Petestack Blog

See maps and text at https://www.petestack.com/running/kinlochleven.html.

Something I got absorbed in making for outdoor education and thought might sit well on my website!

It was Ian Beattie’s stag do at Tyndrum this weekend, so I was among friends runners and we had to run to the pub for lunch on Saturday. About seven miles to the pub in Bridge of Orchy. Where we watched New Zealand beat Australia at World Cup Rugby and I fell asleep because that’s what I do when I’m not doing anything else. And then we ran back to the pub for dinner. About seven miles to the pub in Tyndrum, in the dark with too few headtorches between too many (disclaimer: at least mine was a shining light!). Where I fell asleep because that’s what I do when I’m not doing anything else, but most of the others seemed to get mixed up in some kind of karaoke with the zombies of Tyndrum (apparently normal on 31 October!). After which Keith (perhaps scunnered by his team’s loss) and Dod made renewed attempts to wake the (un)dead with some colourful noise at 2:00am and I had to play whistles in the hostel because Ian made me start and Scott wouldn’t let me stop… (more…)

So a ‘new’ Munro Top just makes the height and an ‘old’ one gets demoted by four (?) inches, meaning 6-0-1 becomes 6-0-2 because I’d already done them both! And the news really shouldn’t affect many folk when you’d have to be trying pretty hard not to do Mullach Coire nan Cisteachan (aka Carn na Caim South Top) if ascending Carn na Caim by the track from Drumochter Pass, but could perhaps have been more interesting the other way round when Creag na Caillich might just have been omitted as a (now) ‘mere’ Corbett Top by someone going for a minimal ‘tick’ of the Tarmachan Ridge. Now of course any logical traverse of said ridge continues to the end, but imagine that… having to go back and reascend to 3,000ft for those four inches! Narrow margins, and to some extent a mug’s game, but you have to draw the line somewhere… rules are rules if you’re going to play it and it’s not the mountains that have changed but our perceptions of them. The moral (if there is one) perhaps being that you get what you deserve if ticking ‘just enough’!