Mourne Mountains at Night - Slieve Bearnagh
Check out the image at the bottom. It was not easy to obtain. Read my story below
TLDR:
Finished worked, wanted to go camping, but the mountain was covered in snow, so ended up hiking at night to get some star photos. Nearly fell asleep behind the wheel but made it back home by 5AM.
We had previously attempted to do the Mourne Wall Challenge and ended up camping on top of Slieve Bearnagh. We did it two summers ago and I just absolutely fell in love with the place. It’s fairly easy to get to, its dark at night so it’s a great viewing spot for stars and the top of the mountain is covered in nice and furry grass, so it’s not too rocky to sleep on, and it’s not a swamp so it’s not damp.
Obviously getting to the top with all your camping gear on your back would put off most people, but it’s worth the sweat.
A few weeks ago, we had a nice gap of weather, the sun was shining and when I checked Yr.no for the weather forecast, the predication was set for 3oC for the night. So, it’s nothing extreme to go camping in as long as you have the right gear! Finished work on Friday, came back as quick as possible and packed all camping gear, food and water I would need for the evening. This did take a little bit longer than I would have liked, but nevertheless, I would arrive at the Trassey Car Park just after sunset. I would have preferred to start this earlier, but I had a photography workshop the next day, that wouldn’t have finished till 10PM, so couldn’t really do this the next day either. The hard part of photographing something in Ireland is that you can never really plan anything properly. Once I have an image in my head, I monitor the weather conditions daily and go whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Either way, I left Dublin and joined the M1 to bring me to the Mournes. Eventually I reached the northern back of the Mourne Mountains only to discover that the top of Slieve Bearnagh was covered with a white blanket of snow.
My smile immediately dropped as I immediately knew I couldn’t camp anymore. I wasted 2 hours packing my gear, 1.5 hours driving here and 1 hr going to shop to get some gear for this trip. Well I wasn’t going to cancel. I might not be camping, but I am getting to the bloody top!
I crossed out the idea of camping straight away, I remember a story in 2017 where a bunch of army soldiers had to be rescued off the top of the mountain after some adverse weather. I did not want to be that guy.
Either way, I pondered for a few minutes on my options of going ahead or going home, it was a cloudy evening with a boring sunset, I didn’t want to waste all those hours hiking for pictures of clouds and fog. Either way, I decided I would go ahead with the hope of the weather forecast coming true and the clouds moving away around 1AM. I ended up packing up only the gear I needed for photography and a good amount of water and off I went. Time was 21:41.
At this point, the sun was well beyond the horizon and was traveling into blue hour.
The path to Slieve Bearnagh is straight forward from the car park, it’s not exactly sign posted, but once you have a map in your hand, you can figure out the direction of which way you need to go. The path has very few forks, therefore it’s hard to get lost along the way.
You start off by a private gate with a little over climb passage (you’d want to be skinny to get through this bit) and then follow the unsurfaced road. Road to the top is rough with plenty of exposed rocks exercise your feet in every direction, but nothing extreme. Some parts of this road are cut off by some heavy flowing rivers that burst their banks and put a few inches of water onto the road, but you can get around these fairly easy. If you’re sporting good footwear you shouldn’t fear a little water anyway (I wouldn’t like to come here in runners though).
Not long till you’re in an open field. There’s a path that goes pretty much all the way to Slieve Bearnagh, you just have to follow it. You can cut through the field and shave off a few minutes, but because the fields were soaked, I ended up sticking to the mostly dry dirt road. In some cases, the water could have been to the same height as your ankles, but there’s always a few high standing stones you can hop across like a frog :)
It didn’t take long for the last few rays of light to disappear before we went into pitch black darkness. At this point, the clouds were blocking the moon, so any potential light was blocked, it was time to get my torch out. Looking at the weather forecast during the day, I knew my window for astrophotography was between 01:00 to 02:00.
The cloudiness did dampen the spirit a little of the potential of getting good pictures, but I soldiered on. Once I got closer to Slieve Bearnagh, I ended up moving into really thick fog. The fog was so thick, if someone threw a rock at me, I wouldn’t know where they were. Regardless, there’s only 1 path to the top, so I checked in with my GPS location every once in a while and managed to stay on the path. It takes a lot of concentration at night to mistake a dry water stream for a path and wander off into the wrong direction.
However, all was good, and I reached the Mourne Wall by 23:00. At this point I started contemplating turning around, fog was thick, I was exhausted.
Is it worth the climb to the top??
I did a full day’s work, and then came out to do this. It’s been two weeks since we returned from Australia, so I was still suffering a little bit of jetlag.
I put all of my will power together and started the climb to the top. So far in this hike, I only seen a few small patches of snow, but as I started climbing to the top, the patches of snow got more common.
The climb to the top of Slieve Bearnagh is pretty hard to follow on a normal day, it’s a scramble all the way to the top. Imagine how much fun it is in complete darkness. To help with the climb, I removed a leg from my tripod and used that as a walking stick to help me get to the top in one piece.
I’ve also made use one of my video lights to light the area, it has a wider throw and lights up more area nearby as opposed to the narrow beam from the torch. The video light has an insane amount of brightness, it can light up a whole area and blind everyone in it at the same time.
By 23:40 I reached the top. The fog was still pretty thick and any direction I looked into was covered by an unspoiled blanket of snow. At this point I was a little early and I knew that once I stopped moving, my body temperature would plummet like a comet and I would get cold fairly soon. So, I moved around as much as possible exploring the area and the completely alien landscape.
After roughly 30 minutes I decided it was time to head back down, but as I started my descent, I started seeing clouds clear on one of the nearby mountain tops. The clouds slowly moved down to the bottom of the mountain and left the peak of the mountain naked. At this point I decided to sit down (the rock I sat on surprisingly had no snow) and enjoy the views of the fast-moving clouds floating through the landscape and revealing the whole Mourne Mountains range. After a few minutes I looked back towards the peak of Slieve Bearnagh only to find stars shinning bright above it. My mind was made up at this point to head back down, so I pondered for another few minutes on what to do.
I’m wrecked; do I go down or stay up and get a few star pictures?
Eventually the photographer in me decided that there’s no way in hell I am going back down without getting some star pictures. Why would you throw away all the hard effort of going up to the top and go home empty handed? Well supposed you could just enjoy the moment, but I wanted to take the moment back home. After all, how often do we get to see the stars living in our light polluted cities.
For the next 30-45 minutes, I scrambled trying to take a few decent pictures, and the picture below is the result of this. It was not easy to take pictures when you’re exhausted and cold. At this point, your mind just takes so much longer to think. Settings for camera are dead easy, it’s the creative little hamster in your head that has been gone to sleep for the last 3 hours while following dark, damp and narrow mountain paths that had to wake up.
Seeing as I had my video light with me, I decided do to some light painting, light myself up, light up the scene, create some light brushes, mess around really, I didn’t really have anything in mind, I just wanted to play with the light to see what happens under different patterns.
In the end, it created this dome of light that nearly looks like an alien abduction, which creates a nice little point of focus for the viewer (I think). I would have loved to stay longer, but I was really struggling after a while, cold started seeping through my clothes, my hands started to shake, and I struggled to even set the lens to infinity to focus on the stars. My eyes couldn’t focus properly on what I was viewing, and seeing as I brought the Nikon D810 instead of the Z6, I didn’t have the tilt screen, which made it very difficult to compose and review images. Ground was covered in snow, I didn’t want to put my knees in the snow as it would make me much colder than I already was.
At this point, I figured I better head back, as any more tiredness and I will tumble down as opposed to hike down. Thankfully the clouds cleared, and the tiny slice of the moon was helping me light up the path to get back down.
Ended up reaching the car by 02:32 and I sped out of the creepy abandoned car park as soon as possible hopping that the chipper would be open in a nearby town, only to arrive and see everything closed :’(
Ended up grabbing my salads, meats and bread out of the car and started to fill my stomach as fast as possible. I left Dublin without eating dinner and didn’t pack any snacks for the hike. To say I was starving at this point would be an understatement.
After this, I passed the border to return to the Republic of Ireland and I could barely keep my eyes open at this point, I ended up pulling into a motorway station for a quick nap. I figured sleeping in the car is more comfortable than putting the car into the ditch. I eventually woke up after a short 30 minutes. The heat from the cabin escaped and I woke up shivering and cold. It was time to head back home.
At this point, the sun was nearly up, I was dreaming how I would love to stop somewhere and watch the sunrise, but I just couldn’t stomach the energy anymore. I walked through my apartment door at 05:13. I dropped everything onto the floor and went to bed straight away.
And that’s the end of this story, thanks for reading.
