The Longest Most Beautiful Day... part 2

Today we are climbing to the very top of this.

The second half of The Longest Most Beautiful Day was spent hill-walking the ancient glacial landslip called Quirang. Thank you to Doug's mom for sponsoring our hill-walking afternoon!

So, in the U.S. we have plenty of hills and mountains; when we walk them, we generally call it "hiking." Scottish hill-walking is similar, but not really the same, and it's difficult to explain why. American hills are hot and humid and tree-ful in the South, cool and rainy and tree-ful in the Pacific Northwest, more dry and mountainous and treacherous in the mid-West; and aridly Mediterranean-esque in California. 

These particular Scottish hills, while treelessly naked, are quite steep, peppered with sheep droppings, covered in moss, and strangely wet and boggy on top. The wetness runs across and down the hill, cutting under the vegetation and through the soil making deep and narrow trenches which are (as Sandi found) easy to fall into, up to your knees. There is also an aroma of peat in the air, which we recognized from our whiskey education: peat is the compacted remnants of plant matter that has accumulated for many years without decomposing, and it is dried and burned to dry the barley that is used to make Scotch whiskey. That's what gives Scotch its smoky flavour. Peat looks like good black fertile soil, but it smells sharp and pungent because of the acidity, which prevents the plant matter from decomposing. You can learn more about it here, but the point is, it was a strange new (though ancient!) scent in a perfectly natural wild world.

The views, as you can see, are simply spectacular, reminiscent (to us Americans) of landscape features in Utah and Northern Arizona, only with grass, and sheep, and strangely more German tourists per square mile than can be found anywhere in America (even the natives were remarking on the number of Germans, and so I thought I'd mention it here).

Huff...pufff...
And we're only halfway up the hill!

I should add that one reason this day was "the longest" was because the summer days are so very long so far North. It was generally light outside by 6AM and dark by about 11PM. On this day we came down for breakfast quite early (and much earlier than we were habitually awake while in Scotland) so that we could make it to Sea Kayaking by 9 AM; we had our faerie glen picnic at around 1:00 PM; we hill-walked from about 3 until 6:00 or 7 PM; and we still had several hours of daylight left to make it back to Portree, have dinner and whiskey, and watch a little bagpipe parade in preparation for the Scottish Highland Games, which we weren't able to see because we had to return the rental to Glasgow by a specific time the next day. We posted a little video of the bagpipes at the end of this blog entry for your enjoyment.

Here are a few more photos of the day!

We parked in the lot visible on the right... this photo is from a small foothill...of a foothill.

My best hill-walking pose!

Getting a bit higher... parking lot still on the right...
Where is Elizabeth Bennett?!?!
Oh yes, she lived much further South. But still...

At this point our breath was already taken by the climb, so the view was all but suffocating! But we survived.

This is the feature that we photographed from the parking lot, at the top of this blog entry.
It's like Utah, with slightly more grass...

Bagpipe parade in Portree!