Rowardennan to Inverarnan
14.5 miles
1430 feet of elevation
Day 3 started with a line for toast and coffee, a trip to the shed outside to put our bags for the transfer service and the most unreal blue sky over our heads.
Really. I haven’t seen a sky that clear in the UK in a minute.
It was so bright blue that we heard a man exclaim over breakfast that he wasn’t even going to carry his rain gear. (Bold move, sir.)
Of course we carried our rain gear, but we enjoyed not needing it all morning. We also enjoyed walking through sun-drizzled forests covered with carpets of moss and old rock walls sprouting ferns.
It was just a beautiful morning. I kept telling myself to remember the sunshine when the rain started later, as my weather app promised me it would.
It’s a trick for me to not rush the beauty of the sunny part of the walk when I know it’s going to rain later.
How many miles can I get behind us before the rain comes, but still enjoy this part?
Almost all of today’s walk was along Loch Lomond, and though the elevation count was not as high as yesterday’s, nor as high as tomorrow’s, this stretch between Rowardennan and Inverarnan is often declared to be the hardest part of the whole West Highland Way.
And now we know why.
When you look at the map, it seems like you’ll just be meandering alongside of the loch for the better part of this stage, but actually the trail is like hiking the letter W all day long.
And that’s not all. The letter W’s are covered in rocks.
Chunks of it feel a bit like what I imagine bouldering to be like. You often have to put your poles in one hand so you have one hand free to grab onto a rock.
The thing about this kind of walking is that..
it
is
slow
going.
You can’t get in a hurry or you’re going to fall.
You have to give all your attention to your steps, so much so that you might hit your head on an overhanging branch, not that we know anything about that. I’m just saying it could happen.
Even with heads down trying to negotiate the rocks, we paused often to peek at the loch or to appreciate that we were walking in dry weather.
Y’all! Can you imagine walking on these rocks when they are really wet?
(We would not have to imagine. Soon we would learn.)
We reached our lunch stop shortly after noon. The Inversnaid Hotel has a dry picnic room for hikers where you can eat your own food or you can order something inside at the bar. You can use their bathrooms and they have a water fill station. A big thank you to them for setting all that up!
I brought a stuff sack full of protein bars and nut butters with me on this trip because they help me keep going better than the food you can buy along the way, so I ate my own food while the gals ordered up soup to add to the snacks they were carrying.
In the short time we sat inside, the blue sky disappeared and rain clouds rolled in. By the time we started to gather up our stuff, the folks walking in were wet.
So we reconfigured ourselves into rain gear (and hoped that the man from breakfast had reconsidered) before heading back out on the trail.
7 miles left.
It was time for more climbing up and down letter W’s and now navigating them in the rain.
Friends, the afternoon of Day 3 properly wore us out. We ate extra snacks under tree cover and counted down the miles to Inverarnan. We looked forward to our dry rooms.
The rain shifted back and forth between being a drizzle and steady drip. It never seemed to downpour quite as hard as on our first day, for which we were very grateful. Even as hard as it was, we all said it would have been much harder in the weather from Day 1.
It finally stopped raining and the sun came out a little over an hour before we reached the end, so we stripped off our wet things (even the best gear has a saturation point) and hung them on our packs to dry. Then of course it started it clouded over and started raining again.
On again, off again.
At the end of the trail we left the loch to climb a hill that heads over to a river that runs into the loch, where Inverarnan is. The views back towards Loch Lomond were just lovely, even in the rain. We bid the loch goodbye and pushed on ahead to our finish.
Finally Inverarnan came into view. There isn’t much there. A campground, a b&b and an inn that’s been around for 300 years.
About a quarter mile before we reached the inn, and after we were down off all of the treacherous rocks, as we were walking on the road, I managed to trip and fall spectacularly. A big face-first, star-shaped splat all the way on the ground. Muddy knees and belly.
Classic.
It seems like my worst falls are always at the end of a walk.
I hopped back up and carried my injured pride on down the road.
Dripping wet, we walked through the front door of the inn just after 5pm, our longest day yet.
I think a few changes have been made to the inn since it opened 300 years ago, but it’s hard to tell. I’ll refrain from writing something that sounds like a bad TripAdvisor review but suffice it to say that after a long, slow slog of a day, the rooms were a disappointment.
My friend Kandace and I have stayed in some dumps together and she often says that sometimes a place is so bad that you’d rather be in your tent.
She’d definitely be saying that tonight.
But the food was hot and the beer was cold. (As always, being really hungry helps.)
And the sun was shining on me this morning.
Remember the blue sky.
Remember the little songbirds flitting through the forest.
Remember the moss, the trees, the ferns, the waterfalls.
It was a beautiful day. And I’m very proud of our little feet for how they carried us over the letter W about 1008 times. It’s time to put them to bed so they can do it again tomorrow.
