Before you reserve a walking week on the Kerry ridges, read the rain figures
Nine nights in County Kerry, two beds, from $2,720 per person. Second step of four, which is to say most of this you could put together yourself and plenty of people do. What is left when you reserve a walking week on the Kerry ridges through this office is the dull residue: two houses that answer no reservation form, and a guide who moves a day when the forecast turns.
- Starting figure, per person
$2,720
- Nights
- 9
- beds you will learn
- 2
- Country
- Ireland
- How much of this you could arrange without us
- you could arrange most of it yourself
Confirmed as a final figure once the supplier holds the dates. Getting to the country is not included.
- Whatever is agreed comes back to you in writing from the supplier, before any money moves.
- No card is asked for on this site and none is stored: the supplier takes payment on its own terms.
- A request sent through the form is answered in writing within one working day.
Most of this you could arrange yourself
Every week in this catalog carries one number that runs against us: how much of it a person could have put together without ringing here at all. There are four steps. All of it yourself. Most of it yourself. The hard half needs a telephone call. It does not exist without an introduction.
This week is step two. Most of it you could arrange yourself, and we would rather say that now than at the end.
The ground is public and the paths are free. The 214 km waymarked route around the peninsula is signposted, mapped and described in half a dozen reserves, and every house you would sleep in answers its own telephone. Nobody needs an introduction to walk up a hill in Kerry.
What is left is dull work. Two of those houses appear in no online availability system and will tell you to ring back Thursday. A guide who will hold a date and then move it by 24 hours when the forecast turns is found by asking three people who the first two were. Bags do not cross the pass by themselves. Kerry is six hours ahead of Kansas City, which is why those calls leave here before eight in the morning.
Wet rock, tussock and the state of the ground
Kerry is wet in a way that a single rainfall figure does not convey. The coastal observatory an hour west of the beds logs about 1,430 mm in an average year and measurable rain on well over 200 days. The ground you would be walking is higher and takes more of it. Assume the summits are in cloud for part of most days and be pleased when they are not.
Underfoot it is Old Red Sandstone. Above about 600 m it is bare, slabby and streaked with water; below that it is tussock grass, heather and peat, and peat holds rain like a sponge for days after the sky clears. There are no waymarks on the high ground at all. The signposts stop exactly where the navigation starts.
The eroded gully called the Devil's Ladder, the usual way onto the main summit, is roughly 200 m of loose stone that has been coming apart under boots for fifty years, and most parties go down it slower than they came up. Wind decides more days than rain does: 40 km/h in the valley is a different number on a ridge a meter wide.
Daylight is the one thing given freely. Late June in Killarney runs from about 05:15 to nearly 22:00. By the third week of September you have a little over twelve hours, and a nine hour day starts to need a head torch.
Nine nights, two beds, and what the days consist of
Nine nights, two beds. Five on the north side of the range, in a farm valley about twenty minutes from the two main approaches, and four on the south side, over the pass, where the walking is lower and longer.
From the first bed the days climb. The Coomloughra horseshoe is roughly 13 km with 1,200 m of ascent, seven to nine hours, and includes a connecting ridge narrow enough that hands come out of pockets. The full traverse of the main ridge is nearer 16 km and 1,600 m, nine to twelve hours, with two sections that are honest scrambling and a lot of air on both sides. Neither is a path in the sense that word usually carries. Hag's Glen, the walk in, is an hour before anything begins. The 832 m hill above the Gap of Dunloe is four hours and about 700 m, and it looks straight across at everything you did not do.
From the second bed the days are distance rather than height: 18 to 24 km on the waymarked route, old green roads, forestry track, bog, gates, and a great deal of rain sound in the trees. Ireland has no ground above 1,000 m outside this one range, so the back half of the week is not about summits.
Two of the nine days are left empty on purpose. In Kerry you use them.
Who has the legs for this, and who should stay off the ridge
This suits somebody who walks all day and does not need entertaining afterwards. Six to nine hours on rough ground, four or five days out of nine, with a map and compass you can actually use when the cloud comes down to 500 m and the ridge stops being obvious. If you have had a long day in the Lake District or the White Mountains in foul weather and did not resent it, you know what this is.
It does not suit somebody who wants a stated distance and a stated finishing time; Kerry does not issue those. It does not suit a plan that collapses if two days of the nine are spent indoors. And it does not suit a party walking at two speeds, because the ridge sections have no exit in the middle: everyone moves at the pace of the slowest, or you split in the valley and meet at dinner.
It is a poor first mountain week. The main summit gets climbed in trainers most summer weekends, and some of those people are helped down. Nothing here is technical. All of it is unsigned, exposed and wet, which is a different problem and a slower one to learn.
What the money is, and how this office is paid
From $2,720 per person across nine nights. That covers both rooms with breakfast, the move of your bags over the pass on changeover day, and one guided day on the main ridge for the two of you. It does not cover your flights, which are yours to reserve and yours to change; a hire car, which you will want, at roughly $55 to $80 a day in summer; dinners; or a second guided day, about $430 for a party of two if you decide on the Tuesday that you want one.
The figure is a starting point, not a quotation. Room rates move with the season and a guide's rate moves with the day of the week, so the total is confirmed in writing before anything is held.
No money changes hands here. Nothing is charged in this office, no card details are kept in it, and every bill is settled in Kerry, in euro, with the person who owns the thing you are paying for. We are paid later by those suppliers, out of their side of it. You pay the same whether you ring here or ring them, which is worth knowing before you decide to do either.
Etre Super Travel is an independent agency in Kansas City, Missouri. Not a carrier, not a hotelier, not a shipping line, not an operator of tours, and tied to none of them.
Short answers to the usual doubts
Do you reserve the flights?
No. Seats on aircraft and berths on ships are not ours to sell, nobody who operates either has any agreement with us, and we would not want one. You choose the flights, you pay for them, and you move them when your plans move. Tell us the day you land and the first bed is set to match it. Most people use one of the two airports within ninety minutes of the valley and pick up a car there, and we will tell you which valley you are driving to and how long that takes at Irish speeds.
Do we need a guide on the ridge, and can you arrange one?
You do not need one for the ordinary route up the main summit in settled weather, and a great many people go up it every year without. For the connecting ridges, in cloud and on wet rock, most parties take one. We can arrange that. One day sits in the price and a second can be added later in the week. The people we ring are self employed, hold their own mountain qualifications and have firm views about your plan. If one of them tells you Thursday is a bad idea, that is the reason you rang.
What if the cloud sits on the ridge for all nine days?
Then you walk lower and you get wet. It happens. There are four low routes from the first bed and the whole waymarked stretch from the second, none of which needs the summits to be visible. Nobody moves your dates for weather, and no supplier returns money for a room because the ridge was in cloud; that is how it works everywhere in Ireland, and we are not going to suggest otherwise. What we can do is shift the guided day within the week, up to the evening before, so the day you paid for is spent on the ridge rather than under it.
Will you advise on insurance or on the paperwork for entering the country?
No, and not out of modesty. This office does not sell, arrange or advise on travel insurance, and it has nothing to do with passports, visas or entry requirements of any kind. Those belong to an insurer and to the relevant government, and an answer from us would be worth precisely nothing to you. We will tell you what a walking day in Kerry involves, what the rooms cost and how long the drive is. Anything in that other category goes straight back to you.