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[Trail blog is here]

Day 1 of our 1st challenge was off to an interesting start.   The weather the prior day has been gale force winds (90 mph) with wicked rain.   We woke up early in the comfort of our hotel bed at the Lock Duich hotel.   The bedroom accommodation was good but the food and beverage service was poor.  Based on our stay there, I can’t recommend it.

Today the weather had cleared a little and the rain had died off.  The winds were still gusting though with forecasts still showing 70mph winds dying off over the next two days.    Given the conditions we decided we would take our FWA (foul weather alternate) avoiding the high hills.

We left the hotel at the prescribed 9am sign-out time and paid one last visit to 914 Outdoor, a wonderful outdoor gear shop.   I’d had my eye on a hip flask that would prove to come in useful over the next few night camp.   I also found a really great headband/spam band that doubles as both a head cover and heck warmer.

A quick stop at the local post office / grocery for a small bottle of scotch and we were off!  We met of first challengers leaving our hotel since it was the official sign-out point.   Following the river up we bumped into almost a dozen including three days hikers and two “north to south” hikers who looked haggard, wet and were ready for a hot shower.  They’d been caught in the horrible weather of the past two days.

The hike from Dornie to the base of the Falls of Glomach wasn’t too eventful.  The paths were pretty easy to follow with little to see as you walked up the valley floor.    As were were cresting Camas-luinie the rain started again and quickly turned to heavy hail that was so painful we had to put on full weather gear including gloves. 

The base of the falls were pretty spectacular with amazing flow and noise – pretty much a full on waterfall that looked very cold.   We met our first river crossing here and had to cross a burn in full-on-spate.   Another solo challenger had been there for a while trying to decide whether to cross or not.    I popped on over without getting too wet.   Lynn opted to pull out her “dry walkers” and came over with a hand from me. 

We’d been told to be careful climbing up to the falls and were lucky that the weather cleared.  The trail near the top was very much a “goat scramble” that would have been very dangerous in driving wind and rain.   The view from the path to the actual falls was stunning and I’m ashamed to say we never got a picture.  In part this was due to the need to take an emergency bathroom visit 🙂

Our first night camping was pretty exciting – rather than camping on the valley floor which was extremely wet, we’d opted to take a little elevation and camped on what we though was a sheltered ridge (NH019245).   That was until the winds changed direction and gusted in a 2am causing the main guyline to let lose!

That wasn’t the only thing that went wrong; I’d neglected to remove my stove from the gas can and Lynn woke me up smelling gas.   After unscrewing it, gas was still flying out of the can causing it to go jetting around the tent!  Yikes – it appears the valve had failed so we had no option but to screw the stove back on and place it outside the tent.

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Overall an exciting 1st day to our challenge.   We felt good and tired.

Distance today: 16km

Go on to day 2