Baden-Powell Council BSA
at the
2022 Blair Atholl Patrol Jamborette

Day 1 - July 12th - West End of the Great Glen - Glencoe, Nevis Range, Fort William

We started our day's touring the day before - flying from JFK Airport in New York to Amsterdam on Delta Airlines, and then connecting via KLM to Edinburgh. The flight arrived in Edinburgh around 7:30AM, and soon afterward we'd picked up our minibuses and were on the road. 

Our route to Fort William and the Jacobite led us through Glencoe, the "Weeping Glen". The A82 winds through the glen, and the traffic was heavy enough and the road narrow enough that it made driving... interesting. I was much too busy with the wheel to take pictures, so I had Mike Homrighaus in the passenger seat grab a few as we went along.
Glencoe Glencoe is the site of famous massacre of 1692. After the 1689 Jacobite Rising was put down, King William of Orange demanded that all of the Highland clans take an oath of allegiance to him, giving a deadline of 1 January 1692 for them to do so. The MacDonald clan chief delayed until the last minute to take the oath, and when he showed up in Fort William he discovered that he could not do so there. By the time he took the oath at Inverary, the deadline had passed. The Earl of Stair sent a force of lowland Scots (mostly members of the Campbell clan) to be housed by the MacDonalds in Glencoe. At a prearranged signal, the soldiers attacked their hosts, killing many and forcing many to flee into the winter harshness of the Glen.
At most of our stops on our touring we had a Scout "Instant Expert" who had prepared a brief talk to introduce the group to the venue. Max was our Instant Expert for Glencoe.	This turf-roofed house is a reproduction of the sort of house the MacDonalds would have lived in at the time of the 1692 massacre. It stands a short walk from the Glencoe Vistor Centre.
Nevis Range Gondolas The Nevis Range cable cars take visitors up Aonach Mor, the second-highest mountain in the Nevis Range. In the winter the visitors are there for the skiing, but most visitors in the summer are either looking for the view or riding mountain bikes down steep and rocky trails back down to the base of the mountain. Our Scouts decided to take a short walk from the gondola terminal to the top of the lesser peak in the center of this picture.
View of the gondolas as we started up the mountain.
The view from the top of the mountain is spectacular in all directions. This direction, you look out over Fort William and Loch Linnhe.	We'd hoped to ride the gondolas on several previous trips, but each time the winds were too high to run the system. We were lucky that they were low enough on the day we visited - although as you can see from the windsock, "low" is a relative thing...
When we'd returned back to the base of the mountain, we went into Fort William. It was a bit early, so the Scouts had some time to hit an ATM and explore some of the shops along the High Street.	We had dinner at "Grog and Gruel" in Fort William. The food was very good, not a bit of gruel to be seen - and of course, grog was not in the cards for our group.
After dinner in Fort William, it was a short drive to Spean Bridge for our night's stay in the Community Centre.