system. But first let me explain what an ‘audax’ is. It’s a non competitive long distance cycling event, from anywhere between 50km to, well, over a thousand km. The longest I’ve done was the National 400, which you can read about here.

I’ve recently had a cull of blogs from my reader as most of them were just gear writers with little actual outdoors interest but there are a fair few remaining and one that I like to keep up with is Chris Highcock’s Cairn In The Mist. A while back Chris wrote about a new book coming out, The Only Genuine Jones by Alex Roddie so I made a note to look it up later.

It was a bit too humid for my liking as I stopped for a chat with Annie, whom I met at the burn crossing, before I sprayed like a garden sprinkler up into the corrie, past the big stone and up the scree on the coire headwall, where recent winds had taken their toll on the foxgloves clinging to the steep choss. Pink bells lay strewn across the slope with surprised looking stalks wondering what had happened. Life up here can be harsh at times. Most of the time in fact.

A while ago I asked on twitter if anyone had good ideas for an iPhone app for use outdoors and an idea came in for an app that can identify hills.

It’s always an awful choice to have to make. Go to the hills or work on something to do with the hills. However, with lots of bad weather providing an excuse I’ve found the time to develop an app, codename ‘Nevis’, that does just that. Identifies hills.

I’ve just been reading Hell of a Journey Kindle edition by Mike Cawthorne, a book I had not really shown much interest in when it came out in 2000 but I it’s been published anew and age has matured it like a fine wine.

It’s about Mike’s continuous, solo backpacking walk over all the Scottish thousand metre peaks in the winter of 1997. From Sutherland, across to the Cairngorms, south to Loch Lomond and back up to finish on Bidean nam Bian in Glencoe. When it was originally published I was at the height of my mountaineering ‘career’ and wasn’t much interested in books about long walks but in the intervening years it’s become a wee gem.

As part of the site revamp I’ve repackaged and restyled my account of my cycle tour of the Big Island of Hawai’i back in November 2002. You can read it here.

I’ve been rummaging around on the main eBothy website, slowly revamping it and restyling it with a view to using it to publish travel, mountaineering and backpacking essays. To that end, I’ve created a section where I’ve archived off some old articles I wrote back in the 1990s about climbing, cycling and travel. Have a look in the articles archive

Normally I write up a walk on the day or a day or two later but since doing this one, I’ve walked St. Cuthbert’s Way and like a fine wine, its memory has matured over the last few weeks. In fact there’s been a fair bit of maturing going on in my reading material. Sometimes, when a book is published, its true value isn’t apparent at the time.
‘Ach, I do that all the time’ is an oft heard ripost, especially from the ranks of walking and climbing clubs. Such was the general reception in my old mountaineering club when Mike Cawthorne’s “Hell of a Journey” came out in 1997. Climbing the 1000m peaks in winter? ‘ach, we do that all the time!’.

In the first week of July I fancied something completely different, so I walked St. Cuthbert’s Way from Melrose to Lindisfarne. Rather than publish my account as a series of posts, I created a wee website for it. Hopefully I’ll manage to walk some more trails and create wee websites for them too.

You can read my account of the walk on Stravaiging St. Cuthbert’s Way.