Tuesday, July 05, 2022
A' Bhuidheanach Bheag
It was a two-hour drive again for us this morning, returning to the Drumochter area to see if we could bag two more Munros before I have to hang up my walking boots forever.
It looked so easy on the map - but then doesn't it always! A track would get us at least 3 kilometres up a steep flank to a disused quarry at just below the 900m contour; and this track started off compacted and nice to have underfoot.
But then the track steepened dramatically and also become much rougher with large, loose, sharp stones and not much room each side of the track to avoid them. It was hard going - and I confess to a certain amount of whinging - although Greger remained stoical. Just above the quarry (which was merely a large patch of broken rocks) the track divided; deciding to tackle the further of the two Munros first, we took the right fork.
We had also been careless in reading the contour lines, as there was far more up-and-down than we'd bargained for. At a small cairn, we stopped to practise our orienting skills - but, noticing a large arrow made of stones on the ground pointing out a short-cut, abandoned our plan to stick to the ridge and took it; this path led us down into a boggy area and then ploddingly up the last pull. Greger was now way ahead of me, and I paused to snap the Gaick hills and distant Cairngorms across a scatter of quartz - startlingly white on the grey-green slope to the summit.
He reaches the top!
And so, eventually, do I.
The flush-bracket number on the trig point was S9079.
It gives an idea of the wide, sweeping nature of this summit plateau; if there are dotterel here, they could be blooming-well anywhere! There was an alarming number of peat hags and boggy bits, but there was also quite a lot of (I think) racomitrium moss - which dotterel like to nest in. On the way down, I snapped some of this together with a low, woody plant that might have been cowberry; I'm not sure the leaves should have been red though.
My knee was holding up pretty well but my hips were now giving me pain. Back at the junction of the paths, we decided definitely against the extra four kilometres it would take to get to the other Munro and back, and started off down the quarry track. A pair of meadow pipits gave us our second tick of the day and we discussed how bird-poor today had been compared to the nearby Meall Chuich walk, a month ago.
We set off for home, and somewhere past the second turn-off to Aviemore, a row of motionless traffic brought us to an abrupt halt. Nothing was coming the other way except for a few cars that had been in the queue ahead and were turning round. We also turned round and made our way to Inverness via Grantown-on-Spey and Nairn.
I felt guilty that Greger had to drive both ways today (I still haven't ventured to drive the Tesla), with quite a lot of the diversion on single-track roads. As the A9 had been shut in both directions, there was traffic coming the other way too, so he had to concentrate. Several times he used the amazing acceleration of the Tesla to cover as much ground as possible while the road was clear - and suddenly I had an experience that I've had before in this situation, only this time it was worse. I feel as though my insides are coming up (not a sick-feeling, more like on a fairground ride) and my head feels strange (dizzy? sort of, I suppose) and I feel as though I'm going to pass out. The only causes I can think of are, either sinusitis (which affects my balance) or low blood pressure, which I have been known to have from time to time. When I complained that his acceleration rendered me almost unconscious, Greger said "No it didn't".
But, my over-sensitivity to G-forces aside, there was a positive aspect to the drive: we'd never been this way before, and the landscape was new to us. We crossed a remote and extensive area with some scrub, woodland, and open moorland which reminded me of the New Forest. Something rang a bell in my mind; when we first moved here, I saw a bird report of (I think) a short-eared owl on Dava Moor. I'd never heard of this place, googled it, thought we should explore it sometime, and then forgot it. There is a Dava Way long distance footpath apparently, but I saw no car parks along this road from which you could take a short walk. I'm not sure why, but I wouldn't care to go there alone.
// posted by Christine @ 2:41 PM 
