Weather/Conditions: Sunny at first, and a little hot, but it cooled down after a while and became more overcast. Very little or no wind!
Distance/Ascent/Time: 10km / 1000m / 3h 50m
Accompanying: Solo

Ascent

This was certainly a very enjoyable hill walk, and particularly so for being my first trip up a mountain alone. The weather looked good, so dad and I travelled up to Arrochar. Dad dropped me off, and he went away to do photography. I began at 11.15am and held a fast and steady pace up the mountain. The weather was superb and everything was incredibly green and humid - the plants emitted all sorts of smells. Sometimes it was a little hot on the way up but all was good. From the beginning I had a very focused approach to the walking, and just kept going on and on - I'd climbed Nevis 10 days earlier so I surely must have had strength off the back of that. I reached the dam about thirty minutes later, which was quick! The quickest I'd ever done anyway. I still felt great and pushed on. Half an hour later I reached 2000 feet. I was very pleased with my progress, by far the fastest I had ever done 2000 feet.





I had burned myself out slightly though and I took about hour over the last section (900 feet). It was tiring, but I pushed on - I think you sometimes have to be relentless to get results when it comes to hillwalking.

I reached the summit roughly at 1pm, and dad has a picture of me at the summit taken from Arrochar as well. He was at Arrochar taking pictures and it was incredible coincidence that I had managed to get up and know where I was sitting at the summit when he took this pictures. We had talked about doing it before but it was lucky I'd managed to get up in time.

North and South Peak

After that I went down to the south peak and it defeated me...I couldn't work out how to get onto it. There's an odd part that you have to almost jump up onto a ledge with a large gap below. I couldn't feel safe making such a jump aver such a gap. Although the conditions were about as close to perfect as they could be for some scrambling on the Cobbler, the mountain will always be there, so I left it to another time. I walked to the north peak which was easier to get up, and I got a picture of me up there. I followed a rough path around the back. (the path, or lack of a single one is horrendous on that hill, there's about twenty small paths winding up it) It sort of faded away and I completely lost it so I clambered up some boulders and onto the cairned summit. I didn't stay long either, although the views were surely excellent.

Descent

What to do now? I left by the same way I had got up and began descending down the path. It was pretty featureless, this descent, so not a lot really happened, but once again I had the usual sore feet. The sky had clouded over a bit also so it was getting a little overcast by the time I was getting to the lower slopes.

By the time I was 650 feet up, (or 666 said the GPS) I met dad coming the other way. He'd began walking up to maybe get to the dam, although I got down before he'd had a chance to reach 1100 feet. We walked down the last part together which was superb, although my feet were killing me. We got back after 2pm, and getting in the car was a relief. It seems that doing a lot of hillwalking raises my tolerance to sore feet but when your trying to get to that point by putting your feet through hell, it isn't terribly nice. (Edit 17th June 08 - I have to say I pretty much solved the problem of feet killing me but I'm not exactly sure how :-) )

Afterwards we drove on back to Glasgow. Excellent day and my fourth time up the Cobbler.