The Skye Trail that wasn’t

It was supposed to be the most epic adventure. I spent months planning and preparing – packing and unpacking and repacking my backpack to make sure I had exactly what I needed for me and Lucy and not a gram more – checking the weather forecast every six hours to see if there had been any major warnings. Up until the week before I was due to leave everything still looked pretty positive. The weather people spoke in breathy tones of high pressure cells and settled conditions. Temperatures, they said, would be above average.

Then Storm Dave came along and threw a spanner in the works. Wind, snow, hail: Skye got it all in the space of a couple of days. Roads were closed. Gritters were called out of their sheds. I sat in the Netherlands waiting with baited breath to see if it would last. And then it was all over again. The high pressure returned and the sun was out and the temperature shot up to 18 degrees Celsius in some places. A wave of heat after the driving cold. My hope was restored.

And so I set off early on a Wednesday morning, nose pointed towards Scotland. I stopped over for the night in Galloway and Dumfries and had a glorious spot in the sun. I was down to my t-shirt! All seemed to be going according to my dreams and plans.

The next day I had a six hour drive ahead of me. The plan was to get up to Skye by early afternoon, park the car at a campsite and then head off on the trail. Seemed easy enough. I’d had a good night’s sleep and I was looking forward to a lovely picturesque drive up to the Hebrides. What I didn’t realise is that driving along the A7 to Edinburgh is much like trying to run a half marathon when you’ve never done more than 10km. The scenery was epic, but the roads are narrow, winding and filled with people in white vans who would like you to go at least 60 mph, preferably 70. It was an exercise in high performance driving that I was not prepared for.

Thus, by the time I got to Skye I was pretty done in. So, instead of trying to then walk a further 15km to my first wild camp, I thought it would be a better idea to find a campsite for the night and set off the next day. In hindsight, it was a good thing I was so tired and didn’t set off into the hills, because less than 24 hours later, the wind decided to step it up a few notches.

I headed for my favourite campsite, Glenbrittle Bay, and was welcomed warmly by the staff at the cafe. Fortified by a great coffee and an almond croissant, I pitched the tent and took Lucy down to the beach so she could blow off some steam on the sand. The beach is also the only place you can get any kind of mobile signal so while Lucy careened around me in circles, I wandered about looking for an extra bar so I could inform the folks back home of our progress and my decision to hold off on starting immediately. The cafe staff had muttered something about possible high winds the next day so I decided that if we were going to do any of the trail, we might have to skip the bit we did last year and just start from where we left off. This gave me a couple of days leeway to see what the weather was going to do.

After a pretty good first night, the next day the wind changed direction, now blowing from the southeast. At first it didn’t seem too bad and I got a nice bit of walking done up to the foothills of the Cuillin, even managing to do a little en plain air watercolour sketching. I returned to the campsite around 3-ish and treated myself to an excellent pizza from the cafe.

That’s when things started getting a bit uncomfortable. The tent was holding up fine, but the wind had now picked up so much that the flapping of the tent sounded a bit like a constant cacophony of towels being flicked around my head. The forecast suggested that it was going to get even worse during the night, so I decided to move all the sleeping gear into the car. It was still windy, but at least we were insulated from the sound.

It was an uneasy and fitful night. The car was being hit by such hard winds, that it felt a little like being in a rocking boat. Thus, when I woke the next day and saw the mountains blanketed in snow, and saw that the forecast was not going to improve for the next few days, I bit the bullet, said my goodbyes to the staff, packed up and drove out of the glen. We hadn’t even been there 48 hrs, but the voice of reason kept repeating ‘this will not be fun – come back and try again another time’.

To add salt to the wound, the high winds, rain and hail chased us all the way back to Galloway and Dumfries, where I’d had lovely weather only three days before. Thankfully, it soon abated there, and we had a lovely couple of days exploring the hills around Langholm, but with my dream lying in tatters, I decided to cut the holiday short by a couple of days and head home to the Netherlands.

There are no hard feelings though. This is just the price one pays for loving a country with weather that is as unpredictable as it gets. Sometimes you get very lucky, and sometimes you really don’t.