Benvironment

“Don’t you get scared?”

“Isn’t it cold?”

“What if a mad axe murderer is up there?”

“Why do you do it?  Why bother?”

I get asked all of those questions from time to time.  And truth be told, when I got all my ‘shit’ together last week it occurred to me that camping, though wonderful, is something of a mental hurdle for me.  Not for the above reasons though.

The photo I took of all the stuff I haul up with me illustrates the reason quite well though:

As you can see, there was a loooooot of stuff.  In winter months you can add ice axe and crampons, ski goggles, extra clothes etc.  It all adds up.  It all adds up into one big FAFF.  I seriously can’t abide faff.  I’d sooner just get out there and go!  But it’s the faff component that creates the mental hurdle.

To try and mitigate somewhat and avoid the constant pacing, puzzled expressions and the agonising lengthy groans of ‘ohhhh what do I need to take with me?’ as I’m trying to pack, years ago I made a checklist that I could just whizz through and be assured I had everything I’d need.

I was justly proud of my hastily scrawled kit list.  “I’ll laminate it!”, I thought.  I didn’t have a laminator of course…….so just made do with a torn piece of A4 that got progressively more torn over the years.  Then in 2009 I got access to a laminator…..but still didn’t laminate said list…..partly because I’m lazy and couldn’t be bothered, but also because I’d have had to laminate all the separate torn pieces by that point.  The result of my lazy indecision is I have now lost said list.  And that’s why late on Friday evening I was still doing my best Colin Jackson impression, hurdling away.

However, the thing that motivates me in spite of said hurdles is the promise of having the hills to myself.  TRULY to myself.  Day walks are great of course, and if you’re canny then you can plan a route that’s unlikely to pass other people, but even then there’s always a reluctance to descend at the end of the day as the light fades or the day draws to a close:

Consequently, as I walk away from the hills back to the car I find myself repeatedly looking behind me, snatching as many final glances as I can.  I want to etch the experience onto my eyeballs, sear it into my soul to squeeze every little drop of pleasure and gratification from the landscape I have been walking. 

Often the hills you’ve been walking will disappear from view long before you reach the car, obscured and finally hidden as you snake your way out of a glen.  So I’ll often pause for a final cup of tea before that happens, taking my time.  I’ll find a rock and sit on it, facing up at the the hills I’ve just walked to breathe them in……like this moment at the end of a walk near Killin in March this year:

All the while appreciating the shapes, the outlines, the beautiful fading light.  But I always envisage a tiny copy of me up there still, standing at the highest point and looking back down in return.  The way I’ve always viewed it is that I leave a part of me on every hill I tread.  The experience, the feeling, the highs, the lows, they are imprinted and last forever, and they are a tangible presence if you ever return to that spot.

Point is, I long to be up there at the end of the day after the world has gone home and the hills fall quiet.  It’s unlike anything else, being up there when you half think maybe you’re not supposed to be, and the experience is so profound as to make any hurdle worth hurdling.

Being stuck up on a mountain isn’t a natural state to be in of course, and it’s a curious thing to choose.  You’re stranded.  Darkness is falling, you’re far from home and there’s no help nearby.  There’s probably no mobile phone coverage.  There’s nothing except what you brought up with you on your back.  You’re utterly alone and at the mercy of the elements.

Sure, you COULD get off the hill if you were determined, if you were a competent navigator and you had a torch, but it’s a risky business on rough, pathless and steep terrain.  Yep, you are indeed stranded.  Willingly perhaps, but stranded nonetheless.

And yet as you ascend, as you plod across empty countryside while the sun falls towards the horizon, you are empowered by having your home on your back.  A snail crawling up the hillside, safe in the knowledge that no matter what happens you have a home to crawl into, a hot meal waiting and all manner of minor treats to sustain you…..depending on your preference of course.  Mine is a hip flask of single malt…..and an ipod.  On New Years Eve 2008/9 it was….erm….champagne:

Okay okay, so you’re a well-equipped snail with a modicum of luxury.  But the point is, you have the option to keep walking as long as you feel the desire, to stop wherever you get tired, to pitch your home if you happen upon the perfect spot, to stay outdoors long after conventional wisdom says you should be driving home.  In short, Freedom.

But where to pitch your home?  By a loch?  At the bottom of a glen?  Alongside a murmuring river?  Everyone will have their favoured spots but I am an unabashed ‘summit camper’.  I want to be right at the top……like this pitch from last October at the top of Gleouraich in the northwest Highlands:

If I’m going to haul a dead weight for miles over rough moorland I think I want a fitting reward.  Unrestricted access to a wild, lonely and humbling 360 degree view does the trick.

You needn’t camp at the very summit to get that of course.  You can pitch a wee way down, provided it’s just a few minutes’ walk or scramble to the top.  That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy pitches lower down or in forests or wotnot, just if I have a choice it’s summit every time.  Fewer biting beasties up there, aside from anything else!

Summit camping isn’t that popular though, I don’t think.  I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise but people generally like at reassuringly sheltered or well-serviced locations: by lakes or lochans, tucked behind boulders or ridges, close to a stream for water.  Maybe it’s the weather that puts people off the idea?  If so, they’ve got a point.

I realise now that I don’t go camping as much as I’d like precisely for that reason.  Frankly, the weather conditions in Scotland aren’t conducive to those kinds of shenanigans.  It happens very infrequently, being calm enough to be able to camp with confidence near a summit.  Perhaps just once every…ooooo….65 years? 

Those perfect conditions where you can camp without fear of a lightning strike, a storm, a blizzard, or being blown into the North Sea by hurricane force winds.  Some days, like this one on Beinn a’ Ghlo near Blair Atholl, you pretty much get all of those things:

Because let’s face it, the very summit of a hill probably isn’t the best place to be caught short.  It’s probably the most exposed place you could choose if and when things do go wrong.

But let’s work on the premise that things don’t go wrong….because indeed so far they haven’t.

<rubs rabbit’s foot>

Wherever I do pitch I always try to point west so that I can sit with the door open, out of the wind but in the sunshine, watching the sun sink below the horizon and soaking up the last warmth and light of the day……as I did in Moidart in April this year:

As it happened last week though, I didn’t quite manage summit camping this time around.  I had hoped to be able to get above 1200m on Aonach Beag, but the mossy vegetation was too shallow and there were only rocks to drive tent pegs into.  Nah.  But I also had a feeling in my gut that it wasn’t right on this occasion, and over the years I’ve learned to trust my nervous tinglings when I feel them, as there’s very little margin for error in a wild, remote location.

So I dropped down to about 1100m, still high certainly, and higher than most of the nearby peaks.  But not quite so exposed as it would have been on the broad summit plateau of Aonach Beag:

It mightn’t look it in the picture above, but it was a beautiful pitch with views down into Glen Nevis and over to Ben Nevis on one side:

Views across to the Grey Corries on the other:

…..and to the south were most of the Central and Southern Highlands laid out before me in an orderly pattern of silhouettes:

It was perfect.  It was calm too.  The wind was light but it was insistent enough to make itself felt as soon as the sun set.  Thereafter it was perishingly cold, but nothing that a tin of Stagg chili couldn’t remedy.

I’m a sucker for strict routine, and a tin of Stagg chili has been a staple ever since I happened upon it in a wee shop in Arisaig in 2008. I did flirt with luxurious curries from Marks & Spencer for a while but it was only a brief infidelity, and it’s been Stagg ever since:

I don’t doubt that at sea level, in a normal house setting it’s utterly vile.  But as anyone who has found themselves knackered and hungry in the hills knows full well, EVERYTHING tastes good at altitude and after exertion.  I’ve tried a few dinner combinations over the years but a tin of food, though a bit of extra weight, is a burden I’m happy to bear.

Then some hot tea…..some Cadbury Fruit ‘n’ Nut chocolate…..a wee nap……before heading outside to gaze at the stars.  Routine y’see.

One of my greatest joys of camping in the hills is stargazing: seeing the Milky Way in perfect definition, as was possible on Gleouraich (albeit too enormous to get in a photo):

…..or seeing the Plough as bright as you’ll ever see it.  Partly by virtue of the low population density and therefore low light pollution north of Edinburgh and Glasgow, but also because of the clearer air up there.  There were no shooting stars this time, but that’s rare.  Typically you’ll see a few, plus any number of satellites whizzing across the sky.

The moon was very bright last week though.  Bright enough to walk about outside without a torch:

….but the sky was still full of stars, and the Plough was present and correct, low in the sky above Aonach Beag:

These days in the UK it’s hard to find true darkness without venturing into the countryside at least……not that it’s something everyone wants to seek out, of course.

Way down in the glen below I could see two tiny lights moving slowly.  Headlamps of two walkers descending the slopes on the opposite side of the glen.  Had they planned to be out that late or were they caught short?  Either way, they had obviously been sensible enough to carry a torch with them, which has been in the news lately following a rush of mountain rescues across the country after the clocks went back. 

When those twinkling little lights finally went out…..there was nothing.  With Fort William hidden behind the bulk of Ben Nevis, there were no lights at all for miles in any direction.  If I walked out of the tent and peered over the cliff edge I could see the small handful of house lights in the small village of Roy Bridge, 10km away……but that was it.  Have you ever seen a massive night time vista in this country where there were no lights?  Think about it.  How often do any of us see that on an island as crowded as this?

For most of my camping trips though, the moon is the only light, and as often happens under high pressure, typically the conditions under which I go camping, fog crawls over the lochs and up the glens as the evening progresses.  It’s like a flood where someone has been holding back the cloud and then just lets it go.  This photo shows that very thing happening at Loch Quoich last year:

To begin with it creeps and swirls thousands of feet beneath you, ghostly white under soft moonlight before lurching upwards to completely fill the glens from bottom to top.  It extends its reach up the hillside like a flood of water in every sense and, though it moves slowly, it has purpose and you can actually see it approaching from below, rising towards you:

Then it will surge over the high passes like a wave:

……and often it will continue the surge until it envelops the summits themselves and swallows you up.  But the surge is usually brief and, like a receding tide, it quickly settles back down and leaves you a few hundred feet above the flood.  Above the cloud line.  Dark peaks pop through the white carpet like islands, more resembling the peaks of high mountains popping up through the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets than modest wee hills in Scotland:

And by then it’s either too dark or too cold to stay outside for too long, so you retire to the tent for the night.

“But isn’t it cold?”, people ask.  And…..”but what about the axe murderers!?”

Your comfort from this point onwards depends on your sleeping bag.  You MUST have a good sleeping bag.  If you’re not warm, you’ll spend the night in extreme discomfort and will rue the day you ever decided to camp at 1100m.

Opinion differs on whether you should wear your clothes or not in your bag.  I believe it’s more to do with the heat you’re emitting at the point of getting into your bag, so if you’re cold then you’ve less chance of warming it up.  Some people say you should do some brief exercise or jump up and down for a bit before getting into your bag.  That way you build up a heat and that energy is transferred to the bag itself.

Personally I’ve found the clothes-less option keeps the bag warmer than if you have clothes on, something to do with your body warming the bag rather than your clothes.  I won’t deny it feels completely counter-intuitive to strip down to almost nothing at 1100m, in November with a bone-numbing wind outside…..but honest to god, it works.  Have a nice hot flask of tea ready, and drink some once you’re in your bag.  Snug!

So, last week I was toasty.  I had some Bowmore whisky from Islay…..put the ipod on shuffle….and dozed in a fuzzy single malt haze.

Personally I don’t find it strange that my thoughts never once turn to the possibility that some crazed axe murderer might be roaming the summits at 11pm.

Others do though.  And it seems to be the main thing they focus on, the possibility of criminality or harm in the hills.  I ALWAYS feel safe when I’m camping in the wild.  It’s a different matter if you’re somewhere like Glastonbury or T in the Park, obviously.  Or even at a camp site to be honest.  But criminals want to take things for free.  The less effort required, the better.

To even get to a remote location in the hills you need to pay with energy and exertion, and I can’t see any potential criminals doing that.  Course, an insane axe murderer might not be restricted by such things…….’cause they’re insane, right?  They don’t conform to the laws of sanity.  They’ll do anything!  But still, it never enters my mind.  I feel completely safe.  My only enemy is myself, if I’ve forgotten something or foolishly cut corners.

So, now that I’m content about my safety, as the hours press on and the rest of the country settles down in front of the latest Simon Cowell-sponsored freakshow, I start to wonder whether I’m in the highest person in the UK this evening.  There is no land higher than 1085m in England, Wales or Northern Ireland.  And in Scotland there aren’t many hills higher than 1100m.  The chances of there being anyone else in Scotland, at that moment camped at the very top of a hill are exceedingly slim.  In all likelihood, I am the highest person in the UK. 

It’s a silly thing to think perhaps, and maybe it says all kinds of weird things about me for one reason or another.  I’m sure there’s someone reading this thinking ‘oh dear, he just wants to be able to look down on everyone’ ;-)

Regardless of the reason it is a wonderful realisation.  That you, out of a population of 60 million, could physically be the highest person in the country at that moment. There’s nobody else above you.  Nobody else is sleeping at that height.  It reinforces the sense that you’re doing something extreme and different.  That it’s special and unique.

Last week my single malt haze was rudely interrupted in the early hours of the morning by the wind.  No, it wasn’t the chili.  The wind outside was really starting to pick up and the tent was beginning to shake. 

It then started snowing.  Not much, but snow nonetheless and it sounded odd on the tent, like someone throwing rice at it.  Barely a few millimetres fell but coupled with the stengthening wind it signalled it could be a wild night.

And it was.  The wind didn’t gust.  It just blew constant and strong and relentless.  The tent shaking was now starting to shake me too (nooooo, I’ve already said it wasn’t the chili!), but surprisingly I managed to get my best sleep during those few hours.  A peek out of the tent though revealed a thick swirling fog.  Oh dear.  I started to wonder whether I had pitched in a bad location…..but my Terra Nova tent, made in GB, has seen me right in gales before and has never let me down.  The rest of the night passed in nervous anticipation……but by 6am the tent had stopped shaking, though the wind was still strong.

At dawn the cloud was boiling among the peaks, giving fleeting glimpses of a crimson red horizon.  Those first moments of sunrise, viewed from up on high, are unlike a sunrise at lower levels.  The line of colour is amazingly narrow, with a steep gradient from red through yellow and beyond to dark blues and black, and to start with you have no real sense of where the sun is going to emerge:

Soon you see a rapidly reddening spot that grows more intense, until the first sunlight peers over the horizon:

……and strikes the peaks around you.  Formerly black hills burn red, and that redness slowly descends down the summits as the sun rises, until the rocks around you and all of the highest peaks you can see are aflame:

This effect is most beautiful in winter when the ‘alpenglow’ turns the snow bright pink:

Sadly the rising sun’s reddening effect was limited last week, as the swirling cloud had yet to clear and was obscuring the Mamores to the south.  Nevertheless, the resulting maelstrom was a treat:

It warms up amazingly quickly once the sun is out, but I didn’t feel it this time as the wind was so cold.  Time for porridge!  Another staple of the Ben Routine.  Oats are light, so it’s no weight to bring with you, and it’s incredibly easy to make.  Top it off with brown sugar and it’s the perfect start to the day, sitting in your sleeping bag, door open, stunning sunrise happening before your eyes.

Thereafter comes the only bit of the whole experience I don’t particularly enjoy.  Packing up.  If it’s windy or wet then you have to be quick.  You have to pack as much up as you can whilst still inside your tent, and then it’s a race against the elements to take your tent down and pack it and your other contents away in your bag before they get soaked or they blow away.  If it’s dry and calm then so much the better.  It’s almost enjoyable.  Midsummer’s Day 2009, on Glas Maol above Glen Shee:

It was easily done this time however, and as you remove the tent you see only a faint imprint of where you’ve been.  As the wonderful maxim goes, take only photographs, leave only footprints……or more typically, take only photographs, leave only arse-prints……of where you’ve been sleeping.

It’s a strangely satisfying thing though, walking away from your pitch and there being nothing there.  And yet you spent the whole night there in comfort, have been fed and watered.  It’s remarkable really.

From that point on it’s a care-free trot along empty ridges and hills.  Of course, the fact that you can be out and walking before anyone has even set foot on the hills way down below is an ENORMOUS attraction of the whole thing.

The morning light can be so outrageously beautiful, with the low sun casting sharp shadows and rendering everything ten times as vivid.  The flanks of Aonach Beag were resplendent in the morning light last week:

I was even lucky enough to get a brocken spectre as I was crossing Aonach Beag’s summit plateau.  These curious apparitions occur when your shadow is cast onto cloud or thin vapour below you.  It was gone in an instant, but I did manage to photograph one a few years back on Beinn Ime:

To be out at that hour, walking the summits alone, is an utter privilege.  It gives you a glimpse of another world.  You get to see how the hills wake up each morning, with ravens doing aerial somersaults between rock towers, ptarmigan croaking somewhere nearby, and deer bellowing in the glens below.  It’s humbling.

Last week I had the Aonachs to myself.  They’re both popular hills so it’s quite an achievement.  The ground was frosty where the snow had frozen, so it was slow-going over rocks covered with a sheen of ice, but the high-level walk from Aonach Beag to Aonach Mor was mostly grassy and flat:

…..and offered stunning view of Ben Nevis and Carn Mor Dearg to the west, complete with freaky clouds beginning to form:

Way down below, cloud and fog still obscured the Great Glen:

And in no time at all I was at the summit of Aonach Mor with its tatty cairn jammed with ski poles, looking back to Aonach Beag, my home for the night just gone:

As I say, I am reluctant to descend, especially when the weather is as glorious as this.  But with all the rain we’ve had recently the chances were it would be a boggy walk-out, so I decided not to linger too long.  I therefore headed down the outrageously steep and loose slopes of Aonach Mor:

….down into the surprisingly wild and grand Coire Guibhsachan:

This really is a stunning corner of the Highlands.  Tucked away above Glen Nevis, you’d never know it was there:

And yet it’s HUGE in its scale and drama, with the steep flanks of Ben Nevis and Aonach Beag tumbing down on each side.  Just amazing:

And yes of coooooourse it was boggy…..but this is Scotland, after all.

I also passed a few people, two of whom are visible in the above photo (just above the right-most kink in the river).  The first people I’d seen since leaving the car park the day before.  They were heading up the coire, up the route I’d descended.  “Good luck to ‘em”, I thought.  It was already 11:30am and they were at least two hours away from the summits.  I doubted they’d be safely back in the glen before nightfall.  Oh well, hopefully they too had torches.

A return through the gorge at the head of Glen Nevis took me past waterfalls hidden from the path:

….and past ones not-so-hidden:

From the beautiful Steall Waterfall (above) it was less than 30 mins back to the car park, and so ended another wonderful camping experience:

Well if you got through to the very end of these musings, I commend you, and I hope I’ve sold the idea of camping in our beautiful hills to you.

I won’t pretend that conditions are perfect EVERY time though.  Many people don’t even wait for good weather, they love camping so much they’ll just head out regardless.  But whatever conditions you get, the memories stay with you forever.