Glen Coe Scotland -- mountain climbing (the Prof)

Monday, March 7

Our Scotland trip write-ups may not get published in exact order, so going to try to date things so that some sense of when they happened can come through.  It's a matter of trying to get caught up quickly (given that things just keep happening) so one of us is writing whenever we have time.

Our third stop on the tour was Glen Coe, Scotland. The drive up to Glen Coe was beautiful.  We moved into the Scottish Highlands as we headed north from Ambleside in the English lake country.  The Highlands are an interesting mixture of small mountains, various sized lochs (lakes) and many streams and rivers.  Even though it was still cold, there was a lot of greenery around (mostly evergreens).  The cabins behind us in the picture on the right were where we stayed.  There really was nothing here except the Clachaig Inn.  It was the perfect "getaway" type place--provided that you don't crave human company all the time.

Someone told us that it was a 15-20 minute walk into town.  It turned out to be closer to 40.  And we did the walk in the rain.  This was a clear case of lack of communication on our part.  Teach and I both had reservations about the walk pretty quickly, but both assumed the other wanted to go and kept walking.  That really became a disappointment when even the little cafe in town (where we had planned to eat lunch) was closed.  I missed the chance to go back up the mountain a second time mostly because I was wet and worn out after the trip to town.

Oh well, it was still a great place to visit, and we got some chance to do some hiking up the mountain on the first day without the rain.  

Here's the crew that Hope and I joined on our way up the mountain.  We climbed up the line of the rock wall to the left and then past that up the creek path toward the waterfalls.  Going L-R, this is Kaitlin, Megan, Nicole and Travis--all HSU students.  This side of the wall was pretty rocky and Hope and I were about to call it a day about half-way up when we noticed that the other side of the wall was easier to climb.  So we jumped over and raced up ahead of the group.














Once we were past the wall, we were up into the creek bed.  It was a beautiful little mountain stream that meandered its way down the side of the mountain.  It was so peaceful listening to it babble along on its way down.





Although we didn't go all the way to the top, the view from where we made it was pretty spectacular.  The pictures below show the view.  The second one has the lodge in it -- giving some idea of how high we climbed.

Hope and I headed back down the mountain