Isle of Skye, Scotland

An Island near Harlosh on the Isle of Skye.

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The bedroom windows of the cottage we rented for a week on the Isle of Skye looked out on the Harlosh Peninsula where ruins, some dating to the Iron age (1200 – 800 BC), are being subsumed by the boggy vegetation that dominates the island. The peninsula is sandwiched between two saltwater lochs—essentially bays—leading to the North Atlantic. Ellen and I walked the peninsula to its tip, trying to keep our feet dry while not disturbing peacefully grazing sheep and stopping to explore old stone foundations. 

 

Skye is the largest of the Inner Hebrides, and it is connected to Scotland’s northwest coast by a short bridge, making access easy and encouraging tourism. The island is a collection of peninsulas anchored to the craggy Cuillin Mountains, a destination for climbers keen to traverse its serrated ridges or ascend its isolated spires when the weather isn’t too horrible, which isn’t very often. Even more than on mainland Scotland, Skye is a wet and windy place, with 59-79” of rain per year and even more in the higher peaks. One wonders how 3,000-4,000’ peaks can be the setting for so many gnarly mountaineering epics until you experience Scottish weather.

 

Skye’s history dates to Mesolithic times (7,000 BC), and the island has subsequently been occupied by Celtic tribes, Vikings, and Scottish Clans, most notably the MacLeods and the MacDonalds who were prone to getting violently into it with each other. More recently, the island has become a tourist destination and a second home for hale British retirees, but as recently as 2001, a third of the population still spoke Gaelic. 

Despite typical Isle of Skye weather, we enjoyed our week there before leaving to hike the West Highland Way, a topic for a later post. Photographs below are of our outings on Skye. I’ve included descriptions of our wanderings and a few words at the end about logistics, but there is plenty of information available online for anyone planning a trip. 

Ellen on the Harlosh Peninsula, where we stayed while on Skye.

The view east from the Harlosh Peninsula.

On our first full day on Skye we drove east and north from Harlosh through the capital town of Portree to the alarmingly large and full parking lot at the trailhead for the Quiraing Loop, one of the more popular hikes on the island. Despite its popularity, the hike begins from a winding one-lane road punctuated by "passing places" (small pull-outs) that we soon learned were common throughout Scotland. From the road, the trail ascends into the mist, tracing the top of a precipitous cliff overlooking (if you could see through the fog) a complicated jumble of landslide debris in the valley below where the return leg of the loop threads its way among rock formations. We suited up against the intermittent rain showers and headed out, defying our arid-land instinct to sit in the car and wait it out, which in Scotland might take weeks or years. Despite or even because of the weather, the hike was beautiful, even with all the people. 

Ellen hiking in the fog below on the Quiraing loop, one of the more popular hikes on Skye.

The Quiraing Loop.

Ellen on the Quiraing loop hiking through heather.

The view north towards the Old Man of Storr (not visible), a famous rock spire, from near the start of the Quiraing loop.

The weather seemed too inhospitable to hike high into the Cuillin Mountains, so instead we walked below them from a campground at Glenbrittle at the end of Loch Brittle to the tip of another peninsula called the Rubha an Dunain (means point of the little fort). The wind picked up as we got nearer to the point, eventually knocking us around enough to make it challenging to stay on the trail when we could find it. Despite the weather, this was one of our favorite days on Skye. The end of the peninsula was thick with ruins, and a small lake was connected to the sea by a manmade channel labeled "Viking Canal" on our maps. Although it isn't obvious to me why the Vikings would have needed to access the lake with their boats, apparently it served as a protected harbor, and Norse boat timbers carbon-dated to AD 1100 have been pulled from the water.

A stream flowing from the Cuillin Mountains to the sea.

Sheep are everywhere on Skye including on this remote peninsula.

Ellen working to keep her balance in 50 mph wind at the Viking Canal near the tip of a peninsula called the Rubha an Dunain near the southern end of the island. The canal linked a small loch with the sea.

The Viking Canal outlet to the sea.

The closest substantial settlement to our base in Harlosh was Dunvegan, and the nearby Dunvegan Castle has been home to the MacLeods for 800 years. They still live there, but parts of the castle are open to the public (for a price). We did the obligatory tour, but more compelling for us was a walk to the coast a few miles north of the castle to a small ruin called Fiadhairt and then onwards through a basalt-lined valley to the ocean.

An inlet off of Loch Dunvegan that we passed on a hike north of the Dunvegan Castle.

The ruin of a double-walled structure called Fiadhairt north of Dunvegan.

A microcosm of fern and moss on the stone wall of the Fiadhairt ruin.

Blooming heather on the Fiadhairt ruin.

A view of the Dunvegan Loch from the Dunvegan Castle, which has been occupied continuously by the MacLeods for 800 years. They were originally a dominant clan on Skye.

A cemetery near the town of Dunvegan.

We spent as little time in the capital city, Portree, as possible, since we didn't need any t-shirts or whisky, but we stopped there twice on our way to or from outings to eat and resupply at the Coop grocery store. The town is attractive, but it's crawling with tourists and busy with traffic.

The harbor at Portree, the largest town on Skye and its center of tourism.

Waterfront buildings in Portree.

The northernmost peninsula on Skye is called the Trotternish and it extends north from Portree past the Old Man of Storr and the Quiraing to a more remote area close to its tip. We visited a castle ruin there (Duntulm Castle) and then hiked to a bothy (shelter) overlooking Rubha Hunnish, the northern point of the peninsula, with views to the Outer Hebrides to the west. We returned to our car by hiking along the shore through bogs occupied by the ruins of old croft houses. Crofting is landholding system in which farmers rent and work small pieces of land, and crofting is still common today in Northwest Scotland.

A classic phone booth (with phone) along a rural road on the Trotternish Peninsula near the northern tip of Skye.

Ellen having lunch in a bothy with views across the North Atlantic to the Outer Hebrides.

Looking south along the coast of the Trotternish Peninsula.

Distillery visits are de rigueur in Scotland, so before we left the U.S., I scheduled a tour of the Talisker Distillery on Skye. Unfortunately, these tours are popular and bookings get filled, so we found ourselves sampling lightly peated Talisker scotch at 10:30 a.m. the day before we left Skye, which contributed to a less aggressive agenda that day than we had enjoyed during the rest of the our visit. Oddly, Skye is not a great place for a distillery except that it has an abundance of clear water, which is essential for making whisky (spelled without the 'e' in the U.K.). Barley doesn't grow well on Skye, so it is shipped in from Scotland's east coast after being dried (with heat and smoke from burning peat). Once distilled, the scotch is shipped out to age on the mainland. Still, the complexity of a distillery was fun to see, and the tasting at the end of the tour was engaging. 

An old boat along the shore near the town of Carbost, home of the Talisker Distillery.

Huge stills in the Talisker Distillery at Carbost.

Somewhat reluctantly we left Skye after a week to return our car to Glasgow and stage for an 8-day hike on the West Highland Way. As we drove towards the bridge connecting Skye to the mainland, rare glimpses of sunshine lit the Cuillin Mountains making them more enticing than they had been in fog and driving rain.

A last view into the Cuillin Mountains as we left Skye.

The road back to mainland Scotland where we were headed to hike in the Highlands.

Logistics

There's no end of information online about visiting the Isle of Skye, since it is one of the most popular destinations in Scotland, but I'll provide a few specifics here from our trip that might be useful.

Transportation: We rented a car (Europcar) in Edinburgh and drove to Skye. Exploring the island would be nearly impossible without a car, though there are some local buses and paid tours are popular with some travelers. The rail system is easy to use in Scotland, and in retrospect, it might have been easier and even cheaper to take a train to Fort William (or anywhere close to Skye) and rent a car there to minimize driving hassles (driving on the left side of narrow roads and all of that) and gasoline expenses.

Accommodation: There are an innumerable vacation rentals on Skye. Portree is the epicenter of tourism on the island and has the largest concentration of shops and restaurants. If that's appealing to you, you'll need to book well in advance of your trip because everything fills up early. Instead, we stayed in a quiet and lovely cottage at Harlosh called the Seascape Cottage, which you can book directly with the hosts (who are botanists!) or through Airbnb, etc.

Weather: We visited in September, and it rained every day, which is typical any time of the year. Bring warm clothes and good rain gear. In the summer months, bugs (midges) are a nuisance, but they didn't bother us in September.

Online Information

Comprehensive travel information is available here.

TripAdvisor has links to travel information.

Sites like this one have information specifically for photographers. 

 

Livin' in a Hot Place

 

An ocotillo in the hot New Mexico sun.

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In southern New Mexico and Arizona, the heat arrives in early June when the jet stream drifts poleward and high pressure creeps in from Mexico chasing the cooler air north. For at least a month until the monsoon begins, the sun drills down from cloudless skies and heat rises from the parched ground. With almost no humidity, the sun hits like a hammer.  

When we were in Kashgar, China in 2006 during the oppressive heat of the Central Asian summer, locals carried beds into their yards to sleep. In the warm evening after the sun relented, Uyghur men gathered around outdoor television sets smoking and talking in the light of flickering screens while outdoor food markets came alive with families socializing and eating fat-tailed sheep cooked on spits over smoky fires and sprinkled with spices. 

 

My mother died in May on a hot day in Cedar Park, Texas where she’d lived since leaving the humid swelter of the mid-Atlantic. She spent most of her 90 years in hot places, growing up in Enterprise, Alabama before air conditioning was the norm. Her father helped build the Pan American Highway, toiling in the tropical heat of Central America, a cigar clamped in his teeth. Later, he owned a furniture store where as kids we’d leave the coolness of the showroom to explore the hot dusty warehouse, shared with a feed store where a pet monkey swung from the rafters. On the street, men sold soggy bags of boiled green peanuts in the heat.

 

Extremes at both ends of the thermometer breed story tellers and songwriters. In wintry places, they huddle around fires, entertaining each other, their backs to the cold. Where it’s hot, they languish on porches, facing outwards from the shade into the bright sun, making up new stories and retelling old ones, glad they aren’t out in that infernal heat.

 

Heat in literature and movies is at least as evocative as location, enveloping us in its pall. Characters sweat and chafe, and passions run high. A writer (unnamed at the link below) observed that: 

 

“Humanity ferments in the heat. People become visceral, bodies betray minds with their baseness. Morals loosen along with muscles. Secrets spill out of open windows, buttons come undone. And while in reality we might groan more with perspiration then passion, fictional characters can be far more comfortable getting hot under the collar without so much as a desk fan for relief.” (Penguin Books)

 

Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett wrote the iconic The Front Porch Song watching East Texas pass by during a hot summer in College Station while trying to avoid being Texas A&M students. “This old porch is just a weathered, gray-hair seventy years of Texas,” Keen wrote. He mixes humor and nostalgia during live performances, pausing mid-song to describe his landlord dragging him off of the porch into the heat to help with chores:

 

“…our conversations were only interrupted by my landlord, Jack Boyett, who was 70 years old at the time. He’d roll up in the heat of the day and roll down the window on his pickup truck just enough to be heard and not enough to let any of the air conditioning escape, saying, ‘Robert Keen, Robert Keen. Can you come help me for a minute? I’d spend the rest of the day mowin’ lawns, movin’ furniture, diggin’ skinny cows out of the mud out there at his old ranch.”

 

Heat rounds off the edges and stretches out the vowels. The Southern Drawl. The Texas Twang. Slide guitar. Fatty food. It’s too hot for crisp transitions.

 

Landscapes that invited exploration in the cool of winter become barren hellscapes in triple-digit heat. Soap tree yuccas shimmer. Sand burns bare feet. Dust devils spin across white hot playas. Snakes come out. We go into the mountains looking for cool mornings and places to swim, hoping not to be squeezed off the tops of them by the warming climate, lucky if we have the means to migrate. 

 

But the heat is part of living in a desert, and just as we embraced the Wyoming cold, we will learn to tolerate New Mexico heat, getting up earlier to walk, napping, trimming the cat’s fur, drinking ice water. A little heat is a small price to pay for a long mild winter, and even in the worst of it, the evenings are perfect if you stay far enough back from the bbq grill.

Uyghur men in Kashgar after the sun has left.

A Uyghur boy pushes fat-tailed sheep on a market day in Kashgar.

My mother, Barbara McCall, on her porch in Enterprise, Alabama with pets. She lived in hot places (with pets) her whole life, and even kept her apartment in Texas at 80 degrees when she could turn the heat up that high.

My grandfather, Oscar Lee McCall, at his desk in his furniture store in Enterprise.

The view into Mexico from the Outer Mountain Loop in Big Bend National Park. Big Bend was so hot when we were there in February 2022 that we started hiking well before dawn. Later in the year, people routinely succumb to the heat.

A porch in West Texas.

Rollin' Smoke BBQ in Anthony, Texas.

Lower Gila Box Canyon, New Mexico

Cliffs in one of the side canyons of the Lower Gila Box in New Mexico.

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In 1983, the late M.H. Salmon and his dog, Rojo, hiked from the source of the Gila River in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness to where it emerges from the mountains near Gila, NM. There, he picked up his cat and canoed through three box canyons (the Upper, Middle, and Lower) in New Mexico and another (the Gila Box) in Arizona, ending his trip before the river succumbed to agricultural diversion on its way to join the Colorado near Yuma, Arizona. He called his animal companions “the crew” and sometimes left them alone by the river to forage while he wandered into nearby towns to socialize and lament the loss of an unnamed romantic partner. His book, Gila Descending, A Southwestern Journey, is a classic. Salmon was a lifelong advocate for the Gila River, and today a bill named for him and reintroduced by New Mexico Senators Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luhan could permanently protect over 400 miles of it.

 

Box canyons in southern New Mexico don’t dead end like the ones in old Westerns where, depending on who was doing the chasing, good or bad guys rode in but didn’t ride out. Instead, they are cliff-lined gorges where the river meanders from side to side making walking almost impossible. Side canyons provide access here and there, and boating is possible when the water is high, but the canyon interiors remain remote and seldom visited.

 

Miraculously, the Gila is one of the few substantial undammed rivers in the southwest (except for irrigation diversion), rising and falling with runoff and the seasons. Despite many attempts to dam it over the years, the river has remained free-flowing thanks to the efforts of conservation groups, New Mexico Senators, and devoted individuals like Salmon.

Today, the Lower Box of the Gila is a Wilderness Study Area (WSA), meaning that it has characteristics that make it eligible for Wilderness designation by Congress. WSAs are managed to preserve these qualities until Congress makes a decision. 

 

Just before entering the Lower Box on his journey, Salmon wrote:

People rule the natural world today and everywhere you look we’ve made a hash of it. A rare gem like the pristine Gila only serves to balance otherwise zealous commercial interests. In juxtaposition, a free-flowing stream may be the most civilized item within our realm. More than birds can benefit from association with a wild river.

In southern New Mexico, winter is the time for desert exploring, and we made a half dozen or more trips to explore Lower Box and the surrounding area during our first cool season since moving to Silver City in 2023. I’m grateful to have such a diverse and archaeologically rich place so close to home. 

On publication of the fourth edition of his book in 2006, Salmon ended a new introduction by urging us to keep up the good fight:

More than 20 years ago, Rojo, the tomcat, and I saw the whole 220 miles of river in one trip. I thought at the time: All said, there's not a better place anywhere in the West. In spite of boosters, boomers, politicians, and certain government agencies, that's still true today. The Gila River is the last flow in New Mexico that can still teach us what a natural river should be. Improbably, it still flows free. Enjoy it. Don't let them take it away. 

Ellen in the Chihuahuan Desert preparing for a hike near the Lower Box.

 

The Lower Box Canyon in December with a few lingering yellow cottonwood trees. 

Hiking in a side canyon last December with Larry Scritchfield and Jane Addis (2023).

Trees and cliffs deep inside the Lower Box.

A shockingly green rock layer in one of the side canyons of the Lower Box.

Ellen in a green slot canyon.

Ellen with T Rolloff in another side canyon.

The Lower Box has been used by humans for thousands of years. Bedrock mortars like these are common.

As are petroglyphs. These are near the mouth of one of the many side canyons.

Steve Buskirk exploring in the hills above the Box Canyon.

Ellen and her brother, Terry, in a side canyon. Oddly, we've had more visitors during the winter in Southern New Mexico than we ever did when we lived in Laramie.

Petroglyphs high above the river.

Bedrock mortars at a rock outcrop a few miles north of the Lower Box.

The Jaguar Panel.

Ocotillo and poppies near the rim of the Lower Box.

An ocotillo under a New Mexican sky near the rim of the Box. March 2024.

Ellen, Bay Roberts, and Beth Buskirk hiking towards the Lower Box, March 2024.