obviously

I've just checked the Wikipedia entry and have discovered that the alleged reason for not letting people who have been funiculated up to the Ptarmigan centre out onto the hill proper is environmental, and not (as suspected) to ensure that people who can't walk up the short distance from the car park are not let loose around the summit. I drifted off the paths round to the south somewhere and had to put my coat on at one point whilst Nicky and Edgar were dragged up after he finished the sleep he started shortly after we set off. The (unoccupied, but the only coat-capable bag I had with me) baby backpack didn't act too much like a sail though I was able to lean quite significantly forward during the gustiest gusts. After retrieving my camera in the lee of a significantly sub-summitual cairn I tried to capture the inside-a-cloud effect once above the cloudline but didn't get much. Apart from a bloke fixing some of the piste-side fences near the base station there was no other living soul out there, unless someone was hiding inside the weather station. There was certainly no-one visible enough to dissuade me from attempting to film a bit of bouldertop-trotting but the necessities of balancing meant that a lot of the clip consists of sky with a small and shaking bit of ground in one corner. The others had reached the top of the railway by the time I got there so I signed in, declined to leave the bag with the man guarding the door and the signing-in book and had a coffee and a muffin before descending on a significantly more marked path with the boy on my back, which my thighs will doubtless greatly appreciate tomorrow. It was a bit too cold and windy to take him back up to the summit first but he still has plenty of time for that sort of thing, though I've been living in Scotland for seventeen years but had never been much higher than a kilometre above sea level on foot prior to today. After returning we popped to the swimming pool to meet the cousins again (with Edgar still nice and confident and relaxed in the water) then back for food and seemingly endless running-around.