Beinn Sgulaird, forever ago

For everyone who’s forgotten who I am since its been ages since my last post… Hi I’m Ashley👋, and I’m living in a teeny tiny van while I camp my way around Scotland attempting to tackle munros and find yoga classes (and showers).

Anyone who follows my instagram might know I’ve been busy doing yoga teacher training in Edinburgh through February and March. For anyone who doesn’t follow my instagram… its @only.young.twice – follow me to join on the journey!! I’ll write a bit about the yoga training at some point. For now, the short version is: it was an utterly fantastic, life-changing, discombobulating, enormously enriching, incomparable experience. It’ll probably take me a while to put the long version into words – I’ll get back to you on that.

Anyway here I am, now a qualified yoga teacher (oh heck! 😅) and once again living in the van wondering where I’m going next (also heck! 😅). Fortunately, this first week back in the van has been accompanied by very un-March weather, making the adjustment all the easier (though I don’t mean to be ungrateful but I do have mixed emotions about the unseasonably warm weather if it’s thanks to climate change?).

It’s been a strange experience hiking some munros *without* 40mph+ winds, hail, rain, thick gloomy clouds etc. To be honest it’s also been strange *not* to need 4 layers of jackets to step outside the van for a minute. But I’m expecting we’ll back to business as usual on that stuff by next week.

With all the other stuff I’ve been up to, I’ve not yet managed to write about a hill I hiked, with a new hiking friend(!), way back in January. I want to take a moment to cover that because (1) (some of) the pictures are good and (2) it turns out a core part of being a munro bagger is Remembering Which Munros You’ve Hiked (think this calls for another oh heck! actually 😅).

I met Nic through Bumble Friends – a ‘dating’ app for meeting friends – where I’d put a “would anyone please like to be my friend” profile up. Nic and I are both trying to knock off some munros, so we weren’t chatting long before we’d gotten down to business on which hills we’d each done and agreed to meet for a hike. And it turned out we had both been defeated in our first attempts of Beinn Sgulaird (see here if you want to re-live my pain), so that seemed like the fitting choice for us to team-up and conquer it together.

I wasn’t overly keen on the weather forecast of (yet more) 40mph winds, which I was thoroughly sick of walking in. But Nic was highly enthusiastic, so I figured her enthusiasm would probably carry us up the hill. Nic’s brother was also visiting, and I got the sense his enthusiasm was more on a par with mine in the Let’s Just Get This One Over With camp. 😂

The day started with a thick layer of grey cloud which weighed heavily over us. Still, if you ignore the grey, and focus on the bit beneath it, I think these pictures are slightly better than last time.

We hiked the annoying Up, Down, Up Again route to get up to the ridge, which always seems unnecessary to me (can’t we just go up when we’re going up, and down when we’re going down please thanks). It felt easier this time, maybe because the pain was shared, and the good conversation distracted my attention from my legs.

I was *extremely* pleased to make it further than I managed on my first attempt, so much so that I took a triumphant selfie the soon-to-be-hiked summit. I was also smiling because the forecast winds we’d been bracing for never showed up. Maybe the wind missed the memo. But all we got was a moderately strong breeze, maybe 15mph. Lovely.

And would you look at that, lo and behold, we made it! And I claimed Yet Another selfie with a cairn on a white background. I was genuinely relieved to have knocked this one off and no longer have unfinished business hanging over me. The list is now back to two clean categories of “bagged hills” and “unattempted hills”, just how I like it. 👏

And the way down was a celebration. Maybe the hill gave up on trying to deter us and dutifully provided the reward we had earned for (finally) making it to the top. Either way. The clouds parted. The sun got stronger. The whole place lit up. I took a *lot* of pictures. Here’s a small selection.

So there we go. I’d been putting off take-two of this hill for ages, but it turned out it Wasn’t All That Bad. I had a blast with my new hiking buddy, the weather came through for us in the end, and I’m absolutely delighted that this hill is now firmly In The Bag.

And if you’d like to see all this captured in a 1 minute video… here you go. Enjoy!