Idleness

My excuse is the weather. What a crappy excuse. I didn't make much progress. Nothing new about the shielings, most of them buried under mud and snow anyway. Nothing new about the northern or eastern approach. I didn't take any pictures. I didn't swim in the loch. Too much snow on the beach, a rim of ice around the edge. The water dark and viscous, just before freezing. No attempt on Carn nan Gabhar. Avalanches, too dangerous, so I told myself. Wonderful.

Not much learned about animals either. I heard the barking of deer, the croaking of ravens, and whatever hellish noise the grouse is making. Rabbits or hares, I'm not so sure, dashed around the tent at night. I know, because I saw their tracks. More tracks in the morning: Something as big as a large dog with five-fingered paws. Badger? Otter? The tracks were too bad to tell, the snow too unreliable. Look, I try to pretend to know something about animal tracks.

I did visit the peninsula and the valve on my only little excursion on Saturday. The northern side of the peninsula ridge offers almost perfect shelter from the storm, here, pottering about down at the loch, one can only wonder why I found it so distastefully windy on the other side of the hill. Just climbing a few metres up serves as a good reminder. Hard snow drives horizontally into my face. This is the same place that I considered 'too hot' in July.

The valve is unchanged. Compared to July there is much much more water now in the valley, but the loch seems to have exactly the same level, plus/minus maybe a couple of inches. More water goes in, more water goes out. That's the only explanation. It's a well-balanced equilibrium. Which begs again the question: What the hell happened in 2005-6? A catastrophe?

First winter

Fantastic weather on the way in and on the way out. In between, however, 36 hours of rain, snow, more snow, rain, more rain. By Saturday morning the wind-beaten backside of the tent was encrusted with ice. When the water finally stopped coming on Sunday morning, it was almost a pity. At this point I had run out of food and didn't have dry pants anymore. But I still had half a battery life on my Kindle and half a dozen new books to get through. I should have stayed the entire week. Reading. Sleeping. Lying awake in the darkness. Standing naked in the storm. Pissing. Back to reading. Waiting for the next day. It's a simple life at the loch.

Carn nan Gabhar

Gabhar, now my favourite Munro, almost by definition. 1121 metres, 32th highest in Scotland, but highest in the eastern counties outside the Cairngorms, it commands a huge stretch of land, limited only by the Dee in the north and Loch Ericht in the West. Commands it, but normally ycan't see it, like the famous blind general that actually never existed. Gabhar, on the other hand, exists. Wait, this doesn't make any sense.

The standard route to Gabhar leads over the other two Munros of Beinn a'Ghlo, and it is a nightmare to find. Basically, you come from the mountain, a huge drop to the left, and you have to find the point of the drop that leads to a narrow bridge over to Gabhar on the other side. You grope blindly and fail. And fail again. And fail again. You seek shelter from the storm behind a tiny rock. You crouch and cry. And try again. And fail. And then you see the tiny cairn right where you need to climb down into the clouds. How do people do this? I mean, do they ALL have GPS? Do they all climb it in clear weather? This feels like I am surrounded by cheaters.

All I can say is that it's much more relaxing over the broad and easy north ridge. As well as over the steep and relentless slopes that fall from the summit directly to the head of Loch Loch. The lake as resting point underneath the mountain, as it should be.

Campsites

Noteworthy: The best campsite in the world, a patch of magic grass directly at the old fireplace, is dry, even after tons of rain. A decent, dry, if slightly hilly emergency campsite is a few steps directly behind, off to the east. Rain brings new streams to existence which make their way down to the beach and turn almost every square inch into swamp, apart from the BCITW. It is a very remarkable spot. Glad to know it's completely isolated. I mean, apart from the obvious land rover tracks just next to it.

The exit

Every loch has an entry and an exit. Otherwise it wouldn't be a loch. It would be a nightmare. Filling with water, overflowing, flooding the entire world with brown, stinking mud. Here the place where this horror scenario is narrowly avoided. It looks quite unspectacular.









We could talk a lot about fording, but my basic rules are: Fording is great, unless you drown. Then it's not so great. in October 2013 the water slightly further down from the exit is only knee deep. In the background, K, dressed all black, wandering into an uncertain future.

The valve

Not much has changed. The entire water level in the loch was slightly higher than before, who wonders after days of rain, but not much. The valve was maybe knee-deep instead of ankle-deep. For the record, here a particularly boring picture to illustrate the situation.

This picture, taken from the northeast ridge of Carn nan Gabhar, by default now my new favourite Munro, shows the entire loch from the north and the valve in today's world:


Contrast this with the aforementioned image from October 2005, taken from almost exactly the same spot. The entire coastline around the valve seems to have exploded in winter 2005-6. What the hell happened here? We have a right to know.

October

This time: with K, and approach from the south. Straloch is absolutely nothing. But the valley has trees, trees with foliage and stems and everything. Apparently, planting different types of trees is some kind of pastime in the Straloch are. We also discovered a tarmac road which ends at the lodge a few miles north and passes only three or five miles from the loch. Quite a significant discovery. The future of the painless approach is here. And involves bicycles, probably.

October is different. The ferns are red. The midges are gone, hell, all insects are gone. The rivers are full with water. The loch is much colder. My feet hurt from the water. And through night and day the rutting stag make truly despicable noises. Despicable, yet surprisingly easy to imitate, especially after a bad cold.

We slept like thirty out of fourty hours at the lake. There was a lot of rain. In the remaining minutes, we managed to climb Gabhar and do some research. A weekend well spent, I would say.