Quite a few people have asked me whether I get lonely in my van. And most of the time I’m not particularly lonely, because I’m occupied with the stuff I’m doing (predominantly chores) and I’m quite happy in my own company. But like anything, living in a van travelling round Scotland has its ups and downs. Admittedly it was a bit easier in summer/autumn when there were more folk out on the hills and I’d meet people on every walk. Funnily enough, the times I seem to feel at my loneliest is when a visiting friend has just left and my brain goes “who are we going to talk to now?!”.
I was feeling a bit lonely towards the end of November, and the prospect of a long dark winter was pretty daunting. (A number of people have also asked “are you going to live in the van through the Scottish winter?!” and my “Yes” has become less convincing each time I’ve been asked – its now more of a “…yes? I think? why?”).
Each time I get a low spell like this, a similar process takes place. First I feel sorry for my lonely self for a while, then I probably call my Dad and/or one or two friends, eat approximately my bodyweight in crisps, rest for a day or so… and then take some positive action. In November, my positive action was posting on the Walk Highlands forum to see if anyone was up for meeting to walk some munros in winter. My post went something like “Does anyone want to be my friend?”. Fortunately, I got a reply from Jamie, who sounded normal enough that I thought he probably wasn’t going to push me off a hill and steal my van.
We decided to meet up to walk Geal Charn and A’ Mharconaich, which are the other two of the set I walked the week before (see last blog post). This was just under a week after Storm Arwen, so it would be my first walk in snow! It’s not that easy to tell from the weather reports how much snow is lying on the ground, but from some googling Jamie thought maybe 10cm. I said “holy shit we’re gunna die” (half) jokingly, and Jamie replied that it’d be ok, he is a nurse, so when we were dying he’d be able to explain exactly what was happening. Perfect! Suitably reassured, I packed my bag.
As it turned out, the snow wasn’t particularly deep on the hills we had chosen – probably because the wind had been doing some snow shovelling and moving it along. And Halfway up the first hill, the sun came out to join us!
It wasn’t too long to get to the top of the first munro. About halfway up I remembered how hard it is to walk and talk, and questioned my decision to find a walking buddy. But at least the conversation took my mind off the lungbusting slope.
We attempted to pause in the shelter of Geal Charn’s cairn for a snack, but being a squashed pancake of a cairn it offered pretty shoddy shelter. Jamie attempted to sit on his sitting mat, but didn’t get down fast enough to stop the wind from snatching it away and hurtling it off the hill before we could do much about it. Hahaha. Cold bum for one!
I’d seen a fair few sets of tiny footprints in the snow, which looked to me like footprints of a ghost baby/doll. I was starting to think we’d wandered into a horror movie, but then the mountain hare responsible for said footprints darted across the snow in front of me. Aha!
Anyway onwards we marched to the next hill, which was bigger. The weather forecast had predicted strong winds with gusts of around 40mph in the evening, but they showed up early. Wind chill took the temperature down to around -16 Celcius, which I can confidently report is COLD. It wasn’t so bad on the way up, but once we reached the long walk along the ridge I started to constantly question whether I could still feel my nose. It was probably worth it though, because the views from the top were pretty spectacular. I took as many extremely quick snaps as I could before the biting cold pain became too much for my fingers to bear.
We wandered over to the *marginally* more sheltered shoulder of the hill to have our lunch, looking south down to Schiehallion:
Unfortunately the route down was straight into the wind which was steadily getting stronger. I added yet more jackets from my tardis bag. I was pretty thirsty by this point too because my water tube was well and truly frozen solid, and no amount of sucking would make any difference. Still it was pretty fun marching down over snow-crusted heather. It turned into a beautiful, if absolutely baltic, evening. All in all a great first outing on snow, a new friend, and 2 more munros in the bag!
Only Young Twice 