brawleysblogtest: September 2008

Patrick, Michael and myself joined Gordon and Craig on their recent 'Lads and Dads' hillwalk up Beinn an Lochain. We parked at the Rest and be Thankful car park at 10 o'clock and climbed straight up, through long wet grass. The adults were wet from the knees down - but the kids got it from the neck!

Michael sontered up this bit, but I was knackered as well as a bit scarred (nearly crying scarred). Patrick wasn't keen on the exposure element either and after a bit of persuasion he crawled on his hands and knees up with Michael like a whipit! He went for "the quicker I get up the quicker I can relax" approach. I went for "the crawl up like a baby" approach

When we got to the top there wasn't any view at all as the cloud had came in. We sat for a while and had a bite to eat and in the space of about 5 seconds the cloud cleared to give us some great views.

This picture above is a Broken Spectre. We saw it from the top of the hill looking down into the cloud. You need to look carefully, but, it is an almost 360 degree rainbow, with the shadow of the observer in the centre.

Definition from the web (wikipedia) - A Brocken spectre, also called Brocken bow or mountain spectre is the apparently enormously magnified shadow of an observer, cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun. The phenomenon can appear on any misty mountainside or cloud bank, or even from an aeroplane, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, a peak in the Harz Mountains in Germany, have created a local legend from which the phenomenon draws its name. The Brocken spectre was observed and described by Johann Silberschlag in 1780, and has since been recorded often in literature about the region.

The "spectre" appears when the sun shines from behind a climber who is looking down from a ridge or peak into mist. The light projects the climber's shadow forward through the mist, often in an odd triangular shape due to perspective. The apparent magnification of size of the shadow is an optical illusion that occurs when the observer judges his shadow on relatively nearby clouds to be at the same distance as faraway land objects seen through gaps in the clouds, or when there are no reference points at all by which to judge its size. The shadow also falls on water droplets of varying distances from the eye, confusing depth perception. The ghost can appear to move (sometimes quite suddenly) because of the movement of the cloud layer.

The head of the figure is often surrounded by the glowing halo-like rings of a glory, rings of coloured light that appear directly opposite the sun when sunlight is reflected by a cloud of uniformly-sized water droplets.

You learn something new everyday!

Heading down was just as hairy in places. We had to walk along a narrow ridge for a while. The cloud was quite close in so it made it a bit easier for me as I couldn't see too far into the presipis!!

I must have taken us about 2-3 hours to come down. My legs were completely gone by the time we got to the bottom, but it was worth it.

Patrick was great - he was a bit wary on the way up because of the exposure - but apart from that he was amazing. He didn't seem too tired and he went to football training the next night - my legs were sore getting into the car to go pick him up!!