SS-175 - Never take local advice!

Old Reflector
1

Carleatheran is just about 5 miles from me so it was an obvious next summit to ‘do’. Took advice last week from the local store keeper and keen walker as to the best way up to hill from the closest village - Gargunnock. Having been told there was a waymarked footpath from the end of the village which would take me to the summit I based my planning on that.

Yes there was a footpath at the end of the village and yes it did head towards the hills. However, it vanished after about 2 km and was never waymarked! This now gave me the tricky issue of negotiating a very steep climb through the vertical craigs that form the north face of the summit. Several different routes tried eventually found a route through and onto the ridge. From that point it was easy to the top but throughout the rest of the activation there was always the nagging thought in my mind about the descent.

Activation went well with the Welsh Mafia qualifying the hill for me closely followed by some of the Scottish Mafia. QSO’s achieved on 5Mhz SSB/CW, 7Mhz CW and 10Mhz CW. Thanks to all who perservered through my poor CW today. Still getting used to the Palm Paddle and trying to send CW whilst shivering was not easy.

Descent was generally straight forward managing to find an easier way through the craigs. Would suggest the southern approach route used by Jack GM4COX as the easier and probably safer option in future.

73 Glyn…GM4CFS

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In reply to GM4CFS:

I always enter the word climb and the summit name into Google, e.g. “climb Carleatheran” and see what comes back. There are so many Marilyn baggers out there logging their progress that you always find some useful info on how to get up avoiding the pitfalls (like bogs and GOML farmers etc.) Couple that with photos from the Geograph website and the OS Get-a-map site and I normally don’t have too much trouble. (Both Geograph and Get-a-map are linked from the Summits pages.) There are some GPS POI files too. If you don’t have a GPS then these are still useful as seeing where someone suggests to park is a good indication of where the path is likely to be.

If I do have problems then it’s normally my stupidity of failing to study the map in sufficient detail to see that my route might involve too much descent on the ascent, and hence too much ascent on the descent! :slight_smile:

Andy
MM0FMF

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In reply to MM0FMF:

Hi Andy

Thanks for the info, all duly noted. At the request of Ken GM0AXY I will put more detailed parking and route details for the approach I did yesterday but will also recce out the 2 other (and seemingly easier) approaches to the summit.

Glyn