Hill Mission

Image credit: Kirstie Smith

Lucy writes: My friend Kirstie and I are raising money for Arran and Mulanje Mountain Rescue Teams. Mulanje is the highest mountain in Malawi, and the team there do amazing work with very little equipment or training. To encourage people to support the cause, we've set ourselves a crazy challenge, to climb all the 700m peaks on Arran in a day. At over 35km and 3,000m of ascent its going to be a toughy!

Today the training began in earnest.  We set off with Wally to help for a dry run of A'Chir, which will be the crux of our challenge. From the moment we roped up, we wrestled with an arctic wind, and even though I was wearing all my layers, I had the coldest hands I've had so far this winter. We bailed, and Wally in the most gentlemanly way, offered to carry the climbing gear off the hill for us while Kirstie and I pushed on with a traverse of Cir Mhor, Goatfell and North Goatfell.  Off we set, and although the wind never let up, at least were were moving fast and keeping warm.  With only 18km done today and 1400m of ascent, we realise that we have got a very big challenge on our hands! You can donate to our fundraiser here: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/Arran700s

IML Winter Training

Lucy writes: I'm just back from a magical week in the French Alps on an International Mountain Leader award winter training course based in Le Grand Bornand with Plas Y Brenin. During the week we encountered varied snow conditions, from hard old snow to epic amounts of fresh that fell towards the end of the week. We covered all aspects of safe travel, including avalanche and snowpack awareness, terrain, weather and route choice. There was lots of learning anf fun adventures on Snowshoes around our base at Le Grand Bornand. After the course finished I spent a couple of days with some of the others from the course exploring on snowshoes and putting our new skills in to practice.

Welcome to the new site!

The Arran Hills are currently snow free.

We are excited to have started 2017 with a brand new site that better reflects what we do and the beautiful places that we work in. Over the next few weeks we will be adding content to the site. We hope that it will not only be a great showcase for our walks, but also for Arran and the outdoors in general.

In other news, I (Lucy) am off to the Alps on a training course next week, and not long after I get back, Wally and I will be moving our base temporarily up to Lochaber to begin offering our winter walks on the Scottish Mainland until the end of March.  We will be coming back to Arran from time to time so if you are interested in a walk/wildlife watching on Arran its still definitely worth getting in touch.