Cona Glen
15/09/2015
I woke to the sound of gentle rain at 8am. Well ok to recount how the night went, after having a cup of Swiss tea (In Switzerland I found it hard to keep fresh milk at my digs- I never used enough and so it was always either accumulating or going off. So I got used, in extremis, to making a strong pot of tea then squeezing in condensed milk from a tube. This makes a good cup of builders tea. They have started doing these tubes in the UK so I took some along-invaluable.) with midge croutons, and settling down to read my kindle (I reasoned its low battery usage would make it last- I was right. Kindle Paperwhite FTW) and to have a few hits on the half bottle of scotch in my pack. That extra weight was worth every drop. Soon sleepy due to hard work and the distillers art I settled down properly to sleep. Sadly the designers of "mummy"type sleeping bags have a very strange idea of anatomy. Eventually managed to get everything in the bag but it was a struggle.
So I slept, fairly well, with my clothing drysack and inflatopillow under my head. The groundsheet was resting on a layer of sphagnum moss which was an excellent mattress.
I actually first woke at 4am with a bulging bladder and went outside for a slash. After gifting a tree with nitrogen I then went back for another 4 hrs.
Incidentally those with Ehlers Danlos will know that 4 hrs sleep is essentially 2 lots of 2 hrs at best as you have to wake up to put your shoulder back in it's socket every couple of hours.
But 8 am I woke, as I say, to the sound of rain. Except it wasn't was it? It was the midges hitting the tent in their insane bloodlust. I had to DEET up and net up before I even cracked the door to get the water boiling. The strainer built in to the saucepan came in usefull to get the midges mainly out of the tea. I also made one of the Mountain House dehydrated meals- raspberry oatmeal. Surprisingly yummy.
Packing up took me far longer than it should. Partly because i hadn't practiced it and also because of the beauty of where I was. So there I was wasting half the day again.
Anyway I started out on the road again, to get a light shower, but it soon passed and back came the sun.
My pace was pretty good, despite the pack shifting a bit due to changed weight distribution. However I developed a blister on the ball of my big toe and stopped to treat with Compeed. I cracked on to an Estate bothy at Corrlarach which was locked but had a hard stand outside I used to boil up lunch, another dehydrated meal this time Sweet and Sour Chicken. This was surprisingly good. I know, I also was surprised.
The Cona brook has many, many waterfalls along it. I urge you to go and see. be carefull of the enormous Highland cattle though. the bulls definitely give you evils.
About 8 km in to the walk, on a fairly flat bit of track, my left knee gave way. I couldn't straighten it, I couldn't bend it. I used my stick to hop to a boulder and sat for 5 mins rubbing it. Got up, seemed ok. Then after 15 yards it went again.
Clearly not good. I was so far up the glen that the nearest help was over the pass at the end. But there was no way I was doing that tonight.So I started to look for a campsite.
Of course at this point Cona Glen consists of one giant Sphagnum bog. everything was sodden. In the end i found a small hill on top of which red sphagnum was growing. Red Sphagnum grows on soil not slush, so it was the best I was going to do. I pitched my tent and then hopped down to the river for water.
The groundsheet kept me dry but you could feel water oozing out when you lay on it.
This time the wind was up enough to keep the midges off so I used my dry ingredients to cook a morrocan soup/stew and a damper with fruit and suet. I only had chopsticks and a fork to turn it but it was yummy.
I necked some tramadol and helped it along with some whisky. this soon had me soothed to sleep.
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