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In Scotland, there are beinns and munros (hills and mountains). Hills are most anything below 3,000 feet and that is what we’ve been mostly skirting on the West Highland Way. They are impressive as you walk trails carved into their lower regions. They form majestic, sloping walls on either side of gentle glens.

Today we are heading into munro country but to reach it, we must cross 50 square miles of the Rannoch Moor, a boggy region of grasses and heather and scores of small ponds and lochanes. I don’t think anyone who wanders off across the moor would ever be heard from again. It is a beautiful and unforgiving place.

Getting this day going: me at the train station flaunting Tri-Colors for Mexico, the Bridge of Orky hotel, the eponymously named bridge and river, and my companions on the bridge:

All the more reason that we have Telford’s Parliamentary Road to tread. It is wide, solidly built and was actually a functioning public road until 1933. You can get plenty close to the moor from the road’s solid ground.

But before all that. Happy Independence Day, Mexico!

A Crain with a view, now sports the colors of Mexico (Oops, no close-up. Trust it, it is there:

The last time we took a September hike, it was the Portugal Camino and I dangled a red white and green banner across the back of my backpack. High atop a forested hillside, I draped it over a cross and cairn where hundreds of hikers had dropped rocks, memorials, and mementos before me.

Today, I’m wearing a jersey of Mexico’s national futbol team, and on my backpack is a cotton ribbon in the national colors. I plan to leave it somewhere along today’s trail as a tribute to my adopted homeland.

Speaking of which, we are leaving early from the converted train station bunkhouse and heading down to Bridge of Orchy to pick up two of our companions. This day’s trek is nine miles and will take us to the Kingshouse Hotel and Bunkhouse, a refined old 18th-century coach house that recently underwent extensive upgrading and expansion.

We stop off at the hotel to pick up our pre-ordered lunch bags because there is nothing along this route besides wilderness. Well, three miles down the road is Inveroran Hotel, another 1700s coach house, which has a little shop with sandwiches, snacks, beverages, and trail supplies. I buy my very first Irn Bru here because another hiker told me the stuff works like a supercharged energy drink. (It does. I tested it out in the last few miles of today’s hike.)

There is an autumn chill in the air this morning but you know what there isn’t? A lot of clouds. This is a good thing because I’ve been carrying an unused pair of sunglasses in my backpack for weeks. I’ve also been wearing shorts since Day 2 in anticipation of warm weather. Justified, at last! But the big reason is that Rannock Moor is wide open country and can turn hellish in blustery rainy weather. Which is the National Weather of Scotland.

Gorgeous day, gorgeous hike, through gorgeous scenery. It just gets better and better.

Loch Tulla dominates the view in the first phase of today’s hike, but it has competition from the landscape around it:

After crossing the arched stone Bridge of Orchy, the trail moves quickly upward through a lightly forested patch. (Every day seems to start with a steep-pitched climb, but that could just be my imagination.)

This is familiar territory, climbing the path cut into a hillside, with a sweeping glen below that opens up to Lock Tulla, a constant companion for several miles, The Loch reveals more and more of its sizeable body with each rise and turn. As lakes go, it’s a beauty.

I find my cairn atop a rise just off the path and leave my Tri-Color ribbon atop the pile. I want to hang around a bit and contemplate the beauty of the view and the warming temperament of the day but: midges.

These are tiny little pests that like to swarm human flesh and gnaw at it with their tiny jaws until you look like an outbreak of smallpox. They are so prevalent that there is a booming trade in repellents and fine netting to cover your face. Thanks to misty drizzly rainy days, we’ve managed to avoid midges entirely.

Today, they are our sunshine tax. And they want blood. Fortunately, they’re lazy buggers. If you keep moving they won’t land on you.

So, I got moving.

The landscape switches up again on the Parliamentary Road, just before entering the moor:

By the time I crossed the Allt Tolaghan river, midges were but a memory.

Just past the river begins the old Parliamentary Road. It is bordered on the right by a cooling stand of pine trees and a steeply rising hillside on the left.

It was somewhere around here that I met my first-ever hiking companion on the West Highland Way. If you have been reading along, you know I am a dawdler. My four companions are racehorses in comparison. I generally walk alone, most happily.

Karen and I had been taking turns passing each other for a while until we figured out that we shared a similar pace as well as a disposition to stop and photograph everything. Her husband, Craig, is an ultramarathon who was actually running parts of the West Highland Way. They are from Maine where they hike the White Mountains and both turned out to be delightful companions.

Rannoch Moor:

We left the cover of forest quickly enough and entered Rannoch Moor. Which didn’t look all that boggy. It was miles and miles of grassland and wildflowers, as far as I could tell.

Until you turned around to look toward the sun. The reflection of sunlight exposes hundreds of bog pools, ponds, mini-lakes, and rivulets that just weren’t obvious before. This is one very wet piece of land.

Fresh respect for the moors, my friends.

I’m sticking to the hard-packed Parliamentary Road.

After a few miles of casual walking, attention is drawn away from the moor and onto the mountains.

Especially Bauchaille Etive Mor, a foreboding black-rock mountain that rises out of the green landscape like a rocketship. There is nothing else like it. All other mountains are shades of green and brown, depending on light and shadow. They are covered in grasses and light-colored rock.

Not Bauchaille Etive Mor. It seems to bear no life beyond the coal-like darkness of its rocky flesh. It is both foreboding and mesmerizing. You can’t stop watching it as you walk closer and closer. With each bend and rise, the black mountain looms larger and shifts shape.

It is not as if it is the only show in town. To the left are Clach Lasthad, Creise, and Meall a’Bhuiridh. Farther ahead, the peaks of Stob Ghabhar and Stob a’Choire Odhair, the two stoic shepherds who guard Glencoe and the valley. To the right is another whole range of mountains all as unpronounceable and spelling-challenged and beautiful as these.

We are for sure walking among the gods.

The gods must have a way of playing tricks with time. It seems only minutes pass before the Glencoe Ski Resort and the iconic Black Rock Cottage are just ahead and Kingshouse Lodge is but a hop, skip, and a jump across a busy highway. The end of the trail. Nine miles passed like five today. I don’t know how that happened.

Tonight Rose, Kim, and I share a two-bunk room with a young German university student who plays clarinet in an oompah band in her hometown. The rooms are bright if not roomy and there is a common room where hikers can hang out, play cards, fix meals, and relax.

The moon is swelling ever closer to fullness and casts an eerie pall over the mountains and river that are visible from the lodge. The warmth of the day is slow to dissipate and if it weren’t for the midges, I’d stretch out on a picnic table and stare at the mountain tops looming so close over me.

Still, I walk slowly back to the bunkhouse after dinner and roll in the warmth of one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut admonitions: “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

This? This day?

If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

Postscript: I feel stronger every day and every mile. I’m going to need it. Tomorrow’s hike includes the infamous Devil’s Staircase which takes hikers to the highest point on the West Highland Way.