The Confident Hiker

Abandoning a dream

The pain of leaving the West Highland Way after two days – unedited notes from Scotland

May 2025

This was supposed to become my first blog entry of a long distance hike and the first one outside of Switzerland. I was contemplating writing it as such but I realize, it is not that kind of story to tell. Not yet anyway. The story of how we hiked the West Highland Way will come. This is a story about going back home and somehow leaving a part of you behind somewhere on a trail. And learning how to not feel incomplete, like failing and to embrace your sadness.

The dream of a real long distance hike lived in me for a very long time already. I immediately dreamed big and intended to do the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT for short), stretching from the border of Mexico to the Canadian border. I loved the idea of being out in nature for so long. Have my feet carry me every day to new beautiful locations. Having all my belongings strapped to my back. Songs in my ears, thoughts flowing and growing wildly, an open heart full of joy and adventure.

The more I started hiking regularly and did a couple of shorter multiple day hikes (I almost immediately start with a Solo 4 day hike), I realized that there is more to this experience and not all of it is a sepia colored montage to Lord Hurons “Ends of the earth”. A big part is logistics, money and pain (literally and figuratively). That being said, those things never outweighed the joy and pride I felt even after a two day hike – heck even after a single day hike. Because as I mentioned many times in my texts, time moves vastly different on trail, so a day may very well feel like a whole week sometimes. And I was happy with my shorter adventures; it gave me lots to write about and discover every single bit of forest, meadow, hills and mountains around me.

But that tickling feeling never quite went away. That pull to do more. To challenge myself in a way I knew I would enjoy; in a way that I knew would feed me, energize me, inspire me on a whole other level. And with Sam entering the picture in 2017 I suddenly had a partner that shared that passion with me. Who felt the pull of nature and hiking adventures very similarly to me. And so grew the idea, to do a long distance thru hike together. The PCT remained our focus. We even bought a guide and started daydreaming of the time on trail. Years went by and with other things popping up in our lives, the dream slipped almost unnoticed into the back where it remained for a long time. It was Alex Roddies book ” Wanderlust Europe”; a collection of stunning hikes in all corners of our diverse continent that re awakened d the dream or maybe more so made it seem less of a Pipe dream. He talked about the Cape Wrath Trail”, an adventurous trail that leads through the wilderness of Scotland. Unpredictable, even slightly dangerous at times; to head out on this trail without a compass is considered a bad idea they say. And my fire was immediately lit again. Not that it ever was put off completely but now it was fully burning. I introduced Sam to the trail and he was intrigued. We both have fallen in love with Scotland already. After I had gone on an Inter rail adventure back when I was 16 with my childhood friend Becca and saw all the mysterious landscapes, the joyful friendly locals and read about some of the legends, I was fully sold on Scotland. And that got reinforced again, when in 2018 Sam and me spent our honeymoon visiting Scotland again.

Knowing what it would take for us to tackle the PCT, the time off work, the amount of money, the preparation, I felt something closer to home and not as long would be a better start. I am not always known for my sense of reason, but years of frequent hiking made me more aware of the challenges and traps that it can bear.

How we exactly shifted from the Cape Wrath Trail to the West Highland Way, I don’t remember. It must have just seemed more approachable. And while I would consider myself an experienced and well trained hiker in good physical hiking shape it seemed like a smart choice to start with something approachable. The West Highland Way is known to be a good entry to long distance hiking. It stretches over 156 kilometers, which is a long distance but not too long, it can be done anywhere between 6 to 12 days, the terrain is for the most part relatively easy and it is for the most part well connected to civilization, even if there are some very remote places and stretches along the way. And the landscape is gorgeous, as it leads for a big part through the Highlands. I now know, that actually up to 75% of people abandon the trail, often about halfway through around Crianlarich.

And so for the first time, we actually started planning. From looking at the various stops, possible sleeping arrangements to estimating our needed time frame. And before long we set our date for May 2025. Time couldn’t move fast enough from that point on. I started to meticulously plan, watched countless videos of other people doing the trail in passionate expectation, imagined myself and Sam marching proudly though the Highlands while singing the “Sky boat song” and felt every fiber of my body ready to move. The last months and weeks were a lot of acquiring all the necessary materials as we did decide on camping most of the nights. It suddenly became very real and at times I felt doubt, anxiety and a strange hard to describe feeling of homesickness before even having left home. But the stronger feeling was the adventurous one, the excitement, the longing to be on my way.

We left on May 12th to Edinburgh. Our journey was almost from the beginning set up to go wrong. Our flight had a delay, we almost missed our connecting flight and in Edinburgh we learned that our luggage somehow didn’t make the flight and would be arriving later. Now while that is always unfortunate and stressful, it is a whole different story, if this luggage contains your whole home and equipment for the upcoming days or weeks. So my stress levels were very high and I started to have this not unfamiliar feeling in my stomach and my heart that my dream was being manipulated somehow and with every other little thing that didn’t go according to plan (and there were lots of those), it felt more and more, as if we were not supposed to be here. As if we were uninvited intruders. Nonetheless we made our way to Milngavie, the starting point of the West Highland Way and as soon as we left the many people, carsounds, the citysmell behind us and entered the meadows and forests, I started to have trust again. I felt like myself. We were happy and content and couldn’t believe that we are actually here. We really made it. It was not in my head anymore; we were walking the West Highland Way direction Highlands and our end destination of Fort William. The backpacks were heavy, we were tired from the journey and the previous sleepless night and I dreaded the first night in the tent but we were adventurers, we got this.

I will not get into detail of the trail; like I said, this is part of another story for another day. But more so on how suddenly – or maybe rather subtly – a dream can become somewhat of a nightmare because of a couple of decisions that were not done with us in mind. Decisions made by us for us. But maybe for a version of us that we so desperately wanted to be for this adventure. And maybe a little longing for something new, something different. For us that was the decision to wild camp. I do believe it was in the end about more than just that but I feel I need to reiterate, that it was not the challenge of the trail itself. Our bodies were ready for that. What our bodies and minds were not ready for however was the unexpected intense cold in the night, that neither our sub zero sleeping bags nor thermo clothing could fix and the severe lack of sleep that came with that. What our bodies could not handle were the heavy backpacks with all our food for nine days and all the camping equipment. We started to feel physically sick and homesick and a kind of exhaustion that I have not been familiar with to this point which brought me to tears so frequently that I started to feel ashamed about it both in front of Sam and somehow myself. The feeling that we don’t belong, that we somehow life someone else’s hiking adventure grew steadily and started to scare me a little. It was such a foreign feeling. Something I have never ever, not once experienced while hiking. I felt abandoned and felt guilty for wanting to abandon my so carefully grown and nourished dream so easily and without much of a fight. But to master the will to find other solutions was too exhausting of a task also with the fact in mind that we had no money left for alternatives. As we lay in the tent, shivering, we started to understand how much our bodies were begging us to see that something is off. It lead to us realize after only two days of hiking and two cold sleepless nights on trail, that we can not go on any further. The fact that there was still a same day flight back home available sealed the deal.

The feeling of relief was so great and it felt like the right decision a 100 percent. And writing this the next day, after having a slept a night in our own warm soft bed I do still know it was the right move and ultimately within all our circumstances really the only way to go.

But here is the thing: I do not feel happy about it, I do not feel good about it. And I realize that this is a possibly very unique experience of a special set of feelings related to abandoning a trail. That is not to say, that abandoning other dreams or plans can not be equally as painful or evoke complex feelings. But I do believe it is a form of grief that is hard to understand if you haven’t made the experience and honestly even if you have experienced it. I have very little understanding myself, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to write about it.

And when I say grief, that is truly what I mean. I have lost people very dear to me and I have to say that the emotions that I feel now are more similar than I would ever dare to assume, knowing that losing a beloved person or pet is by far more intense for many. And in many ways more final (depending on your beliefs). Because we can – and will – do the West Highland Way from start to finish in the future. Scotland isn’t going anywhere and neither is that trail and the beautiful landscape around it. But I do still feel a tremendous loss. A loss of a dream I had and that carried me through countless difficult times where everything seemed rather pointless and empty. A dream that I cherished and that became an essential part of me. Currently my husband is packing up our tent neatly so that we can sell it to someone who will use it more after we used it only two nights along the trail and it brings an unexplainable pain to my heart. A stabbing, hollowing sensation. I feel like I am failing this tent but most likely I am rather feeling as if I failed my dream. And I do feel I left something behind, we left something behind. And it is not something I can regain here at home. It is there on the way, in those couple of days. Those seemingly unfinished days.

There is a lot of talk about how to readjust after a thru hike – especially the really long ones that take several months to complete. How one can often not just come home and go back to normal. Because home might no longer be where it was before. While we were only gone for such a short time (I have done longer hikes here at home in Switzerland), the different experience of time, the distance to home and all the intense emotions – good and bad – made it feel like so much longer. And currently I do not yet fully know how to come back home and let this adventure, this experience rest, though I know that I will find the answer on how to get there eventually. But for now I am still somewhere in between, figuring out what the messages out of this experience are, the Epilogue so to speak, that somewhat wraps everything up nicely. But maybe I also need to accept that I can’t and don’t need to understand it all. And I think most important is to not feel like this was in any way failing, to not feel guilty about not having enjoyed every minute of this immense privilege to walk in this magical landscape. Those fairytale like forests with lush green grass and countless purple flowers, those impressive hills, big deep Lochs, vast blue skies, the little carefully curated Honesty Boxes along the way. To hear the crunching of stones and gravel under my shoes, the rhythmic sound of my hiking poles, the numerous birds, the lambs calling for their mothers, the rippling of the small streams. To smell the dewy grass in the morning, the sweet scent of numerous different flowers, the comforting earthy scent of the highland cows and that unmistakable smell of all the elements, of nature.

I will gradually learn to accept that I am back home, already yearning to be back on that trail and simultaneously knowing that it was simply not our time yet. Our time on the West Highland Way is yet to come. And I am grateful to have been out there and seen for myself what all the magic is about. It is truly there, you feel it after the first couple of steps and it doesn’t leave you anymore, it stays with you. And therein lays my comfort.