TGO challenge: arrived in Ft. Augustus

After two long days I arrived in Ft. Augustus yesterday evening.

I started in Shiel Bridge Friday 8:30 (yes, I know that sign-out is supposed to start at 9:00 but it’s not my fault that the sheet was already there – and I was not the first anyway). Weather was as I expected it to be in Scotland. After two hours I had already experienced all permutations of sun, wind, and rain. Overall it was very pleasant and walking was very easy.

Another hiker asked me when I planned to be in Ft. Augustus and by mistake I said in two days. They looked a little surprised but nobody said it was impossible. So when I realized my mistake I started thinking if I could actually do it.

The final decision to try it fell during my late lunch break, at the Altbeithe youth hostel. I felt great and so I decided to move on. And this was a great idea. The whole afternoon I had only about 15 minutes of rain and a lot of sunshine.

My goal was to reach Cougie and everything looked like I could make it. But when I left the dirt road somewhere south of Affric Lodge to follow the public footpath to Cougie the trail turned bad. Very bad. The trail was still clearly visible but had turned into a bog. Every step I sunk 10-15cm into the mud and I had to walk extremely careful not to slip. This took a lot of energy and the last bits of my motivation disappeared when I passed a very nice spot a little south of Affric Lodge, sheltered by trees and very close to a small river. So around 18:30 I pitched my tent. Later I measured the distance I walked that day I came up with roughly 32km and with another 36km to Ft. Augustus. Hard but not impossible.

After dinner I immediately fell asleep and woke up ten hours later, fresh and ready to go.

Day two

Again I started walking around 8:30. The trail was still horrible but now I was fresh enough to ignore it. The weather was pretty much the opposite of Friday. The first few hours were pretty good, sunshine and only a few very short showers but just when I was about to look for a nice spot for my lunch break, a large cloud front moved in and it started to rain. The rain continued for most of the afternoon. Most of the afternoon I had to walk without any cover over a few hills and I was already pretty tired when I finally reached Glen Morrison.

10km to Ft. Augustus and just one more hill to climb. It was 16:30 and I decided that I needed a break before moving on. So I sat down under a large pine tree and had some chocolate. Five minutes later an older lady showed up and joined me under the tree (she later told me that her first thought was: “Who had dumped all that trash under the tree” – to my defense she said also that she wasn’t wearing her glasses ). After some chatting we got up and started walking again. But after one or two kilometers I was on my own again, because she found a camp site and decided to call it a day. I kept on walking and the old military road over to Ft. Augustus was better than I expected, some grass between the rocks and my feet were very happy about this.

The climb drained most of my remaining energy and to make matters worse, I had to cross a section where forest work had been done and the trail was completely unusable. But the area around it wasn’t any better, so there was no way to get around it. These one or two kilometers cost me nearly an hour and I started thinking about pitching my tent here and making in down to Ft. Augustus early the next morning.

But stubbornness prevailed and I kept walking. After what felt like a million switchbacks I finally reached Ft.Augustus and found the hostel. My next problem was that I was now one day early and had not booked a room. I did not expect this to be a problem but I did not know that there was a rally that day with many old and very nice cars. The hostel was full. But the girl at the reception was very helpful and called all B&Bs in town, but no vacancies. I was lucky when she called the Caladonian Hotel, which had exactly one free room because somebody had had canceled a little earlier, a family room for 70GBP. Yes, expensive and more than I needed, but I wanted to have a real bed.

I was again lucky to find out that the Caladonian Hotel bar is supposedly the best bar in town, even locals come there. I enjoyed a Guinness, a Tradewind and a nice chat before again dropping dead in my bed.