WHW Day 7: Kinlochleven to Fort William

Finally!  Our last day of hiking.  15 miles of remote highland walking in the hills to get to the rather large city of Fort William.

Ah, we did awake to the news of a "no" vote.  Scotland would be remaining as part of the UK after all.  The mood in the pub that morning was noticeably darker than it had been the night before.  It's too bad, as I showed up here with no real opinion either way, but walking around the week leading up and chatting with locals as we went, I really think the "yes" voters had an articulate and compelling argument for succession.

Was I sad to be almost done?  YES.  I felt that maybe I needed a rest day, but I could have kept going.  If I did this trail again, I would have planned on adding more days to tackle the mountains that haunted the air around me.  It was kind of frustrating that the trail stayed low and skipped all these lonely challenging hikes.  While it was a long hike (this was the longest I had ever hiked in consecutive days) it wasn't hard at all and I was itching to find a more challenging route into the next valley.  Despite the fact that I had PMS cramps and low energy, I had rounded the corner on that bit and I felt good.  This had just gotten me enthusiastic to explore more of this wonderful countryside.

The only real downers on the trail were the proximity of the highway for most of this.  You'd be having a nice jaunt and zen moment, and the roar of a tanker truck would put you back in the earthly realm.

The only other complaint I had was the garbage on the trail.  Compared to England, there was a lot of bags of trash and random pockets of beer cans and whisky bottles along the way.  In fact, the first 30 miles of the trail there was an enforced "No Camping" rule, as there had been problems with people driving in and leaving bags of trash instead of carrying out.  Almost every spot where one might be able to camp had knotted-up trash bags and rubbish scattered around.  Whatever possesses people to take the time to bag up their garbage and leave it for an eyesore for all the rest of the world to see is beyond me and it ruins it for all.  Carry it out.

The morning started with no warm up at all, and we huffed away up the first hill.

Ah, what views!

 Today, the walk was across a high-up moor surrounded by murnos.

Stonechat

There were ruined shelters that the sheep and cattle drovers would camp out.

Soon, we rounded a corner, and ended up hiking for miles across a felled forest.  How depressing!  According to my OS map, we were supposed to be in the woods for a few miles, apparently it hadn't been updated in a while.  It wasn't a comforting site: miles upon miles of bleached stumps and brush piles.

We decided to take a side trail up to Dun Deardail- the ruins of a 2000 year old fort that had been burned so hot that the rocks fused together.

Naturally, the fort was on top of a very steep hill.  I wanted that view badly, and a few hikers were sitting at the bottom of the hill, waiting for their friends to be done with the view.  

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That's Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in all of the UK.  It was an enormous, hulking rock.  Bry had decided this would be tomorrow's hike...supposedly, it was an easy pony trail to the top, but a very long all-day hike.    But yes, with views like that, it's worth the hike up to Dun Deardail.

It was also the only part of the trail where I got vertigo!  The hilltop the fort was on was a sheer drop on all 4 sides, with steep steps to get to the top.

Ah, and there were some nice druids working on the stairs and trail improvements leading up to the top.  Real live druids, in the wild!

From here, the trail goes down the glen and into the suburbs of Fort William.  Not content to end our walk in such a anticlimactic urbanity, we decided to climb Cow Hill, a hill that lords over the city. We'd decided we would rather have a spiritual ending of the trail, rather than an official one.  

It ended up bring a very long, steep climb...more switchbacks than the Devil's Staircase, at at times I made progress in inches rather than feet.  It took more than an hour to climb to the top.  I thought this was a more appropriate ending to a week of walking, and I was right.  At the top, we stood by the TV tower and thought about all we had seen and all we had done, and thanked our feet for carrying us as far as they did.

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Ahh, that's much better!  Loch Linnie, the hills and glens and murnos and Ben Nevis and the city of Fort William.   A real sense of accomplishment, this was, and a sad finality as we had run out of West Highland Way.

And that, my friend, was that.

We didn't have a map of Cow Hill, but it wasn't long until we realized that we had gone up the short, steep way, and we had gone down the very long gradual way, and instead of bypassing the trail's official end, we ended up meeting up with the trail and walked the last official mile through the bustling pedestrian streets of the city to the official end, which was a bench with a bronze statue of a man rubbing his feet.  Cow Hill had added 2.5 hours onto our hike, and we were closer to 20 miles at this point day.  The other thing I didn't realize was that one of the only B&Bs I could find with a vacancy was well out of the city center, and we had another 15 minutes of walking along Loch Linnie before we could get off our feet.

We celebrated with hot showers, finishing up our bottle of Glengoyne, and walking back into Fort William with our flip-flops on for dinner and a dram.

The trail was officially 95.5 miles.  Thanks to our apps, we calculated that we did closer to 110 when all was said and done.  It was probably more...we had a few long days where our phones ran out of batteries before we were done.

We were beyond tired, but elated.  I found I was exhausted enough to not be able to hold a conversation or have patience for waiting, and the moment I was done eating, I was just wanting to be recumbent more than anything.  That last mile walk back to the inn after dinner was the longest of the trail, but how sweet sleep was that night.

WHW Day 6: Kings House to Kinlochleven

I loved waking up in our little hobbit hut and seeing this:

How fantastically eerie!  Somehow, the foggy cloudy days were so much more interesting than the warm and sunny.

I did spy some black grouse on the moors.  They nervously darted away, making all manners of squacks.

Since the cafe at the ski lodge didn't open until 9 and we wanted to be well down the trail at that late hour, we walked back to the King's House hotel and took our coffee and carbs there.  What a place: in the light of day, the waitstaff looked rough.  Hungover, scabby, bedreadlocked and bruised. We did not linger.  

Today was the day that had caused much anxiety in my gut when I was planning this whole trip: a section called the Devil's Staircase in which the road builders had to somehow get a military up and over.  Never mind that, a look at the elevation map made my heart flutter:

I was fairly certain a dramatic helicopter rescue would be needed and that I would be the laughingstock of Scotland hiking lore for eternity.

I am the queen of random bouts of vertigo when it comes to hiking in the hills.  When it strikes, I drop like a stone and get tunnel vision, completely helpless to move my limbs forward.  Knife-edge ridge walks are out of the question, as is steep scrambles.  I might be able to get up them, but going down is a story that can not be told.

Still...we saw a lot of old people on the trail in amazing shape...people in their 70's.  We saw a lot of unfit people on the trail- we passed them in the morning, and if we were being lazy, we'd pass them again after lunch.  Good for them, they looked like they were in pain a lot of the day, but the ability to keep going is really the only skill you need here.  The trail so far had been easy- aside from the one scrambley part around Loch Lommond, there was very little challenge in a navigating a wide, well-worn track.  The weather had been fantastic.   I'm pretty sure I would be fine.  Still, that gnawing worry was almost as bad as the vertigo itself.  

This to me sums up the romance associated with Scotland.  The moody dark morning, the mysterious moors, the lonely bit of trail.  It was heaven, I tell you.

Meadow Pipit

I do spend a great deal of my time stopping and observing everything around me.  If you hike with me, you will be getting quite a few short breaks.  Look at the colors of these mosses!  I don't think I've seen such vibrant colors outside maples in autumn.

A lonely croft, long abandoned, was the one sing of humanity we could see.  That and the busy A84 road cutting down the valley to Glencoe.

At the base of the Devil's Staircase, there was a car park and swarms of people were making their way up this section of trail.

Now I got the name:  It was a devil to build this thing.  It was a well-engineered bit of trail, with perfect S-curves and banked turns.  Remember, this was a military road, and getting horse and cart over a hill like this would have been a pretty big deal.

Me though?  Nah, it posed no challenge at all.  I had to stop to catch my breath a few times, but other than that, I was up and over before I even knew it.  How anticlimactic!  Devil's staircase, you can not beat me.

Helicopter rescue diverted, we headed down into the next valley to Kinlochleven.

This was the largest elevation drop of the trail- we basically lost all the elevation we had gained all week, and would end the day at sea level.

This was by far our shortest day, mileage-wise, with a little over 10 miles to do.  Ah, I've reached the point where I can think a tenner day is a cakewalk.

Kinlochleven used to have an aluminum smelting plant, but now it's just an outdoorsy base camp.  The huge amount of water used in the plant had to be piped in from a reservoir over the next mountain, so a system of pipes and pumps kept us company for most of the rest of the walk.  The trail was a wide dirt road the whole way down as it was how heave trucks would get up and over; easy going, but quite uninteresting if you are on foot.  

Ah, but the beauty of all that elevation loss is that we were once again in the brambles.

We actually got to the pub before our bags did that day, and made some friendly chatter over a pint before exploring the town.

The former smelting plant?  Part of it was turned into a climbing center, with climbing walls reaching the ceiling, and uniquely, an ice climbing wall.  It was an huge walk-in freezer that you could shimmy your way up with ice axes and crampons.

The town itself was just orderly and neat, and we restocked supplies at the first grocery that we've seen in days.

This was also the night of the referendum vote.  We had seen graffiti and signs everywhere all week, and we knew we firmly in "yes" territory here.  It was all anyone could talk about.  

After a shower and a change of clothes, we decided not to have dinner at the pub, but at another place more than a mile away, just to have something to do.  It was nice to see the town and we found a trail that lead to a waterfall, so we hiked around in our flip-flops for a bit.

They actually had a "via ferrata" here and you could get outfitted to climb up the cliff to the top of the falls.

Me, I was content to sit at the deep pool at the bottom and give my feet a nice soak.  Remarkably, after 76 miles on the "official" trail (and many more off the trail), we had nary a blister between us.  My feet were tender and I had developed kankles over the miles, but we were in surprisingly good shape.  Much better than at this point when we were doing the Coast to Coast, but I'm sure the brutal heat and heavy packs had something to do with that.

We did enjoy some spectacular views with our evening meal, and a bit of sticky toffee pudding as well.  Earning dessert is something I look forward to every hike.

The worst part of the day was an empty dram.