I spent last week at Glenmore Lodge, near Aviemore on a Mountain Leader training course. This training course was the first part of the process of gaining the Mountain Leader Award qualification.
Last weekend I went to the the Leuchars Air Show. Unfortunately the day was ruined somewhat by the weather with rain, a low cloudbase and poor visibility meaning that most of the flying displays were cancelled or curtailed.
Last year, I ran in the Great Scottish Run 10k race in Glasgow (see the previous blog posting ‘Great Scottish Run)’ and yesterday I ran in the Great Scottish Run again, this time doing the half-marathon (which was not surprisingly more difficult). My time was about 2 hours 7 minutes – incredible to think that Haile Gebrselassie ran a full marathon in 2007 in less time than this.
Last weekend I travelled to Assynt in the far north-west of Scotland to climb the summits of Conival and Ben More Assynt and to look for the remains of an Avro Anson that crashed in the area in 1941. On the saturday evening I walked into the mountains from Inchnadamph and I had blue skies, the warmth of the setting sun and a breeze to keep the midges away.
At the start of this month, Lesley and I went on a trip to the West Country (Bristol, Bath, Portishead and Clevedon). Then we went to Amsterdam for a few days (second visit for me, see my previous blog posting ‘Amsterdam‘). Lesley has written great blog entries about the trips here and here, so no need for me to duplicate what she has already done!
Lesley and I spent last weekend on the island of Mull, staying in Tobermory. On the Saturday I walked up Ben More (whilst Lesley went to the island of Iona), which is the highest summit on the island, and the only munro summit that you need to catch a ferry from the Scottish mainland to visit. Unfortunately I got no views as there was humid mist and clouds from low elevations all the way to the summit. I walked up the easiest route on the north side of the mountain and it was a long, sweaty climb.
Last weekend I went for a walk on the Cairn Gorm – Ben Macdui plateau, primarily to locate an air wreck site near the summit of Ben Macdui (see the previous blog posting ‘The highest air wreck site in the whole British Isles?‘) but also to see how large the summer snowfields on the plateau were, and how they compared to previous years.
Last weekend I went for a walk on the Cairn Gorm – Ben Macdui plateau to locate the site of an Avro Anson that crashed near the 1309m summit of Ben Macdui in 1942. The site was fairly easy to locate, but required a bit of a detour from the main path to Ben Macdui. There were quite a lot of walkers on the path to the summit that day, but none seemed aware of this wreck site just a few hundred metres away.
Lesley and I spent last weekend in London. We spent Friday evening in the Groucho Club in Soho, drinking expensive cocktails and looking out for celebs (I only saw one, Stephen Merchant).
Last weekend I walked and cycled to the two summits of An Sgarsoch and Carn Ealar, in the southern Cairngorms, with Norma (who hadn’t used her bike for getting to remote summits before).
I am a software engineer / database administrator / web developer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. In my spare time I like to travel and take photographs (especially of mountains). See my main website here: Eddie's Photo Archive