This has only been activated once before and I know why, the ground is horrible.
I was on my way to stay at the South end of Loch Broom, about 8miles S. of Ullapool. That was my base for a few days. The targets where Beinn Ghoblaich (Forked Mountain) GM/NS-080, Cnoc a’Bhaid-rallaich GM/NS-100 and Beinn nam Ban GM/NS-090. If the WX held I was hoping to grab Little Wyvis on my way home. The WX forecast was for seriously good WX, sun, a few clouds, not much wind and no rain till at least Saturday lunch. I had intended to stay in Badrallach at the foot of three targets but there was an issue with the cottage website meaning it was booked whilst saying not. I found instead a wonderful B&B about 21miles drive from my original destination. It wasn’t bookable online, you had to ring to enquire and this stops many people booking. It was glorious, lovely location, splendid wifi, a killer shower, nice furnishings and delicious breakfasts. The owners were super nice too. OK some extra driving but with the forecast there was no way I was missing the chance to get up here especially as work at home had limited options this year.
The drive up is M90/A9/A835 and so I looked for something “easy” to bag on the way. I could have tried Ord Ban or Mount Eagle again but Cairn Na Dubh Choille GM/NS-117 only had 1 previous activation and I was going to drive past the starting point. Why such a low count? Well there’s so many bigger and better hills nearby and it can’t be hard it’s a wee 1pt summit above a forest.
I parked at the forest entrance just after the Ben Wyvis car park and before Inchbae Lodge Hotel/Cafe, there is a Forestry sign. You used to be able to cross the bridge into the forest and park off the main road but the gate is now locked so I parked carefully so I was clear of the road and the entrance. Walking gear on and off we go. It was mildly breezy but warm in the sun. I wanted to test the backup 41ft “random” antenna. I carry this always but normally use other antennas so it was time to check it was working OK. If it was broken I would take other antennas so I had 2 known workers with me.
I followed the forest road as it skirts around the North of the hills and looked for the cattle-grid. After crossing that, I’d read to follow a path up to the left by a fence. It was quite obvious but hard work following it due to the vegetation. It climbed up and sort of petered out with the fence and then there was nothing. So I tried a rising traverse through the undergrowth aiming for the col.
Gordon Bennett this is not a good route. The ground was uneven, the vegetation consisted on heather, shrubs, grass, and the odd bramble. Always shin deep and sometime chest deep. And I I struggled on and on and on. Finally getting to flatter ground that was still hard work to cross. At the col it seems like a long way to the final summit. It isn’t but it’s hard work walking along and I wasn’t looking forward to the return.
Finally I set up the 41ft at the top and was away. I started on 30m and it was working fine. The views were quite good especially down the valley to the dam across Loch Glascarnoch in the distance. This was completed in 1957 and is a major hydro power source. Behind it sat Beinn Dearg GM/NS-003 peaking out and An Teallach (ann shallack) GM/NS-004 looking magnificent. 30m worked fine and I tried 40m SSB knowing this was a seriously rare summit. I’m sure my 41ft worked better before on 40m but I struggled to work 2 stations. Lots of calling and no more stations so 15m CW to finish off. Easy DX with Roger KF9D out near Chicago.
Pack and back out the same way. It was just as bad coming down. I’d found a dry hole on the way up, laughed then found the wet one. Foot out with boot and only the top of the sock was wet. However it had soaked down a bit whilst sat. I was never so pleased as when I got back to the path and then track. Back to the car in no time. Boots off etc. and car repacked.
There’s very good 4G from EE at the top and on the way up. Along the road towards Ullapool and Beinn Dearg GM/NS-003 looked unbelievable in the sun and clear air.
So where are the photos Andy? Ah well funny you should ask that. I first used Unix in 1983 on a PDP 11/44 at Uni. I was roped into helping a fellow undergrad try and type in some C code a lecturer gave him. We were introduced to Unix command line, vi, and cc in one session, scary. Then I’ve used IDRIS (68000 1984), Xenix (LSI 11/23+ 1984) BSD 4.? (NS32016 1989), Unix SysIII (68000 1990) Unix BSD 4.3 (Vax 11/730 1990), Ultrix (DEC Alpha 1998), LynxOS (PowerPC 1999), SunOS (SPARC 2000), OpenBSD (PARisc 2005) and Linux (ARM32, StrongARM, AARCH64, PowerPC, x86, AMD64 since 2000). I have had a Linux machine alongside my Windows machines for the last 25 years. I’ve finally dumped Windows (should have done it years ago) and just a few weeks back upgraded my new PC to Debian 13 Linux. My other desktop runs Deb13, both laptops run Deb13. Before that I was running Debian 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 & 12 and a few things still run 12. SO I SHOULD KNOW WHAT I’M DOING 
Unix and Windows have temporary directories… your Windows temp folders will be full of crufty old files. Likewise Unix has /tmp… a place for temporary files. But often these folders fill up and nothing deletes the files unless you, the user do. So Debian 13 like many new releases of Linux mounts /tmp as a ram disk. I have 32GB of ram so 3.2GB /tmp ramdisk is created. Put the temporary files on there and when you reboot… poooof… all the cruft vanishes. I knew this but forgot.
You can see where this is going. I’d cleaned years of old photos of the camera SDcard so back at the B&B I wanted to get the photos on to the laptop and off the camera. SDcard into laptop. Create a folder on /tmp for the pictures like I have done for years. Move not copy the pictures to the new folder and we have pictures on the laptop and the SDcard clean again. Job done, feel pleased, turn off laptop and go for something to eat.
And at that point the pictures vanished. 
What an eejit. And of course the SDcard has been used since so I have not been able to un-erase anything. I know damn well for next time not to use /tmp like you are meant to.
11 QSOs 30m CW, 2 QSOs 40m SSB & 6 QSOs on 15m CW. 41ft proved an OK backup antenna.
I don’t know if there is a better route up this but good views or not, I’m never coming back to do it again!
