Walking the West Highland Way

In April of 2024, my wife and I walked the West Highland Way in Scotland. We walked 90 miles in 8 days including one rest day. I took almost 800 photos. A few months after the trip I wrote a blog post saying how much I hated the photos and I probably wouldn’t write more about it. Here I am, two years later, writing more about it.

I didn’t know this at the time but our six weeks in Europe in 2024 were the opening bookend of one of the hardest years of my life. In my original blog post I failed to mention why I hated the photos, perhaps because I couldn’t articulate it at that point. It’s because the Hard Year had ransacked and corrupted and overwritten the memories of this trip until only the things that fed its narrative remained. The shitty story was all there was. Here’s what I remember.

Milngavie to Drymen

The West Highland Way starts in Milngavie, a suburb of Glasgow. We had arrived the prior evening and slept terribly in the local box hotel. Our luggage had been arranged for the flight and not for hiking and in our haste to catch the bus into town we had to leave some small items behind. The start point is on the high street; when we arrived, other hikers were there making last minute adjustments and laughing about the weather. We stopped into a Costa and had a flat white. It wasn’t very good.

After the coffee we took the photo and hit the trail. It was, of course, raining.

In the lead up to this trip Casey and I had been living out of our RV or car for over a year. There’s an exhaustion that comes with full time travel that you don’t often hear about. The joy and exhilaration of discovering new places and meeting new people combines with the stress and worry of logistics, safety, and money. Both drain the nervous system in different ways, poking holes in one’s mental bucket. Eventually it just can’t hold water anymore. In Milngavie, right at the start, we had been empty for a while. But we had trained, and we had shown up, and we were going to finish this walk.

Drymen to Rowardennan

After listening to our hotel room windows getting battered by a storm all night we made the choice to skip this particular 14.25 miles in favor of hiring a taxi. We heard later that on the same day a couple was injured up on Conic Hill due to the storm.

It didn’t seem that bad from the taxi. It never does.

Rowardennan to Inverarnan

On our third day the storm still hadn’t entirely cleared off. It never would entirely abate, stalking us all the way up the coast for the rest of the week. This day’s walk was 18 miles along the eastern shore of Loch Lomond. My GPS watch reported that we endured an elevation change of 6100 feet, up and down and up and down, without ever getting higher than 30 feet off sea level. It was mud and crags, water and moss, mile after mile on repeat. Casey had overpacked her bag, her tiny frame lugging around almost 40 lbs in an ill-fitting backpack. I had a nasty patellar tendonitis that put me in a foul mood. There were the small fights, silence, some tears, that fucking backpack. Mile after mile on repeat.

I now know that it wasn’t about the backpack.

Inverarnan to Tyndrum

On the fourth day, sunlight. Spots of sunlight between the clouds. In the night we had repacked, distributed some items, tried to spread out a bit. When you start any long trek there’s a warmup period where your body has to be coerced out of desk-life and into walk-life. Walk-life is uncomfortable but we are built to move and the body eventually clues in and wakes up. The discomfort is required for this wake up process. It’s a discomfort that you get used to. It also often masks pain that you should not get used to. But it’s hard to tell the difference in the moment.

Off in the distance, we watched darker clouds form and dissipate and form again.

Tyndrum to Bridge of Orchy

The fifth day was a short walk, only two hours. The trail was light even if the spirit was not.

One side effect of full time travel with another person is that you are almost always within earshot. There is no barrier to quick comments or full conversations. You talk a lot and at some point you run out of things to say. Inevitably, physical presence becomes a substitute for emotional connection and actual emotional bonds from actual communication start to erode.

Bridge of Orchy to Kingshouse

The sixth day we walked through Rannoch Moor, a boggy expanse on the way up to Glencoe.

Casey and I walk at different paces. I’m taller and walk faster and was often leading by six or ten feet. On occasion during this trek we’d both pass or get passed by other hikers or couples. One of these couples passed us, walking side by side and happily chatting away. Some time later I realized Casey was no longer behind me. I turned back and she was in tears, upset that we weren’t also side by side. It wasn’t a trek we were doing together but a trek that we were doing separately at roughly the same time. She was, of course, correct. And another hole appeared in the bucket.

Kingshouse

We spent two nights at the Kingshouse Hotel in Glencoe. A rest day in a beautiful place. We ate and drank and read and recovered and tried to claw back some small amount of energy where we could. I spent time walking around the grounds alone and Casey read her book alone. We watched BBC together after dinner.

The day was unfocused and distracted. It didn’t feel restful, it just felt like we were waiting to start walking again.

Outside, the rain continued to fall.

Kingshouse to Kinlochleven

The seventh day of our trip was through Glencoe, up the Devil’s Staircase, and down into Kinlochleven. The walking gave me an opportunity to invent all kinds of stories about Casey and how she had wronged me. I knew it was all bullshit, it just felt good to be right.

Kinlochleven to Fort William

The eighth day, our final day of walking, was punishing. The storm that had harried us all week came back with rain and hail only the Scottish highlands could produce. In the chaos I neglected to put on my rain pants and within 20 minutes I was completely soaked from the waist down. Even if I could find a dry spot to change, my boots would still be soaked. We stopped to have a snack and a bathroom break and I accidentally led us into a bog. The sucking mud came right up to my shins. The rain never let up. It was exhausting, we were breaking, and eventually Casey called a halt. She had had enough. I heard her yell over the wind: “I’m done. I’m cashing in my fun ticket.” We were many miles from any kind of road or help. We had no choice though, and we walked on.

Many miles and many hours later we crested a hill and came face to face with Ben Nevis. In the distance, we could see the outskirts of Fort William and the finish line. We walked into the Fort William city center and across the finish point. That evening, we walked down the street to get a pizza. It’s all a bit of a blur.

This story and these photos are now largely how I remember remembering it. A version of events driven by exhaustion, nervous collapse, and depression. Moments that became casualties of the Hard Year.

Now? There’s more. The Beech Tree Cafe outside Milngavie where we had to take off our boots to go inside and joked about being smelly tourists. The cab driver between Drymen and Rowardennan laughing about how Americans pronounce it “dry men”. The long third day broken up by a couple of beers and Border Collie that waited in the drying room intently watching the door for his owner to come out. Sunday roast at a 700 year old inn in Inverarnan, buying Toblerone from the Green Welly Stop in Tyndrum, or the Portuguese waiter at Bridge of Orchy who goaded me into getting the lamb chops. Kingshouse and its doorman chiding us for “bringin in the wet”. Hiking along Glencoe with the Buachaille rising into the fog, Casey making faces at the devil and his staircase. The pizza - perhaps the greatest pizza ever created by man - that we ate the night we finished. We did a hard thing together and I would do it over and over and over again with my wife.

It’s two years later and the Hard Year is now over. We moved into a house, I got help and I got medicine, and the storm passed. The bucket still has holes, of course it does, but there are far fewer and now it can hold some water. The memories are accurate - as accurate as any are - but now they’re not all of the memories. There’s definitely more. There’s always more.