Wednesday, May 08, 2024

Meall Odhar (At the Feet of the Executioner!)

We're going on an adventure!

We decided Tuesday was our "if the weather is good, we go Hiking, and if the weather is bad (or gets bad) we don't go as far" day.


We discussed possibly hiking around the Quiraing, the hilly landslide formation directly behind our Airbnb, (featured in the early picture with our rental Toyota), but the Cuillin, further south, is notoriously beautiful hiking on Sky so we decided on a route up into the Black Cuillin, where we'd be able to start the approach to one of the outermost peaks, which was said to be a lovely walk even in poor weather, and get some excellent views if the weather held out and we could continue up onto the mountain.

That's where we headed.  Rachel might have doubts. Reasonable.


If it was easy enough, we'd plans to scramble up to one of the outermost protrusions before turning around, or picking a new route once we had a sense of the terrain.

One of the reasons we were wary in the Cuillin was that they have a ton of Iron in them -- Mother Nature's way of saying "You brought a compass? Well that's right fucked now, good luck without it!").   

My new phone (a Samsung S23) has apparently not made its compass an especially high priority feature, so I had already seen some atrocious results from it in the google maps app, which made me a little wary, but I figured with a good map and GPS, especially in open terrain, I was up for a much easier time than. . . literally every landnav course I've ever taken, and that turned out to be very accurate.

The sky cleared over the course of our walk, which made for really rewarding views.


The walk highlands app made it a breeze, because we could download all the map tiles for offline viewing, and it would overlay GPS and compass data directly on the offline hiking trail map (complete with elevation lines! Be still my heart.).  And even with the local iron and my shoddy compass, the app did an excellent job keeping our heading.

So, properly provisioned with plenty of water, snacks, a meal, a good camera, two phones with maps and compasses, and our hiking book, we set off for the Cuillin.

The hike was gorgeous.  We covered about 11 Kilometers by the end of the day.  The point we settled on climbing,  Meall Odhar, was a lumpy ridge that juts out in front of Sgurr Am Bastier ("The Executioner"), one of the highest and most threatening points in the Black Cuillin.

(from what I am learning, it seems that a "Meall" is a hill, generally with a rounded or lumpy appearance, while a "Sgurr" is a jagged peak and is usually higher)


We reached Meall Odhar around 16:00 and had lunch.  The views from the top were absolutely stunning.



The Meall is connected to the Cuillin mountains behind it by a soft ridge that slopes away on both sides, and we decided to come down the opposite side of this ridge and then continue, turning our walk into a giant loop and letting us see a new section of trail on the way back.


I'm pretty sure Rachel is in this picture!


 

She's just very far away.

 


While she was navigating the rock scree, I climbed down alongside this byrne (stream).


The water in the byrnes coming off the Cuillin was disorientingly clear


The new trail was really interesting, with an absolutely crystal-clear byrne that we followed most of the way back.  Along the way we stumbled across a beautiful and comically precarious "footbridge", which was a fun traverse (that Rachel watched me do from a safe distance).


 

A soupรงon of Peril!


We also trudged directly into the path of photoshoot -- a couple were having their wedding photos taken in the golden-hour light (those pictures are going to be incredible).  The combination of kilted assistant in full dress, the incredible and austere landscape, plus the fancy dress couple and the blinking photography drone did make for a very anachronistic scene.


Romance.

We made it back to the car around 19:00 and headed back to our place for a quiet evening in -- we had found black pudding in the local grocery and we had leftover potatoes from our roast chicken, combined with some eggs and toast, we made a pretty excellent breakfast for dinner.

 

A well earned brinner.  Delicious!

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