Day 3 - Sunday 10 May

Both of us ended up sleeping fairly well Saturday night, and Sunday morning we were packed up and ready to go fairly early. Eddie left the bothy a little later that us, but caught up to us a little way down the trail. We all ended up at the Alltbeithe Youth Hostel at nearly the same time, and also ran into some additional Challengers there, including Gordon Greene, who we had ridden on the train with, and Des Horan. The hostel is a fairly nice place, which is off of any regular roads, at just about the head of Glen Affric. From there we continued down the track alongside the River Affric, into the glen. The going was much less steep than the day before, but there were still some ups and downs as the track avoided certain natural obstacles as it generally followed along the river. Lisa seemed to do fairly well with this walking, but still had to stop fairly frequently to "open up" her back by bending forward, as she was continuing to have some leg pains.

By now the weather had turned really quite nice, with no more rain and quite a lot of sunshine. Lisa actually ended up getting just a little sunburned (not bad), even though both of us wore our wide-brimmed sun hats nearly the entire day. We were heading toward Cougie, still just about a day behind our planned route. We began to see the forested areas of Glen Affric, which were quite nice, as we had been told they would be. The track on the south side of the loch was very good, and as we got nearer to the car park at the east end of Loch Affric, it became fairly heavily used by other day walkers and some cyclists. We saw Eddie, Gordon and Des a few more times during the day, but eventually they went on a little ahead.

At one point someone spotted a stag deer up on nearby ridge, looking down on us, and we also saw the doe (I'll post some photos later). Somewhere along the way we also heard the call of a cuckoo bird for the first time - it sounds pretty cool - pretty much just like the clock!

As we were beginning to near the end of the day we arrived at the public footpath to Cougie. This was definitely progress, but, unfortunately, it was also the beginning of some very difficult walking. The footpath began climbing fairly steeply alongside the Allt Garbh (an allt is a small river or creek) , and it was incredibly boggy! With every step water and/or mud oozed out under our shoes, and it was difficult to know where to place the next step. The going was quite slow. Lisa was getting extremely worn out by this.

Eventually, before it got too late, we got to the top of the rise along the allt, where the path began to turn, and were able to find a more or less suitable campsite. I say "more or less" suitable, because although it was actually a generally dry area beneath a nice large pine tree, there just wasn't any really level ground, and certainly none the size of our tent floor. So, we had to pitch the tent with a certain amount of sloping of the floor. Normally that amount of slope probably wouldn't be a really big deal, but, our tent has a silnylon (siliconized nylon) floor, which is very slick, and Lisa's new Thermarest sleeping pad also has a very slick surface, so anyone on that pad almost automatically will end up sliding down into the tent wall. We anchored our extra trekking poles to serve as something of a barrier to that, but it was still a problem. Lisa and I switched sleeping pads, as mine is not nearly as slick on the tent floor, but mine is also a great deal shorter, and still does tend to slide some. So, we went to bed and hoped for the best! At least the weather was still good. Our total distance traveled at that point was 19.3 miles.