Can anyone imagine a more glorious setting than the Skye Trail to mark the passage from late middle age to early old age?

I ask this having read Westgate’s report about wild camping the Skye Trail in May at the age of 69. At 59 years and 363 days, I had plenty of inspiration and precedent when setting out on the longest segment, the 36km/2400m ascent of the Trotternish Ridge which, because we opted against lugging our camping gear from California, we had to complete in one day.

While we had known of Skye’s storied beauty, one evening two years ago, while walking Argyll’s Cowal Way, our B&B hosts shared photography books of the island and reminisced about running the Sconser Lodge, about halfway between Broadford and Portree. One of their books included images of the Trotternish Ridge and that night, intrigued by the physical challenges and allure of the island, I vowed to turn 60 on the Skye Trail.

Our original plan was to walk the route in the order laid out in the Skye Trail book by Helen and Paul Webster, but as we learned during our nine days on the island, plans are just that, subject in particular to the whims of the weather. On the bus from Glasgow to Portree on Friday, September 6, the Metcheck weather site forecast beautiful weather for the following day (Stage 1: Rubha Hunish to Flodigarry) but rain and high winds for September 8, our Trotternish Ridge day.

No brainer—we swapped days.


EARLY BIRDS
We awoke at 6am on September 7 at the Quiraing View B&B north of Staffin to partly cloudy skies and calm winds. While the weather was ideal, I felt bleary and a bit apprehensive, having slept fitfully and struggling with jetlag. We had departed California only 72 hours before this morning’s wakeup call, and the 8-hour time difference was hitting hard. But today was our best chance to walk the Ridge and so, after stuffing as many cups of coffee and calories in our bellies as possible, Donna, our host, drove us to the nearby trailhead in Flodigarry. We hit the trail just after 7am and started walking towards the Quiraing.



TRAINING FOR THE TROTTERNISH RIDGE
My husband Jim (in the below photo from the Quiraing) and I are fortunate to live in Santa Cruz, California, an area of redwood mountains crisscrossed by hiking trails. Our conditioning for the Trotternish Ridge included weekly hikes up the 1,153m Loma Prieta peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about five miles from our house. Loma Prieta is most famous as the epicenter for the 7.1 earthquake that shook the San Francisco Bay Area in October 1989, and which nearly destroyed our present town of Santa Cruz. (We also have an 800m mountain in Santa Cruz County, Ben Lomond, named after a certain mountain in Scotland.)


Due to the divergence in terrain of our homegrown mountains and those on Skye, we could readily condition our legs, hearts and lungs for the distance and ascent of the Trotternish Ridge, but not so much for bogs or skree. The closest bog to home is in Wisconsin, over 2,000 miles away. While bogs were not too troublesome on the Trotternish Ridge, we wrangled with them on subsequent sections of the Skye Trail, and on Rubha Hunish in particular. We took to calling them “bogstacle courses”, thinking at the time we coined the term, but had not. (Google it.) We also had a go with skree slopes in the Black Cuillin.

As part of turning 60, and vowing to be suitably fit for the Skye Trail, every Tuesday for three months before we left I completed a workout that matched the length and ascent of the Trotternish Ridge. I called it my “blue ball” workout after the moniker given by locals to a nearby park, named after the series of 6,000 pound, 10-foot metal spheres painted blue and permanently installed as a public art project.

Several hills in Blue Ball Park are quite steep (43m ascent in 400m distance.) I carried a GPS with me to track ascent and distance, marking off each iteration on a log sheet. Here is my log from July 30, up and down 37 times before taking my dog on a 10km redwood walk to make up the difference.


The two Skye Trail segments we were most concerned about were the Trotternish Ridge, due to the length and ascent, and the Sligachan to Elgol segment (Stage 5) because of that infamous cliff-edge section on approaching Elgol. Happily, we completed both of these segments and missed only one (Stage 4), but for good reasons: a hurricane and a sinus infection!


WELL ON OUR WAY
After passing through the Quiraing and crossing the Uig-to-Staffin Road, we were feeling confident, our GPS indicating a 5pm arrival at the parking lot in The Storr, where a Gus’s Taxi was scheduled to drive us to the Flodigarry Hotel for a celebratory beer or three. We carried the excellent Harvey waterproof Skye Trail map as well as a Garmin GPS and the ViewRanger app, both loaded with all segments of the Trail.


We had learned the hard way that it’s possible to get lost on a treeless mountain on a sunny day: In 2016, sadly underprepared, we took a wrong turn on massive Crough Patrick in Ireland and added a few hours to an already long day. No way we were going to unnecessarily lengthen this day’s 36km by taking a wrong turn!

We were happy to have had an early start (and extra caffeine supplements, just in case), primed for the seemingly endless mountainous undulations ahead of us.


ENIGMATIC LANDSCAPE
What makes this landscape so compellingly mysterious are the strange formations created by ancient lava flows and massive landslides that forged the Trotternish Ridge. While I am a bit of a science geek, I had never focused on geology until we first encountered geometric volcanic basalt formations on the Antrim Coast of Northern Ireland. We have since seen them on the high plains of Oregon, and then here on Skye, though not the distinct hexagons of the Giant’s Causeway. Jim and I now pay more attention the types of rocks and formations we encounter on hikes, and Skye offered up a bonanza.


After four and a half hours of walking, we stopped to snack on nuts, trail mix and Tunnocks Teacakes (which, truth be told, are the real reason we keep returning to Scotland.)


We were prepared for midges, having first encountered the little bastards in the bogs of Ireland. It turns out they find my blood particularly intoxicating. We did not necessarily expect midges on this adventure because, theoretically, they've deposited their eggs and are dead and gone by September. With partly cloudy skies and zero wind, our lunch stop on the summit of Beinn Edra proved ideal for those remaining midges—apparently a rare third generation—and they all pooled their efforts to chase me down. We kept this break short and continued on our way.


ACROPHOBIA
Walking alongside the ridge of this ancient landslide, especially on a sundrenched day, one is continually rewarded with unexpected vistas and heart-droppingly scary cliffs. We could suddenly see the peaks of the Red Hills and Black Cuillins to the south, and soon after, closely skirted gaps on the Ridge’s precipice, stunningly beautiful if a little scary.


I was especially proud of Jim for agreeing to walk this ridge, not to mention That Place on Stage 5, where a narrow cliff-side path has been made more treacherous by erosion. Jim has a very good reason to be circumspect of heights: His best friend died instantly in a mountain fall in Canada in 2012. I take this into account when he steers clear of the edge. I usually stop short of putting him in the position of being afraid for me—although I sometimes can’t help but approach a precipice for a peek.

On a trip County Clare Ireland in 2014, we hiked the Cliffs of Moher, which plummet straight down 70 stories to the crashing North Atlantic. That morning, I belly-crawled to the edge for a peek, my stomach in my mouth, Jim safely ensconced behind me. At this very moment, a young woman was doing a warrior pose with her toes literally (I mean literally literally) pitched over the edge. The fear of heights is the most rational thing in the world, but some people seek them out while others avoid them completely. I’m somewhere in the middle.


NEARLY DESERTED
Along the Skye Trail, from the Uig-to-Staffin road to The Storr, we encountered only a handful of walkers, a dozen at most, even on this blessedly sunny day. Many of the walkers were solitary, and on this particular day, all of those were young women wild camping the Skye Trail. I cannot fully express my awe at these young women, on their own, fearlessly tackling such a forbidding landscape.

The walkers we met that day were from Scotland, England, Germany and Belgium, the comradery instant and genuine. Jim and I are both (high functioning) introverts and on hikes, usually give wide berth to other walkers. But anyone in the middle of the Trotternish Ridge has worked hard to get there, so we found most quickly engaged in conversations, lots of smiles and well-wishes as we continued on our respective routes.


As for us (and with all due respect for Westgate’s wild camping), Jim and I were on the “princess tour”, being hauled to and from trailheads by buses and taxis and staying in comfy beds at night. This term, princess tour, originated on an enormous annual bicycle fundraiser held each June, the AIDS Lifecycle, which starts in San Francisco and ends seven days and nearly a thousand kilometers later in Los Angeles.

I cycled in the Lifecycle six times the 1990s, and always camped, along with the other 2,500 riders, in a mobile tent city. The local hotels in each day’s destination were fully booked a year in advance for those willing to cycle 150km a day but unwilling to sleep on the ground. Ergo, “princess tour”.


TIRED LEGS/SCRATCHY THROAT
After we descended Hartaval and on approach to the final ascent at The Storr, at once exhilarated and exhausted, I had a sudden realization—probably at about the instant Jim snapped the below photo of me starting the final ascent—that I was coming down with a cold, no doubt due to jetlag, a lack of sleep and physical exertion.


A number of fellow passengers on the bus from Glasgow to Portree obviously had colds, coughing and hacking and sneezing and such, but I had washed my hands in the tiny micro-sink in the wee micro-loo every chance I got. This had not saved me. In retrospect, I’m happy that the virus hit at the end of the 36km Trotternish Ridge rather than beforehand, but I also worried what this would mean for the six segments to come.

Finally, after nearly ten hours of walking, with a few breaks here and there and a plethora of photo ops, we came over the pass to behold the Old Man of Storr, a glorious sight for sore eyes (and legs!) My cold was kicking in, Jim’s knees were aching, and we were both nearly delirious with exhaustion, but we did it! The Trotternish Ridge in one fell swoop!


Jim kept moving the camera around on this selfie to make it look like the Old Man was sticking out of this old man’s head. We were utterly exhausted and more than a little happy.


As we approached then descended The Storr to the waiting ride, we were joined by the multitudes who had made the ascent from the carpark on the A855. A helicopter, seen in the below photograph hovering above the Old Man, was on a rescue mission for someone who had apparently sustained injury on the mountain, a reminder of how treacherous this landscape can be.



EPILOG
That night my cold kicked in big time, then Jim caught it as well. Regardless, we completed the Rubha Hunish to Flodigarry segment the following day, but I spent my actual 60th birthday (September 9) in bed at the Medina B&B in Portree, lollygagging and taking hot baths. (My deepest apologies to Aileen, the fantastic owner of the superb Medina, who caught our cold a few days later.) Bored and antsy, around 5pm we took the circuitous 3km Scorrybreac walk near Portree, and I managed to slip and fall, bruising my hip pretty badly. (One almost always wrecks their car close to home.)

The next day, we rallied to complete Stage 3 (Storr to Portree), but by the end of that day, I realized that my cold had become a sinus infection, a life-long health issue. That evening, a big windy, rainy storm moved in, the remnants of Hurricane Dorian, which had devastated the Bahamas the week we left California.

On September 11, the day were to walk Stage 4 from Portree to Sligachan, I ended up instead at the Portree Medical Centre, where a marvelous nurse practitioner, Gillian, prescribed a strong antibiotic, which I filled at the Boots Pharmacy and started taking before even exiting the building. Nurse Gillian, a Skye native, told me that if you had to bypass one section of the Skye Trail, Stage 4 was the one to miss. And so, with rivers in spate from Dorian and my sinuses in disarray, we rode with our gear to the Sligachan Hotel. That night, I woke up drenched in sweat three times, a reliable sign that antibiotics are starting to kick in.

We stayed at the Sligachan Hotel for two nights instead of one, and while I probably should have been resting and drinking plenty of fluids on our Sligachan layover day, the gorgeous Black Cuillin beckoned and we instead walked most of the Bruach na Frithe trail before setting out for Elgol the following day.

We felt lucky in so many ways, including the two extra days to recover from our colds. The brunt of my sinus infection hit while we were still in Portree, with ready access to medical care. We had acceptable-to-great weather for all the remaining segments. And we were fortunate to have had Jonathan and Aneta as hosts at the Bayview B&B in Elgol to serve hot soup after our encounter with the eroded cliff section en route to their home. (If you’re ever in Elgol, book two nights at the Bayview with dinner; Jonathan and Aneta are excellent hosts and super cooks. The best cullen skink we’ve ever had!)

I hope to get around to chronicling the other sections of our Skye Trail adventure, but if I do not, know this: That Place on Stage 5 is not that bad. Just pop a caffeine pill for clarity when you pass by the Camasunary and watch your feet!


ABSOLUTE ESCAPES
Kudos to Absolute Escapes for concocting this adventure for us, including the excellent accommodations. We nearly always fully plan out all aspects of our adventures, from transportation to lodging to daily trekking routes, but on Skye we wanted someone to know where we were each day. James Fathers and his team did a great job of planning our accommodations and island transportation, as well as assisting with last-minute changes due to weather and health conditions.