Their story, in their words…
As part of our goal, we walked across the Cairngorms, starting at Aviemore and ending up at Pitlochry. This included us wild camping for 5 nights in remote areas and maintaining our eager determination to secure our accomplishment.
We faced many challenges over the 6 days hiking such as; on the first day we set of to cover 12 miles across around 8500 feet of elevation. Towards the start we were managing fine however after climbing to the first peak – we were able to see our destination for the day which was much further than we had expected. As a result, we sped up our pace and continued to hike over the rocky terrain. Moreover, someone had injured their ancle and the light started to fade so we decided to set up camp just at the top of our final decent – where it was very windy and difficult to set up camp.
After this we were a lot more alert across the rest of the hike and better managed our time so that this wouldn’t happen again. There were also a few instances where some of us fell into
rivers which significantly affected the groups spirits, yet we continued. Whilst we manged to keep high spirits throughout the majority of our hike, towards the last two days where we had our second highest climb across a pathless mountain. The visibility was very low due to the clouds causing many of us to become discouraged, resulting in us looking for an escape route from the top whereby we gradually descended to safety.
Over all we are all grateful for this opportunity and proud of ourselves for continuing through with it despite the challenges we had to overcome. From this, we all value the determination and resilience we got out of it which will allow us to overcome even greater problems elsewhere. Furthermore, we all learnt how to effectively work as a team and how to resolve issues between us without the team breaking down.
