by EmilyD » Mon Jun 17, 2019 11:55 am
Pray to a deity of your choice for wind. That is, without a doubt, the midgiest place on earth.
In August 2017, my partner and I had plans for a two-day Mullardoch round and set up a tent by the dam the night before. It was windy when we set up the tent and had dinner, so all seemed copacetic. Sometime after we crawled in the tent, we heard what sounded like drizzle. "Huh," we said. "Rain wasn't forecasted."
Around 2am, I rolled out of the tent for a pish, and discovered that the air wasn't made of oxygen molecules anymore -- it was made of midges. It was crawling. I've camped in some pretty midgy places, but this took it above and beyond anything. It was out of a bad movie. I dove back into the tent and said to my partner, "That was one of the worst experiences of my life." Of course, when I threw myself into the tent, so did the midges. The inside of the tent wasn't much more habitable than outside. We gathered up critical items -- car keys, headtorches, and sprinted about 50 meters, to where the car was, and jumped into it. We drove down the glen a bit, then realized Irn Bru was needed. The Irn Bru was in the back of the car. My partner ran out to retrieve it, and when he came back, he looked haunted. He said he had to stick his hand into "a ball of midge" to open the boot. To make a long story short, we drove into Cannich and then at 5am, we turned back up the glen to rescue the tent, which involved making Tyvek suits out of everything we had, collapsing the tent into a heap as fast as possible, and shoving it into the car.
Then we drove to Lairg and did Ben Klibreck instead.
When we cleaned that tent in the bathrub later, the water turned black with midge. It still has midges embedded in the seams, which the friend I sold it to doesn't know about.
It could have been worse. We could have been in a very small backpacking tent, at the far end of the glen, between Beinn Fhionnlaigh and the start of the ones on the north side. I think we would have run through night to Alltbeith or the A87 and figured out how to get back to Glen Cannich later.
But aye, enjoy the Mullardoch round.