This was my first time activating two summits in one day, the walk in to both Carleatheran and Stronend is the same 50 minute track starting just outside the village of Kippen. The route map is shown below, I completed this activation with Douglas MM7DCD. If you’d like to view the route on Strava, you can do so by clicking here.
This was a long one, total walking time was just under 6 hours with over 15 miles/34,000 steps walked. I didn’t sleep great the night before and wasn’t feeling 100% but I really wanted to get out and activate these two summits. I opted to activate these on 2M FM and didn’t bring any HF kit. 📻
As we climbed the initial walk from the farm we quickly found ourselves in the low cloud so we expected to get no view at either of the summits. We headed to Carleatheran first as it’s a longer walk - this took us just over two hours of walking time to reach. Once at the Carleatheran summit I took out my Yaesu FT-60 and with the supplied rubber duck antenna called out. We each made 6 contacts in 10 minutes and decided to move on to the next summit. We had a couple of pork pies and took this photo first though! 🥧
In total we walked 5.6 miles from the car park to Carleatheran, the walk from Carleatheran to Stronend was a further 5.8 miles making 11.4 in total. I had bought a new pair of boots the day prior and although they done a great job of keeping my feet dry through the boggy terrain, wasn’t the best walk for breaking them in. I had a few blisters halfway through and was in a bit of pain making much of the walk uncomfortable. About four miles of the walk between the summits is on a windfarm path.
At one point we had to cross a little burn by standing on some slippy stones, Douglas was certain I was going to slip and requested that he recorded me!
The summit of Stronend is slightly higher at 511m vs 485m for Carleatheran but the walk up wasn’t too bad. At this point it was later, after 4PM local time so we opted to use Douglas’s Yaesu FT-7900 and 5 element yagi antenna to secure the contacts for the activation. I made 8 contacts and was satisfied, Douglas hung on and made 12 contacts in total. We packed up after this and started the 4.3 mile walk back down to the cars and got there a little over 8 hours after we left.
We were both happy to complete the activations but agreed it’s not a walk we’d be in a hurry to do again. I dare say if you had an e-Bike this would be a much quicker and easier activation.