Stefan Durkacz

With a new mountain bike to take out for a spin and a strong urge for hills and solitude, I decided to head somewhere I've only been once before but fell in love with straight away: Gaick. This long and spectacular natural route from Glen Garry to Kingussie is just a few miles east of Drumochter, and it's only thanks to a few twists of historical fate that the A9, the railway and a line of massive pylons is routed through there rather than here. I huffed and puffed up the track from Dalnacardoch Lodge, grinding the gears on my unfamiliar bike, nearly crashing on a downhill when I changed down to the small chainring thinking I was changing up to the big one. By the end of the day, on the way back, I'd just about got the hang of it. I was also already thinking about the modifications I could make - a 1 x chainring set-up for a start, which would relieve my tiny mind of a lot of the worries about gear changing, redundancies and crossed drivetrains. Anyway, it's many years ...

The long north ridge of Carn Mor Dearg Out there, it's been a stunning summer so far, apparently, but spare time has been scarce these past few months. Time to crawl out from under a blanket of Edinburgh haar. The plan was a trip to some of the remoter, obscurer bothies and mountains of Assynt, and so it remained until Aviemore. Having lunch in a cafe, my eye caught the weather forecast on the screen high on the wall. The north and west of the country were invisible under an angry yellow and purple rash of thunderstorms. Weather warnings were in place. Time to reassess... Lower Glen Feshie was humid and dusty when I parked up near the Achlean road-end. The storms would be hitting the Cairngorms too but hopefully a little later tomorrow than out west. The glen was quiet and still, even the birdsong was muted under the blanket of heat. Dark green fritillaries weaved and fluttered over the heather. Humans were in short supply today; the deep green calm of the Caledonian pine woods wel...