Hill of Whirren - again - must be a ski trip coming up

Another ski trip is in the offing,  got to avoid those nasty peat hags and all the other nasty terrain our local hills are full of.  So, it's Hill of Whirren time.  A nice easy 12km round trip, a mere 500m of ascent AND a safe track nearly to the top.  (strangely Ordnance Survey are unaware of it).  Start at the 202 contour, past Auchowrie, up just north of West Craig, to the peak north of it  then West Wirren and then Hill of Wirren.  Simples,

We drove up through Edzell and then up to Glen Lethnot in clag and increasing mistyness.   As we came up into Lethnot we popped out of the cloud into blue sky - hurray - and the temperature dropped to -2C...

But what a view, sorry this blog is going to be very visual  because I just couldnt stop taking pictures.

The locals tried to stare us out, I think they thought we had come bearing gifts...

And as we climbed up the views started opening up

And it was reet pretty.   I'd had a bad dose of the flu through the start of January and found the walk up a bit of a grind.  I was quite surprised how hard going it was since I'd spent christmas and new year putting 450kms under my skis, it seems that the flu is no respecter of fitness otherwise.

We got on site on target with only a couple of hundred metres over rough peat hags, albeit well frozen ones at an estimated -5C.  We got the aerial up at GM/ES045,  WAB NO57 and Trig point TP3915 expecting a nice welcoming committee on the radio, having alerted frequencies and times in advance.

 And found - nothing.   No-one on 7160, 7118 was busy so I tried CQing on 7121, surely people will be tuning.  Nope.  I found an S2S with the guy on 7118 and a reply on 7121 with a good signal from Wales.  There is propagation!  Eventually after 20 minutes 7.118 was free and I got called by Brian G8ADD who spotted us on the SOTA cluster.   Thanks heavens for that as we had no mobile signal here at all as we'd expected from past experience, so no chance of self spotting.  I hadn't noticed how reliant we'd become on that.  If this is going to continue we're going to have to change strategy.  VHF only?  CW only so that we get spotted by RBN?  Either way, the usual clientelle are going to miss out - either shape up or lose out....  Once spotted, well lots of usual people turned up, but where were you before?   I had an interesting chat with Jack gm4cox/p for an S2S near Biggar on 2m FM where he told me about a bug key I could use to do CW - this may be the way ahead to get auto spotting by the RBN.   A trip to 20m got me, almost nothing.  I did have a really nice 15 minute chat with oh6ghi who wasn't a chaser but heard my big (!) signal,  you could hear his pa fan in the speech gaps signals were so strong.   Where was everyone else?

I wouldnt have minded so much if the sky was broken with no propagation, but it was actually quite good, just that everyone was so fixated on spots that no-one seemed to be looking out.

Well stuff it, maybe we'll do something different in future, but the walk was awesome,  even if I was now a bit cold due to inactivity!  Time to head down.  The low cloud had been busy while we were otherwise occupied and seemed to have been working their way up the Glen.

Just after we packed the aerial away here's a couple of shots from the summit:

Well, I'm sorry but the following sequence was shot on the way down,  I'm not going to bother commenting, this was just a self indulgent sequence of loveliness,  I dare anyone to ask at the end of this why I go out hillwalking:

And this bit deserves a caption:  THE ONLY BIT OF SNOW WE FOUND!!

 

Sorry

Some of those pictures are out of sequence, but imho they're all so pretty.  bye bye, I don't know if we're going to carry on doing HF SOTA and WAB, maybe a change of strategy is needed.  Let us know if you want us to continue doing what we've been doing.