And the score is - Black Mountain 1, Tent 0
As training for the trip continues, I was back on Black Mountain at the weekend with friends Dan and Seema who have foolishly agreed to accompany me from Strathcarron to just North of Ullapool.
The plan was to have a pleasant few days walking and testing out new gear. Unfortunately the weather had other ideas. The appropriately named Black Mountain has a Mordor-like quality at the best of times, but as we parked the car and headed off into its bleak beauty, clouds were gathering ominously.
Perhaps it wasn’t a good omen that the only sign of human life we saw on Saturday was a Mountain Rescue van parked at the pass. As we continued along the Picws Du ridge towards an overnight camp at Llyn Y Fan Fawr, visibility dropped to nil and the wind was reaching storm force.
Pitching the tents was like trying to fly a kite in a wind tunnel. As the night went on, the winds were gusting up to 100mph with driving snow thrown into the bargain. My ageing North Face Stratos took the brunt of this and barely survived the night, emerging with one side caved in and the aluminium poles bent into a Dali-esque nightmare.
Dan and Seema fared better in their newly acquired Marmot Grid, which shrugged off the conditions and is now top of my shopping list as a 4 season replacement for the mutilated North Face.
Dawn eventually broke and an eerie milky yellow light illuminated the snow dusted sides of Black Mountain (see photo). We were allowed just a few moments to enjoy the primordial majesty of the setting before the wind and hail came back with a vengeance, driving us down toward Glyntawe and a warm but weird pub.
The mountain well and truly whipped us and reminded us all of our utter insignificance in the general scheme of things. There’s probably no better place to train for the Cape Wrath Trail.
