Short report on EMUOTC’s expedition along the West Highland Way – Summer 2022
One of our core missions at the East Midland Universities OTC is to foster resiliency and confidence in our officer cadets through adventurous training. For us, this involves putting on multiple trips a year, organised by our third year Officer Cadets, for our first and second years, many of whom missed out on key communal outdoor experiences due to their final years of school being spent during covid restrictions.
Our key aims on this trip, were to provide a fun and challenging expedition along the West Highland Way for our Officer Cadets, whilst also utilising our instructors to deliver the Army Summer Mountain Foundation course. This is a qualification is the key that unlocks a huge number of opportunities for our young people in the world of adventurous training and opens doors to them such as winter mountaineering courses.
The West Highland Way is a hugely popular long distance walking route from Milgavie, just outside of Glasgow, along 96 miles of track to Fort William. The route offers brilliant scenery and a perfect ratio of challenging bit of elevation and nice, long winding paths to soak in the vistas. This makes it a perfect route for introducing people to spending extending periods outside and boosting their confidence.
The trip also gave our cadets a great opportunity to bond as team. Freindships were forged across our years groups, something that pays huge dividends to the cohesion of our unit and especially for the confidence of our first years as they look to one day organise and lead expeditions for future cadets.
Our expedition set off from Drymen and ended with a summit of Ben Nevis. Along the way we stopped in amazing and beautiful places. These included a campsite halfway up Loch Lommand with beautiful access to the water and Kings House with its beaautifully barren and windswept vistas. The group was blessed with good weather throughout the trip with a small exception of an evening of rain. But battling on through the heat and midges provided some seriously character building moments for our Officer Cadets. Whilst the West Highland Way does not present too much of a technical challenge, there were multiple days with the deistance and ever present midges that really did build up resiliance and confidence in our young people.
OCdt Karaalp who organised this expedition took a huge level of experience from this, having never organised an AT trip before. Saying “After this trip I think that I now have the confidence to give organising complex expedition next year for my course mates at Sandhurst.”
Everyone at EMUOTC is enormously grateful for the grant we received from Ulysses Trust. Without it there would have been no way that we could affordably provide such an AT trip to our Officer Cadets. We believe that the Trusts grants really are effective in inspiring and growing the developing generations.
