Friday Night - Storm clouds gather?

Friday Photo Gallery | Competition Map

Competitors arriving at the LAMM at around 9p.m. tonight were greeted with the sight of clouds around the summit of Beinn Dearg, the hill that has given it’s name to the event this year and also one of six Munros in the area.

In fact the weather forecast for the event isn’t too bad: A clear day for Saturday with intermittent heavy showers and an even fairer day for Sunday, although the forecast for Monday is for gales, so hopefully those won’t be arriving any sooner than currently expected.

Over the course of the last week though, members of the event team have already been battling high winds as they put out the controls, and not without incident. Angela Mudge, a regular helper at the event and also a world class hill and mountain runner, managed to lose two of the kites (control markers) that she was carrying as they were blown away whilst she was placing one on a summit, which then necessitated a five hour return trip to the event centre to collect a replacement.

And Angela has not been the only contributor to the event to go beyond the call of duty.  Dougie Clark the proprietor of Heilan Loos (“and they’re bloody clean loos” – Martin Stone 2011) took six loos out to the overnight yesterday and said to the marshals who was with him, that it was “one of the most ambitious places he’s ever been asked to take a loo to”, and had he not missed a planned reccying trip to the overnight camp in May with a bad back then he would have declined the business. To say that the overnight camp is remote is an understatement, (but all will be revealed tomorrow) and if it had been anywhere more logistically difficult then helicopters might have had to be involved. And all of this effort was instigated at the behest of the single competitor who in 2007 COMPLAINED about the previous system of only communal slit trenches for loos!

As I write this it is already 1 a.m. on Saturday and in around 7 hours the first teams will be setting off. I’d  like to write more now, but am currently keeping the web master and timing guru Andrew Leaney from his bed, so if any of you are still up and avidly glued to your PCs I’m afraid you will have to wait until tomorrow morning for another instalment where I'll also explain what's happening in the other photos.

Goodnight.

Jon Brooke