We then took the only road up the east side of the island, a road that was sometimes single track, and finally took off for the hike Paul wanted to do, past a little town called Staffin, up another single track road for a long ways with lots of traffic of Saturday hikers, so many cars in the parking lot, a famous place called Quiraing or the Quirange, a big open ridge hike. I ate my goat cheese on oat crackers, the croissant with cheese and jam I saved from breakfast…I just felt like having a big picnic. Paul set out with his students to hike, and the rest of us hiked for an hour, I stopped several times to make small drawings.
At 3:00 we met back at two of the cars to set off for the place to climb. Carefully following the guidebook, we parked just beyond a solitary white farm house, that is where Amy drove the car off the road, it was probably 4:00 by then, but luckily some French guys happened by and helped us push the car out of the ditch as well as Angus, the farmer at the farmhouse.
We set off across the mead to find the sea, Dan had his insect net hat on, with Fionna, there was no trail, and often we sank down into the wet mead. There was no one else there, we stopped an talked to Angus, who was complaining about the midges and gave us some helpful directions about how to get across the mead. Before we left we sprayed on lots of deet and other repellents. The midges were not such a problem as long as you keep moving.
We found a way down to the water, gave Elisabeth keys to one
of the cars, we made it down the
grass and boulder to the ocean, which seemed to be at fairly low tide. There
were lots of limpets and other sea creatures clinging to the rocks. We walked to the base of the spectacular wall
of rock, it had sea tunnel that went all
the way through to the other side of the cliff, and a narrow bridge of rock
across empty space, the beginning of Spantastic. That was our destination. We began to notice the water was rising at a
threateningly fast pace. I thought the
tide rose slowly, but not the case here.
Already there was water covering our approach beach. I looked up and
down the wall, the base of the Spantantastic was already 5 feet under water, so
I decided to climb out of our little grotto, and then move right toward the
route, set up a belay and get Amy out of the cave. As fast as I could, I put on my harness, pulled the rope out, geared up,
things were still a little tangled up from yesterday. My feet were already in the water. The idea was to climb up about 20 feet and
make a belay and then bring Amy up above the water. So I started climbing up the black rock with
wave lapping at my feet and then crashing in the sea tunnel. I huge piece of black rock pulled off, I
thought, I should just swim out of here, but I kept climbing, finally making a
belay above the high tide line with 3 blue aliens in a tiny horizontal crack. There was a young
cormorant above us and another bird nest.
We did the climb, amazing views of the ocean, the place
where we were standing was now 6 feet deep in water. At the top of the climb was a steep, very
steep hill of grass, leading to a small ridge, where there were two spikes
driven into the ground for people to abseil into the climb. This was the third
pitch: 5 feet of rock, then 40 feet of steep and slippery grass. I put as much
gear as possible in the 5 feet of rock, then pulled myself up the grass slope
to the spikes. It was starting to rain,
so we got off that steep grass as quickly as possible and hiked back fast to
the top of the hill over the bog, to the road, down the road, where everyone
was sitting in the car completely steamed up, to stay away from the
midges. They were not happy. I did not blame them a bit, but after we
shared some fish and chips in town in the dark, I think they forgave us. Elisabeth and Anna said they were praying for us. I knew that the worst that would happen would
be we would have swim back, maybe leave some gear, or probably tie the gear to
the rope and pull the rope behind us until we made it to dry land.
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