Fear of the Dark

This post is a little late, about three weeks in fact, mainly because I'm exceptionally busy and popular (ed: lazy and useless). It was another night time meeting by the railway tracks in Dalwhinnie; having arrived early I got to work digging a car parking spot out of the two feet of snow that still covered everything. This proved time well spent when Murray and Colum rolled up in Murray's gigantic 4x4 and ploughed through the drifts with ease!

Murray has a little blue and red flashing light that clips onto Penny's collar so that we can see her darting around in the darkness and doing the usual trick of covering twice the distance at twice the speed compared to us. It's a surprisingly bright LED and makes the whole walk a little like being at a very poorly attended rave.

The good thing about these night walks is the fabulous view:




The down side is that we are all cowards and once Penny started barking into the darkness the idea that a bear, or some equally ferocious animal like a squirrel, might be stalking us in the darkness took hold. Still it was an incentive to walk faster!

Snow Joke

Finally I had run out of excuses and so, at last, we met up in Newtonmore for a walk in the hills and the official start of the Bike & Hike training. The road up to Shepherd's bridge was fairly covered in snow and ice but this proved no problem for Murray, who had cunningly engineered a flat tyre at just the right time. On arrival it did, however, prove difficult to shut his car door and he confided in us that it had fallen off earlier that week. I helpfully enquired whether a door was actually an MOT requirement. Apparently it is.



Glen Banchor is very scenic in its winter coat and we managed to give it the appreciation it deserved by moving at the stately pace of 1.5 miles per hour. All of us except Murray's dog Penny, she covered about twenty times the ground that we did with at least fifty times the enthusiasm!



During the decent we had enough time to practice our ice axe breaking and pioneer some new techniques for this essential winter skill which, to the casual observer, may have appeared to consist of flailing about like a helicopter in trouble and landing in a heap, head-first in a snow drift. No doubt we will be out once again, when the bruises have healed.

The Badgers Return

Despite swearing a sacred oath that we were never, never, never going to cycle and walk 70 miles ever again, somehow we are back for the 2010 Bike & Hike. The blisters have healed, the dreaded chaffing has subsided and the emotional scars are almost forgotten. Now, in the depths of winter, the training begins in earnest so please follow our progress here.