It has been a long time since anyone activated these hills and by none other than @MM0EFI Fraser, on his long lonely journey from the west. Clearly he needed to do these again (to get completes) and this time with a buddy.
I had decided we could do a route from the east, starting from The Steplar and following the track towards the wind farm and then up into the hills. I plotted out the route and it seemed reasonable, and to make things efficient, I reckoned you could cycle from the start to the wind farm where the route forks between the summits. Yes, it was some up and down hill first but I’m sure it would be fine, half the time you don’t need to pedal anyway. Plus then we’d cycle through the wind farm and surely that’s going to have lovely made up roads for us.
We knew the weather forecast was for some showers but when we woke up it was pouring down. There was also a G3 level geomagnetic storm this morning and Kp was 7. So it was looking good … 
The forecast did suggest the rain would ease off later on, and I didn’t want to sit around at home so off we went. Bothy bag and waterproofs packed.
We met at the car park and off we went on our bikes, immediately starting up the hill - Dead Wife’s Hillock no less.
We reached our first summit and now it would be downhill to the stream.
Downhill it was, although the track was quite cobbly and we both commented on “not looking forward to pushing the bikes up that on the way back”. Over the stream and then into the wind farm.
Whilst we were cycling through the wind farm, we weren’t really on any of the new roads and still had to make do with cobbly, steep tracks cutting across the wind farm. We did get a lovely moment of cycling along one of the roads but only for about 500m before turning off again.
As I had to be back home by 5pm, we decided it would be best if I did Corriehabbie (GM/ES-031) first and then if I was short of time then I could just head off quickly from Cook’s Cairn (GM/ES-033) later on. I stomped off through the heather down to the other side whilst Fraser headed up and setup at the top.
It’s ironic that Cook’s Cairn has no cairn and the most shelter you can find is if you lie down on the ground. Fraser chose to guy his mast and not bother trying to use the cairn.
Meanwhile I was nearing the top, and was pleased to see a huge cairn and trig point for mast support - although the hole was very deep so I made sure my mast was not going to collapse into the trig forever! It also had an iron hat it was sporting to one side - I’ve not seen one of those before.
A quick call on 2m and Fraser was in the log - his first complete and cue to pack up and head over - and then, to my surprise, I had a run of 3 more QSOs on 2m. I made use of the shelter and setup on HF. Denis, @MW0CBC, had just setup on G/SC-010, and we just managed a S2S on 40m. The HF bands weren’t great, but they weren’t dire and I managed some more.
It was time to swap summits. The wind seemed to have picked up quite a bit by this point and whilst the rain had generally kept at bay, there were occasional short showers before they blew on. The climb up Cook’s Cairn was a bit of a trudge through the heather, straight up the side, but got there in the end. After being spoilt by the lovely cairn, it was quite different setting up on Cook’s Cairn. The wind was strong now, but a combo cairn/guying kept the mast up and, sitting back to the wind with hood up and earphones meant I could hear. Other than another 2m contact with Fraser - for both of us to get two completes - I didn’t bother with the HT as it was hard to hear it.
It had taken us longer to cycle in than I had planned, but we’d made good time on the walking and activating parts, so we met back together at the bikes before heading down and back to the cars.
Some nice fast downhills, and then that push uphill we’d not looked forward to from this morning but it wasn’t that bad. We had the wind behind us now, and that helped with the struggle. Fraser also did an excellent job with the gates.
4:55hrs, 21.2 km, of which 13 km on the bike. Two completes each, two more off my GM/ES list (16 to go!), hardly any rain and sufficient radio activity - a great day out! 
(At least I thought so…).
Although my great day out became less great on the way home…
