Easter weekend had been an absolute stinker here in Glasgow - all the forecasts had been full of talk of Storm Dave, and rightly enough Dave had brought rain, hail, gales and all sorts of rotten weather along with him. I’d essentially written the weekend off in terms of the possibility of doing anything fun outdoors, so it was a nice surprise to see that by Easter Monday, the forecasts were looking promising again, particularly to the east of the country.
Schiehallion (GM/CS-005) was a Munro that I’d bagged many years ago, but had nice memories of it being a fairly straightforward but still interesting enough hill that I could boost up and down in not too many hours and make it back to Glasgow in plenty of time for dinner. I was even thinking if progress was swift enough, that I might have time to knock off Dun Coillich (GM/CS-100) on the way home.
What I of course had completely failed to consider in that plan was the fact that Storm Dave had also thrown a pretty significant dump of snow across a lot of Scotland on Sunday, even normally-tropical Partick had failed to avoid getting a wee coating of winter wonderland about it. Thankfully however, I had decided to chuck the ice axe and crampons in the car as a just in case measure, as well as the big gloves and other various cosy accoutrements that I thought I was done with for the winter season.
The snow cover was right down to car park level, although the path and the car park itself were nice and clear, with the path only starting to gather a wee bit of ice and snow as I gained height. Schiehallion is almost certainly one of the easiest hills to navigate in the whole world - the well made path definitely helps, but even when that’s covered in a foot of snow, you’ve essentially just got a nice big evenly-shaped ridge to follow right the way up to the summit.
Speaking of failing to prepare, while I did manage to remember an axe and crampons, I completely neglected to bring sunglasses, hence a lot of squinting at the phone camera. Not long after gaining a bit of height, I did hear @2M0OSB calling out from Torlum (GM/SS-227), but while I was able to get a good 5/5-5/6 from him, it seemed like he wasn’t hearing my reply.
Were the crampons really necessary? Probably not, but they were certainly confidence-inspiring on a few of the steeper sections. They were probably most useful in the awkward transition zone between the path being clear and the path being completely disappeared under thick soft snow cover, where a few big sheets of ice were visible where snow had been blown away.
After a bit of plodding up through the soft snow, the summit was reached in fairly good time, almost bang on at my predicted alert time of 1130. My plan had been to carry on off to the west of the summit to activate, as this would keep me clear of the crowds, while still managing to keep a good ridgetop position. The main thing stopping me from reaching my operating position on time was a couple who were quite frankly going a bit over the top with the instagram opportunities on the summit, meaning I was a shocking 5 minutes late getting on station.
As soon as I’d found the perfect rock with the perfect bum-shaped hollow and stuck the foam mat on it, just as soon as I’d settled my bum into said hollow, the FT-65 sparked into life and I made my first QSO, a summit-to-summit with @GM5ALX over on Carn na Caim (GM/CS-039) - I think Alex had a much easier time seeing Schiehallion from his summit than I had spotting Carn na Caim from mine, but a good 5/9 each way with direct line of sight and not a lot of distance between us.
Eventually, I did manage to get the fibreglass pole up with the Slim G on board, and rather than faff with guy lines on a rocky and snowy summit, I just decided to wedge it between my leg and my rocky perch. Because I’d left the FT-65 with the RH-770 tuned in while I was setting up, I stuck the FT-270 on the Slim G, but there was thankfully not a lot of need for any QRM-busting on Schiehallion. Interestingly, the biggest disturbance on the hilltop was the clearly-audible PA system from an orienteering event down in Kinloch Rannoch.
I made three more contacts fairly quickly, including a personal first - a 5/0 receive! Paul @M0RTO in Edinburgh gave me a 1/1, and although I could hear him absolutely perfectly, his signal didn’t even make a blip on my S-meter. Unfortunately however, I couldn’t quite make the QSO with the second operator he said he had with him.
Just as I was considering doing a further round of CQ shouts, a wall of cloud very suddenly appeared from the south and clagged everything in, so I decided that my four contacts was plenty, and to quite while I was ahead, with fond memories of operating in the sunshine. While I was on my way down, I managed to catch one more contact, Jace @MM7VXJ on one of my local hills, Meikle Bin (GM/SS-129). Unfortunately, I was well below the activation zone by that point, and too far gone to consider a scoot back up to make a proper summit-to-summit of it. Apologies to Jace for making my contact a bit brief - it seemed my signal was talking over someone with an Aberdonian accent who wasn’t hearing you, I didn’t want to cause any further interference.
The descent was naturally nice and easy, and the crampons came off a lot sooner than expected on account of a large amount of the snow melting during the couple of hours I’d been up on the hill. Back at the car in good time, I decided the only course of action would be to take a slightly longer drive home to visit one of Perthshire’s finest dining establishments.
Yep: scampi, chips and beans at the Ballinluig Motorgrill. Incidentally, I have an amazing inability not to sing “MOTORGRILL!” to the tune of Motorhead’s Overkill in my head any time I visit.
Anyway, I thought I’d write an impassioned plea about how the winter bonus system should be overhauled at great effort because I didn’t have to get my crampons dirty til April this year, but so sated was I with my scampi that my wee Skoda and I positively floated back down the A9 on a wee trail of rainbows and sparkles, full of chips and good memories of a cracking day on a magic hill.