tent!

I woke up in the bothy, ate my oatmeal, and waited for the Spanish boys to get up. For breakfast they made a big pot of tea and dumped museli into it (which, come to think of it, is a good idea: then you only have to heat one batch of water). During their stay in the mountains they had been watching a tent that was pitched about a kilometer from the bothy, and hadn’t seen any activity around it for the whole five days. They wanted to go see if the tent was salvageable. So we went to scope it out. It turned out that the tent was full of stuff—moldy bread and cheese, three couch cushions and two sleeping bags, a tape deck and three Bob Dylan tapes, three pairs of dirty 41×31 jeans—but had been abandoned since at least early may, as the milk had expired on May 6th. The three of us hauled everything back to the bothy (this guy must have spent some time setting up: it took all three of us with two trash bags each).

So that was where I got my tent. The boys already had one, and I needed one, so I took the salvaged one. Everything else we left in the bothy.

I headed off around 1pm, going around the Bad Step, next to Loch Courisk, over a shoulder of the Black Cullins, and then back along the river valley. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in my entire life. Shortly after this photo, I came to the Bad Step, which is a nearly vertical scramble above the water. As I searched out footholds and balanced myself with my pack, a tour boat came chugging underneath. I felt like a spectacle, clinging to the rock face, and worried that the click of their cameras would throw me off balance.