It’s getting a little chilly outside (and inside when the heating turns off, or people in the shop declare that the front door has to remain open). Went for a walk up Skiddaw yesterday. The top quarter of it has a nice sprinkling of snow and a not so nice glaze of ice.

Armed with my camera and tripod, crampons and ice axe I set off. Since it was a Monday the place wasn’t crawling with tourists so for the most part I only had the constant whistling of the wind for company.

Yes. The wind… setting off from the carpark was alright, but as soon as I got onto the open part of the path before it goes steep a rather persistent wind tried to blow through my head. On went all my hats, gloves and extra layers. This seemed to be good until I started going uphill where I began to overheat. You really can’t win and have to accept being a little cold (if you accept being a little too warm you’ll sweat loads, soaking your clothing, giving you hypothermia when you stop moving and also making you really dehydrated). The wind didn’t let up either. On the top it was quite possible to relax the entire top half of my body and lean against it while walking, which is a really strange experience. Not as strange as being able to walk down-hill with my body 90 degrees to the surface I was walking down. Normally this’d make you fall over, but with the persistent howling icy blast keeping me upright it turned knee-bashing downhill walking into something as easy as walking on the flat

Quite glad I had such a heavy bag, it stopped me from being blown away. The wind instead tried to blow my skin off, which once it realised was futile tried to sneakily freeze my finger ends off. Stopping to eat sandwiches was fine with no gloves on, but before I’d had time to think “hmm, fingers are going cold” they’d done pretty convincing impressions of frozen sausages and I was half way down again before they’d got to the “burning hot and painful” stage of recovery.

Winter is here, and by the looks of things, it’s going to be a cold one. This is good Could do with sharpening my crampon spikes though, I spent a lot of the day walking across frozen gravel - not really crampon territory, but exposing my fingers to the wind was something I didn’t want to do, so they stayed on my feet. Someone made a comment about this, but then had that brief moment of complete understanding as he nearly slipped on some ice. Why take twice as long to slip and slide down a path when you’ve a pair of big spikes in your bag?

There’s a selection weekend in two weeks for next year’s staff. Unfortunately I’ll be in London, so won’t get to enjoy jumping in the ghyll. Shame, I was looking forward to being dunked in icy water for a few hours. Never mind, I’ll think of them while sitting in a warm, dry pub

All week, whenever we stopped to so much as take a pee or check we were going in the right direction, the assessor would say those magic words. Yes, this week I did my Mountain Leader Assessment. And I passed too

The Summer Mountain Leader allows you to take groups of people walking anywhere in the UK - up any mountain, over any valley, into the remote depths of Scotland, across Dartmoor, wherever you like. The only limitations are that you can’t take them climbing (although I also have my SPA, so things are a little grey around there) and you can’t take them on snow and ice.

So why did we have snow and ice on one day of the assessment? Navigating in mist is bad enough, trying to work out what’s going on in ice is taking the piss a little. OK so I made a few little navigation mistakes like overshooting a large 200m long blob by quite a long way, and putting myself 500m short of the summit of Beinn Ime - my quote of “Ah… Not Beinn Ime… err… umm crap” probably not being the best thing to say on assessment

The nav was weird. They pick some random tiny bump in the contours and say the words “take me here”. Off you go, on some compass bearing with a time you’ve worked out. Some time later you either forget where you’re going, or your watch says “stop now” and you look for something to fit the scenery and map to. You then declare “we are here”. The assessor then merely says “OK”… nothing else. No “Nope, wrong” or “hmm… if you say so” just a non-descript “OK”. Four days of this and you get a little paranoid. The mind games going on in your brain are quite exquisit. They play on this too. Occasionally they’ll say “are you sure?” in a tone of voice that indicates you’re more likely to be on the Moon than where your finger is currently pointing. Confusion and doubt sets in, you think “argh! wrong place! fuck! I’ve failed the navigation part… arses!”. Either out of panic or the non-desire to go any further you say “yes!” and the assessor goes off to wind someone else up.

Night navigation was… interesting. Wander the dark hillsides doing exactly the same navigation as during the day, but in the total darkness. You still have to find the same little silly bumps and blobs on the hillside. If you can’t do this during the day, you’re screwed. Mountains far away look like small blobs nearby, the sound of a small trickle of water sounds like a raging stream just next to your feet. Oh, and the symbols for electricity pylons are NOT in the same place as their real-life counterparts. Compass bearings are set, compass bearings are followed in straight lines regardless of terrain. And when you reach the point you think they want… THEY DON’T SAY ANYTHING EXCEPT “OK”! You will never know if you went to the right place unless you ask them in the debrief.

Aparrently I have a “casual attitude” to navigation. I think this means I sometimes don’t bother… which is true… if I can see the thing I’m walking to, I’ll just walk there, maps and compasses won’t be used since there’s no point. Anyway, they were satisfied that should I get lost, I can get myself un-lost again without too much trouble - a skill I demonstrated many times to them during the week. They’d ask me to go to a certain point (point ‘A’). I’d go to where I thought point ‘A’ was (we’ll call this point ‘X’). They’d say “Alright… now take me here” and point at point ‘B’. I’d notice point ‘B’ looked quite similar to point ‘A’ and was quite close by. Off I went to this mysterious point ‘B’. Upon ariving at ‘B’ I’d notice I’d actually found the correct point ‘A’ that they were after in the first place. Some confusion would pass in my brain - do I admit I was wrong and say I’m now at point ‘A’, or do I claim to be at point ‘B’ after all? I chose the first option, figuring they’d rather me admit I was

Navigation is crazy. The first few hundred times you do it, the ground and the map don’t make much sense apart from the obvious big lumps in the floor (we call those ‘mountains’ or ‘valleys’. Sometimes they’re blue in which case that’s a hint they contain water). The tiny bumps in the contours are just ‘to show the shape of the hill’. After you compare map to ground several thousand times, you begin to see contour lines everywhere! It becomes obvious where one contour ends and another begins.

There was some playing with ropes, tieing them around people’s waists then lowering the poor victim down a steep slab using ye olde body belays. This caused immense fun and rope burn for all concerned. Getting this bit wrong would have been a little embarassing given I have my SPA We also got to play in a river which was cold and wet. Two nights in a tent which were also cold and wet, with force six gales trying to blow my tent away. I awoke at four this morning wondering if my tent was going to fall over. I thought I’d best go outside and check it. However, once the zip opened and I saw The Outside World I shut the tent flap and went back to sleep. If the tent collapsed, at least I’d be inside it. I had no intention of going outside in a gale to look at things. The wind roaring over the dam wall we were camped below was quite loud all night too.

I now have another bit of paper to show potential employers, and one month to wait until the end of my Powerboat Instructor. After that I’m free Not sure what I’ll do, but I’ll be free Hopefully I can convince someone to employ me next year with all these bits of paper I have collected.

It’s been quite mad that I came here with nothing, and now I have the ability to take groups of people and teach them various things, or take them off to do things with ropes or the hillside.

Anyway I’m going to fall asleep…

…legs don’t work…
We were going to go up Ben Cruichan - a mountain with many tunnels through it - but after seeing the claggy mist and fog a change of plan was decided on. According to my dad’s Munro book there were several interesting walks we could do near The Drover’s Inn on the A82, a short drive from Crianlarich. After finding a map that actually had the whole hill on it - the hills there being on the corner of four OS maps, and just on the corner of a Harvey’s map - we set off to go up Beinn Chabhair from Beinglas Farm.

It was so hot, still and humid. The worst weather to go walking in. People think rain, snow or howling gales are bad walking weather and that a nice sunny day with no nasty cold wind blowing is a nice day outside. It’s actually the opposite. It’s so much easier to keep yourself warm than to keep yourself cool - keeping warm just requires moving around and covering yourself with warm things. Keeping cool involves taking things off, only there’s a limit to how much you can remove before you’re either arrested for indecent exposure or you get sunburnt and bitten by anything and everything. Combine the heat with my inability to walk faster than a one-legged donkey and we were all set for a loooong day.

A looong day that turned into a shorter one since we turned around half way between Ben Glas Falls and Lochan Beinn Chabhair, then came back, going for a look at the very steep waterfall and some goats that were climbing around the waterfall trying to eat it.

It would appear, after a call from Angus, that the Looney Bin think I’m working tomorrow - despite me telling them I won’t be there, and the message they wrote in the Magic Blue Book obviously not being read by the right people. Heaven forbid the people in the office talk to each other :-/

Today was good. The first real time I’ve been out for a proper walk on my own. Nobody following me, nobody to play catch-up with and nobody telling me to hurry up else we’ll be late. When my legs gave in I stopped, when I couldn’t be arsed any more I stopped, when I felt I was being a bit slow I conned myself up things with the promise of a cheese sandwich at the top, but then when at the top deciding it was too cold to stop and that the sandwich would appear at the bottom again… I can’t even bein to explain the bizarre mental tricks being played there - I know I’m going to keep edging myself along with this promise of a cheese sandwich, but it still works. Every time.

The ridge is a lot better when you’ve not got a tent strapped to your back ;) I was free to actually walk along the edge of the ridge (when there was one) or invent my own route along the more pointy bits. It was nice choosing to walk over the tricky bits, or miss some out as I chose. I wasn’t trying to prove my excellent scrambling skills to anyone and didn’t have anyone else to try and be better than. Rumours of me showing off on the wire bridge are completely unfounded… the bridge decided to flex, creating the illusion I was jumping up and down on it… yes…

Saw the most funny thing ever in one of the little cols on the ridge - a small flock of sheep were eating grass and philosophising on the meaning of life, like sheep do, when one squatted with its tail out straight, squoze itself almost into a ball and went PHOOOT! out of its arse. Guess it must have eaten too much grass! Our dog farts, but you smell it, never hear it. This sheep sounded like a jet engine!

Because my nose runs, and I was constantly blowing it I was plagued by a persistent nosebleed most of the way around the ridge. It’d start, stop, then start again some time later. Quite irritating, but funny standing and bleeding onto a rock. God knows what the next people to follow me were thinking :-)

During a short interlude when I was trying to take a photo of a particularly interesting bit of rock (hey! If I can’t carry the boulders back with me, I’ll at least take a picture of it!) I heard a jet somewhere close… very close… I looked up just in time to see it shoot down Glen Nevis - lower than I was. If I was stood at the edge of the hill I could have waved at the pilot. Wonder how many climbers on the crags were startled and fell off ;-)

The middle mountain - Am Bodach - looks really really big and thin, as though you’re climbing up a big pointy knife blade, and the way off the other side looks impossible. It’s a big letdown when you actually get on the top. There’s a few moments on the top when you can see the edge just a few feet in front of you, but as you edge closer to it the way down appears and it looks quite acceptable.

I met two very knackered looking people carrying tents asking if walking into the middle of the ring was a good idea, and could they get down by the waterfall. I told them that going down the waterfall would be a Bad Thing to do, and that there was a nice path behind NNNN that’d take them back to the road. It looks quite nice to wander into the middle of the ring, but once in there the only way out is back up the hills and over their tops. Unless you have abseil gear and very good waterproofs, going near the waterfall would be a very exciting and short experience.

About as exciting as the route I chose up the hill. According to the guide book, all I had to do was go behind the climber’s hut and up the hill, through the trees. “Up the hill” my arse! If you struggle for long enough through the neck high bracken (nasty tick-infested stuff. After a little visitor hitched a ride on me yesterday I’ve been even less inclined to thrash my way through bracken) and trees you eventually collapse in a boggy col near Creag nan Eun. From this it’s a mere plod up the 45 degree grass slope to the beginning of the ridge on Sgurr a’ Mhaim which has the strangest rock I’ve seen. I think it’s marble, or some variant on quartz. Whatever it is, it’s perfectly white, or rippled like stilton cheese and breaks into flat slabs, cubes or triangular shapes. The folded rocks on Stob Ban across the valley are equally strange with their 180 degree folds and ripples where they were pushed out of the ground and 1000m up into the sky. Mica Schist is crap rock to climb on, but when you see 100s of metres of the stuff neatly folded into a mountain it becomes something else.

I found a walking pole, stuck in the river. My dad found a Thermarest neatly rolled into its bag. Can’t quite work out where the pole came from, it was in the river at the bottom of the waterfall and some poor bugger will be putting their tent up about now and coming to the nasty realisation they have nothing to sleep on.

This youth hostel is being overrun with Belgians. Perhaps not a lot happens in Belgium since they’re engaged in a very loud game of cards. Never seen anyone so engrossed in a game as this lot are. They’re aparrently doing the West Highland Way. It actually seems that most of Glencoe and Glen Nevis is full of foreign people. I guess it’s The place to visit in Scotland according to all the travel brochures. I’ve seen Buachaille Etive Mor on so many promotional booklets and posters it’s unreal.

We’re off to Crianlarich’s youth hostel tomorrow and a walk up Ben Cruachan. Wednesday I go back to the mental asylum.

Why walk up the damn thing in shorts?! why why why do you do it you silly people? You know your legs? See how they look alive and pinkish? When they go bright red, white or transparent that’s your hint to put something over them. What posesses people to trudge up a mountain in the howling wind, stinging cold rain wearing a pair of shorts, cheapo “waterproof” jacket and a pair of trainers?

I mean, my trainers have Gore-Tex in them, so the rain stayed out for at least two hours, and it wasn’t until I was nearing the top that I could feel one of my heels getting a bit damp. By the time I was at the top both feet were making definate squidgy noises. Nothing to worry about though, I had a nice fat pair of Smartwool socks on to keep me warm - or so I thought…

Speaking of the top… what a mess. Three hours of trudging up the monotonous Tourist Track to be confronted with the remains of the observatory and a load of banana skins. Nice. Almost as nice as scrabbling your way up the Pyg Track on Snowdon to see the train tracks and station. While plodding up in the mist, playing ’spot the cairn’ I can now see how people manage to fall into the gullies. The path heads directly to the top of one, then - unless you keep on going forwards - you go around the lip and off towards the observatory which suddenly appears out of the mists a few metres in front of you. If you forget to go around the lip you’d end up at the bottom again (or, at the moment, buried head-first in some snow. Did I mention it was cold?). It wasn’t until the mists cleared a little that I realised just how close to the edge the trig point is too.

After exploring the top - being shrouded in mist at least makes finding things on the top fun - and having all sense of feeling removed from my fingers I put on every item of clothing I’d brought (two Buffalo jackets, a thick pair of fleece trousers, waterproof jacket and trousers, Ortovox woolly gloves that work even when soaking wet) and we started the trudge back down to the car, arriving there two hours later. Upon removing my soaking trainers I discovered a nice, dry pair of Smartwool socks on the car seat and a very soggy pair of cheapo Asda white socks on my feet. Sometimes you’re not too far away from being a hill-numptie yourself ;-)

Don’t walk up the Tourist Track, it’s as fun as walking up a five-mile dirt track in the rain and mist. Go up the Carn Mor Dearg arete instead, it looks much more fun. At least it’s not got a trainline going up it, mind you.

Climbing tomorrow… probably… unless there’s rain actually falling out the sky. The rock seems mostly grippy when wet and is ledgy granite type stuff. Hopefully I can still lead severe in the rain and that there’s lots of gear placements.

I’m currently sat in Glencoe Youth Hostel’s Quiet Room, by the only plug socket in the room, listening to the hoardes of Dutch and French people who’ve descended on the place.

We arrived yesterday, my dad collecting me from the Looney Bin around 12pm. While sat in the Clachaig Inn we decided on a walk to do today and proceeded to plan a nice route up to Stob Coire nan Lochan, across to Bidean Nan Bian, then down the Lost Valley Buttress into the Lost Valley itself and then back to the road.

Naturally, now having a pretty good route plan (it was drawn on the map along with bearings to follow and a way off if the weather turned nasty) we got out the car this morning and after taking one look at the murky sky decided to do it backwards.

The weather was nasty. When the wind stopped trying to blow you away, and the rain stopped trying to dissolve you, the air was warm. The kind of warm that’s not good to walk in. Add the cold wind and rain and you have a choice between roasting alive and stewing in your own juices, or slowly catching hypothermia and being equally damp.

The Lost Valley is a strange place. From the road it looks like the top of a small hill, but once in it, you could almost imagine you were back at the bottom of the hill. Some very large boulders block the exit of the valley, and the entire valley floor is filled in with small stones and boulders making the whole thing look like a beach.

The track goes across the valley floor, and up the right-hand side before disappearing at the bottom of a horrendous red scree slope. Scree is nasty when its dry, add some water to help lubricate things and you spend more time going downhill than up. It must have taken an hour to trudge our way to the thin gulley at the top of the scree pile. After trying to knock someone below me out with a loose rock I popped up onto the top of Bealach Dearg and promptly went back into the gulley again to put on every item of clothing I had with me. To say it was windy and cold is a small understatement. The drizzle and clag we’d wandered into while climbing the scree slope was merely a small eddy caused by the wind howling up the opposite side of the hill.

There then followed a very damp and misty wander along what was probably a fairly thin ridge (I couldn’t tell, at best I could see down one side and that was enough to convince me to stay in the middle of the path) until we came to the top of Bidean nam Bian. From Bidean nam Bian we followed a scrambly path down to a col. While eating a selection of slightly damp sandwiches we made the decision to go back down. Although walking in mist is good experience and all that, it’s not that interesting! I also had the suspicion my waterproofs weren’t, and that the creeping dampness was making its way up my right leg and down into my boots. My boots which, until I crossed the (now quite large) river back in the Lost Valley, were dry.

All the valley walls had big white foaming waterfalls spilling off them, adding to the raging torrent that cuts its way through a deep gorge at the top of the valley. All this water pours and froths its way downhill until it reaches the gravelly floor of The Lost Valley. At this point it disappears… completely… it just seeps away into the stones to appear around 500m down past the blockage at the end of the valley. It’s really really odd. A wide fast flowing river just spills into nothingness, it doesn’t collect in a small pool or anything. There must be some large caves under the stones to allow so much water to vanish like that.

The stones round there are equally strange. Lots of conglomerate, some of it red, some of it black, some white and uniform in colour. All of it speckled with other kinds of rocks. It’s like someone’s mashed a load of bricks and concrete up then spread it about the hillside. In my quest to build my own mountain I brought back around 2Kg of stones :-) All of them different. I’ve not been to a place where there’s so many different kinds of rock naturally on the ground.

Tomorrow we’re off up Ben Nevis. Probably by the tourist path. I have the way off memorised - 150m on a bearing of 231 degrees grid, then 281 degrees grid to the middle of the zig-zag path. Get this bit wrong in mist and you’ll end up at the bottom of the hill slightly quicker than you expected - assuming you stay together and that bits of you haven’t flown off while on your almost 1.5Km plummet down Five-Finger Gully…

On Sunday I hope it’s dry enough so I can go to Poldubh to magic up lots of lead climbs, then sometime else during the week we’re going around the Ring of Steall (this time without the weight of a small child strapped to my back), and across the Aonach Eagach ridge - and for that it’d better be clear. I want to see the drop on either side of me. Rige walks are boring and slightly more dangerous if you can’t actually see the sides of the ridge!

Well, that was actually a good day’s wandering. The terrain was mostly flat and not too hard to walk around on. Lots of bumps that weren’t on the 1:50,000 scale map’s interpretation of the world, even more small pools of very deep water that weren’t on there too. Many many sinkholes and bogs that definitely weren’t on the map, and some raging torrents that were big enough to be given names by the map.

Still couldn’t see more than 50 metres in front of me though. Fortunately my waterproofs mostly worked, no waterproof being designed to keep you dry when crossing rivers and bogs that eat your feet. Can’t stop the stupid things riding up my back though, letting water right to my skin.
Phil gave us places to get to, and we had to work out the usual bearings and random timings to get there. Navigation’s easy if you can follow a little red needle and use your common sense. Common sense like if you walk around a big pool that happens to be in your way, you bother to walk around the other side so you’re back on the correct path, and don’t just walk to the side and continue walking forwards, religiously following your little red pointy arrow.

It’s interesting being lost. It’s even more interesting watching people get their nav wrong and make you lost. Watching someone contour around a hill without even noticing is different, then watching as the pick some random bump in the ground and proclaim it’s “probably around here, somewhere near this ring contour”. You can’t beat random guesswork when navigating. Unfortunately you can’t beat the person guessing, either.

I didn’t really care, we were on a big plateau which, if we walked randomly in any direction would have either made us go down hill into a valley, or start going up a mountain.
Eventually, after walking in circles for a while we worked out a strategy for getting un-lost. This involved deciding we were in one particular grid-square and plotting a random bearing off the hill, hopefully meeting a track.

Well, it worked. We trudged off in the mist, various people falling in bogs, and eventually came to a huge raging torrent that could only be one of two things on the map. We followed this down the hill and came to the Edge whereupon the cloud lifted and it stopped raining. It was as if the weather decided we’d escaped and it couldn’t be bothered any more.
There then followed a nasty trample down a gentle slope, a river crossing involving rope. Nope, I’d rather walk the extra “5Km” (it was just up the hill) to the bridge and go over that, I don’t like getting excessively wet feet and legs.

My sleeping bag’s dried off at least. Unfortunately that seemed to have cost me a large amount of energy since I’m freezing cold. Bone dry but freezing cold. Outside is pretty much the same as it was earlier. Going for a walk in this would be less than fun. A hard day’s walking combined with an even harder day’s navigation sounds like a good way of appearing in the 6 O’Clock news. Fortunately everyone else agrees. We’re off to do some more navigation and then go back to the bus.

I’m currently sat in a mighty Vango 2-man tent listening to the rain spitting on my gas stove, waiting for some tea to brew, the giradia and bits of sheep having vigorously boiled to death.
In the tent next to me - another Vango, that one having the correct tent poles, so the outer-tent reaches the ground properly - is a rather animated conversation between Dan, Dave and Mark about the finer points of a game of Poker. Phil is in his tent, doing whatever it is he does at night.
We planned to leave the Centre at Four, although somewhere along the line the message got garbled and I thought we were leaving tomorrow so hadn’t bothered to pack or even think about finding all the bits if crap I need to take that seem to hide. It’s quite ironic when you can’t find your compass in your room.

In our activity store are some fearsome tents made from such modern fabrics as canvas and rubberised plastic. They even have metal zips and really thick poles. Oh yes, these Vango tents may be God as far as group camping goes, but bugger off if you think I’m rolling half a mile of canvas into my rucksack along with any water it decides to soak up. Fortunately for me and my back we found enough parts to make a ‘new’ tent that had a nylon outer. It still had the heavy inner, but at least I’m not carrying two lots of canvas with me. And more importantly I’m not sleeping in a faded luminous orange tent!

We left the bus in a ditch in Glen Falloch around 6pm and wandered up the hillside. Naturally our walking pace was a shade quicker than the 3Km/hour we’d calculated, being somewhere more like five. Not to worry, the steep ground soon brought everyone down to the 3Km/hour trudge that makes everything seem further away than it really is.

Some rather picky micro-nav lead us on a little jig around the hillside before trying to find a place to camp. Had we not been doing the seemingly pointless micro-nav we’d have been able to walk right up the hill to where we wanted to be. I don’t ‘do’ mapwork when I can plainly see where I’m supposed to be walking to, it’s pointless looking for little re-entrants and flat bits when you can see the top of the hill. Still, it was good practice.

Since it took us over an hour and a half to weedle our way to the top of the hill, we’re now camped on the shore of Lochan Duin. There’s a 5Km hike to the bottom of Beinn Dubhchraig and Ben Oss in store for us tomorrow…

My tea has been stewed for at least ten minutes and it still tastes like water. It’s supposed to be Citrus Green Tea and doesn’t even have the boiled-grass flavour green tea usually has. Sitting here drinking tea and listening to the rain is quite nice. The rain hasn’t worked its way into the tent and I’m warm. The ground is a bit lumpy, but repeatedly hitting it with my fist seems to make the more uncomfortable bulges go away.

This morning’s hill walk up the Steeple was nice. We got to the top in about 45 minutes, had a look around, took some pictures, then went back down past the rock climbers.

This afternoon was nasty… Trapped in a boat with six 8yr old lippy kids who just wouldn’t shut up. To break the monotony of this I found Angus who was doing a boat trip and went to say “hello” (or “help!”). Unfortunately the boat was full of rather dim leaders asking equally daft questions (the favourite being “why is there just one adult on a boat of six children? what if he has to go into the water to rescue someone?”. The simple answer is I don’t get out the boat. What would have boggled her mind is I’m quite capable of running safety cover for as many sailing boats as I can physically see). We drove around some, I resisted the urge to push them all over the side, and eventually, three years later, it was time to go back in.

Once I’d grabbed the mooring rope the wonderful kids began swaying the boat side-to-side in that irritating way people do.

Then, just when I thought it was safe… the Climbing Badge with some of the little sods. Oh it wasn’t fun… about as fun as poking yourself in the eye with a rusty screwdriver. Kids with the attention span of a goldfish and that slightly gormless “we don’t understand” face whenever you tried to explain anything to them (which they were perfectly capable of comprehending, if only they’d stop asking questions about things we’d not explained to them yet). One of the leaders (the same one who asked the dumb questions earlier in the boat) suggested we should go outside to explain some of the climbing stuff. Having nothing better to do, and no will to live, me and Angus decided to give it a go.

We got eaten alive by midges and nobody learnt anything. Well, I learnt something anyway - ignore silly requests.

Ah well, they get to drop each other on Friday afternoon, we’ll see what they’ve forgotten. I bet belaying has disappeared from their minds.

Morning ActivityHill walking
Afternoon ActivityFishing
Evening ActivityClimbing badge
Weathercloudy but warm, some sun and wind