Mountain landscape - Scotland

Sgùrr na Lapaich cloud inversion

This photograph was from a backpacking trip, rather than a purely photography endeavour. It’s one of my favourite images but it would have been hard not to capture nice photos during this day, given the glorious scenery, the nice weather and the cloud inversion we spent much of our day above. (There was a sea of cloud almost all the way to Ben Nevis, almost 60km away).

We’d started our trip in Glen Affric, walking up a progressively wet underfoot Gleann nam Fiadh and camping by the river. The ground dried up as we gained height in the morning towards the summit of An Leath-chreag and the sun came out. It was November, so we weren’t up overly early, but it was warm - much warmer than it should have been for the season. I prefer the cold but the bonus here was the temperature inversion and when we reached the first bealach there was a lot of low-lying cloud beneath our feet, which got thicker and thicker as the day progressed and made for a simply glorious day out which involved our traversing the awesome ridge to Stob Coire Dhomhnuill plus the summits of Càrn Eige and Beinn Fhionnlaidh, before we stopped for the evening on the summit of Mam Sodhail (which is where this image was taken from, as I looked out along the ridge towards Sgùrr na Lapaich).

Photography-wise, if I'm being critical, I'd have preferred the moon in the distance to have been larger, and ideally above the end of the ridge, but it was was 5pm. I also didn’t have a tripod and no means of using anything else so, with neither of us having anything to occupy our attention as regards to entertainment, we retired to our tents not long after eating. I was hoping for more of the same in the morning but when we exited our tents, it was to thick mist and drizzle.