Picture, if you will, a country. A few hundred miles west of Norway, a few hundred miles more southeast of Iceland, and an imaginary line north from England; this country is Scotland. It was Scotland where I spent the last year studying, and it was Scotland where Skyler decided to join me for some highlands hiking after the end of said studying.

We decided to backpack through the Affric-Kintail Way as our first point of adventure. This track goes through an isolated part of the highlands, and getting there meant first taking a train up to the city of Inverness. The bus ride out from there was more akin to a roller coaster ride, and we were left in the village of Cannich looking quite a bit greener. Cannich itself was dominated at its heart by a crumbling, abandoned hotel, and it was here that we began our backpacking in earnest.

We climbed uphill from the hotel and soon found ourselves amongst patchwork tracts of dense forest and stump-ridden fields. The trees were pine with an intermingling of birch. Pleasant scents filled the air there, which moved in a gentle breeze, keeping the local insect population grounded. This was a blessing unbeknownst to us at the time.

Even with gear-laden backpacks, the hiking was initially easy. We went through a few more miles of forest before taking a brief break at a bridge over the River Affric. It was during the following uphill climb into Glen Affric that everything else started to go downhill.

While at the bridge, Skyler had noticed the onset of a couple blisters on his feet. He applied bandages and we trudged on, eventually reaching our first views of Loch Beinn a’ Mheadhoin. The weather had been kind and the sights stunning. It was through this beauty that the midges descended as swarms of sand grain-sized demons.

The highland midge (Culicoides impunctatus) is a tiny insect native to the western parts of the Scottish Highlands. The females of this species require a small amount of blood to reproduce, and they will happily bite away at any nearby mammals they can find to get it. This includes humans, and so the midges are often referred to as “wee beasties”, “wee bastards”, or (if you’re a true highlander) with just a long string of expletives.

We hadn’t paused five minutes when the first swarm hit. They would have covered us had we not covered up first. Despite our handy-dandy midge netting, the insects still swarmed around us and crawled through whatever holes they could find in our clothing to bite. We continued walking, as the midges were small enough that moving even at a walking pace meant they couldn’t keep up. We walked, barely stopping, the many miles to the end of the loch, where we made camp for the night.

We awoke the next morning to light rainfall (which did nothing to diminish the midge activity). This rain undulated throughout the rest of the day, never quite going away. The route for that day was only about 9 miles, but between the fatigue and rain, it felt far longer than the previous day’s trek. The path continued up Glen Affric, with much of the initial portion going alongside Loch Affric. Following this, we were again trudging along beside the River Affric.

It was difficult to tell what time of day it was through the gloom, but we must have reached Alltbeithe sometime quite late, as Skyler’s worsening blisters and my own fatigue slowed us considerably. Alltbeithe, at one time a small village, was now only home to one standing building: a small youth hostel. We checked for vacancies, and were overjoyed to find some available. In fact, we ended up having half of the bunkhouse there to ourselves, as we were two of perhaps 7 total guests at the hostel that evening.

We departed Alltbeithe late the next morning. Scattered clouds sat dense and low in the sky overhead, but the previous day’s rain had stopped. Instead, a gentle breeze blew, scattering the midges and allowing us to hike in peace. The glen narrowed ahead of us, and we passed several ruins as we walked.

The track went up and down numerous small hills, and we had to ford a stream every 100 yards or so. It wasn’t until we reached the edge of the Kintail region that the hills opened up before us and revealed Glen Lichd. The floor of this valley lay about 200 meters below, and the trail made a very rapid descent to reach it. Many of the rocks on the trail were still damp, and not slipping on them was tricky at places.

By some miracle, the rain largely held off. We clambered past waterfalls and increasing numbers of sheep as we continued along Glen Lichd. Besides the occasional hiker going back towards Alltbeithe, sheep were about the only animal life we saw. It wasn’t until we were nearing the end of the glen that another hiker pointed out some golden eagles soaring far overhead, which made for a welcome change. A couple more ruins greeted us before we eventually reached the end of the glen and the village of Morvich.

After Morvich, we had little energy left, and essentially dragged our feet the remaining four miles to the village of Ratagan, where we collapsed at a hostel, ending this section of our time in Scotland.

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Hey you, thanks for reading our blog! Both Skyler and I have now returned to our respective homes in Colorado, and we will soon be continuing our irregularly scheduled program of blogs about hiking the American West. Stay adventurous!

Cheers,

Ty & Sky