I had arrived in Edinburgh the previous day and had an uneventful drive up to Newtonmore. Uneventful, that is, apart from a catastrophic incident at the Drum Brae lights on the Queensferry Road, where I opened the 2 litre bottle of Irn Bru I had just bought at Asda only to have a good part of the contents spray all over my nice clean hire car, the Wee Purple Peugeot. This meant a stop at the north end of the Forth Bridge in to try and clean things up a bit. I was booked in to the small and super-friendly Newtonmore Hostel, which was otherwise filled with walkers on the 2012 TGO (coast-to-coast) Challenge. I was up early in the morning in order to tackle the Glen Feshie hills, Sgor Gaoith and Mullach Clach a Bhlair. It would be a long day, especially for Day 1 of the trip, and perhaps made longer by the amount of snow that was obviously on the summits. I drove up the road to Kincraig, then turned off past the Watersports Centre at Loch Insh, through Feshiebridge and so into Glen Feshie.

Loch Insh