City Glow

Steve


Spent too long in the car yesterday. I therefore couldn't wait to get out on the hills again. I was feeling pretty tired by the time I arrived at Steve's house (the meeting point) but knew that this was just what I needed.

It turned out to be just the two of us. Super fit Dave was in Birmingham. Deciding to do Cochno Hills we set off. I was aware that Steve has done this run plenty of times so didn't think twice about it..I didn't even take my garmin!

As we climbed the early stages of the hill I realised that we weren't going to see the Glasgow Fireworks scheduled to take place. The cloud was low and we were ascending into a wet misty fog.

We decided to go for the 'lower' of the hills, giving us a slightly longer run (apparently). I had not done this route before, but given that we weren't going to see anything from the top it made little difference.

We huffed and puffed our way to the top. It was incredibly wet and slushy. My Achilles was really feeling the constant stretching in the later sections.

We didn't spend long on the top. Just long enough to hear the big nothingness that you get on foggy, dark nights. Steve led the way down. A particularly steep and craggy bit of hill. It wasn't till we had reached a huge bog that he casually admitted..."I don't actually recognise any of this!"

Now I wasn't about to panic, not at this stage. I mean how lost could we be!

We changed direction and came across the lake..this should have been good. Steve decided we should follow the lake edge to the causeway. This would have been fine but I was sure it was in the other direction.




By now my thoughts were turning to possible actions:

Plan A

Call Mountain Rescue or just call Marco Direct. Did I have his number...sure Debs would give it to me! Hmmmm then the explanations as to why I was on the top of a 'hill' (do they even rescue you from hills or only proper 'mountains?') with no survival gear, no garmin (why oh why when I hardly ever even do a road run without it!!)
At least I had taken my phone.

Plan B

I call Dave in Birmingham, he knows these hills like the back of his hand, but would he be able to identify our position from a picture of this particular rock I was stood on?

Plan C

Think hard and follow our noses.... for a bit longer anyway.

Other more amusing thoughts were flickering through my mind which I can't say I entertained for long. They were more along the lines of . Lost. American Werewolf in London. Blair Witch Project. Two fools on a hill top in the fog at night. (OK I made that one up!)





So, after a while of traversing the Loch I suggested we switch our head lamps off, just to see if we could see anything through the mist. As our eyes became used to the darkness we could just make out the silhouette of the hill we had been at the top of. With little else in the way of ideas I suggested we climb back up and see if we could work our bearings out from there.

Lights back on we climbed again, upon reaching the top we killed the beams once more to see if we could see anything other than fog. At first it was just pure whiteness, Steve was hankering to go off in the direction I was sure we had just come from. I was beginning to feel cold now as the sweat of the climb was cooling and the air was chilly. Gaining confidence in my gut feelings I became sure I could make out an orange glow percolating through the fog to one side, in the other direction. I was sure this was the light pollution from the city. We took that option and headed downwards again.

To my relief we hit a track which started to become more familiar. My visions of attempting to build a bivouac in the marshy Cochno hills were happily discarded.

We made it back to the car in no time.

It's amazing how quickly you can become disorientated in such circumstances, once doubts start to creep in and you loose confidence in your direction it doesn't matter if you're only 100 meters away from where you need to be. We were never far off the trail but if it hadn't been for the Glasgow glow we could have been up there for a lot longer.



From now I will always take an extra layer, charged Garmin and my phone. No matter how experienced my companions are!