Blethering Blonde

It's been a while since I've been wild camping so there was much faffing about with gear and I hoped that I'd chucked everything into the crate before we headed north. It was the first outing for the Haglofs Matrix 60 . I'd bought it for winter backpacking but needed to test run it. I'd pondered long and hard before buying this pack. At 1650g its not the lightest one around nor the heaviest. The features that sold it to me were the twin compartment for separating the gear, the quality of the build and the way it carried and that was before I took it out to play. Yes there are a couple of features that I would have preferred, like hip fin pockets and slightly deeper wand pockets but these ended up not being an issue in the end.  Onto how it performed. Packing it was actually a pleasure as you could easily stash in the lower compartment practically all the camp stuff. The only thing I couldn't squish in was the Jetboil. It has a rather nifty internal compression

As far as whacky ideas go this is a fairly tame one but Kate and I liked the idea of being on a 1010m hill at 10:10am on 10/10/10. This had come about after we realised that we'd missed out with Stob Ban 999m as we'd done it on the 5th of September 09 instead of waiting to the 9th So the search was on for a 1010m hill. There are 4 in Scotland and the list was wittled down on the merits of location and ability to wildcamp. Kate had to be back in Cardiff on the Monday so Sgurr Eildhe Mor was the hill that ticked all the boxes. So here we were over a year later and a few others were interested in this quirky outing, queue Zoe, Maria, Ben and David. By this time Kate and I were both on the injury list so we were taking the leisurely approach while the others were on a bagging mission. After a spot of lunch in The Ice Factor we parked up at Mamore Lodge with blue sky above. We were pleasantly surprised to spot a rather big bird circling above. Not being a twitcher or able to get