Mustering confidence, I fixed my mind on something random. I’d read somewhere that reciting your telephone number backwards during times of fear engaged a part of the brain that antagonistically quelled your fright cells; as I turned to face the rock and placed my foot on the first ledge a few feet down the crack, I shakily began to do it. Three points of contact at all times; look after your hands, and your feet will look after themselves. I could smell the murk of the rock as I pushed my face close to it, trying hard to make my entire world the crack before me and the narrow tube of rock at my feet I had to get down. No mountain, no drop – just this little ladder. Nothing else.
Concentrating on moving my hands to where my feet were, striking the rocks with the edge of my fist to check their stability, and mumbling my reverse phone number aloud with my exhales, I steadily made progress down the crack. I dropped down the last foot, landing squarely on the little platform. My heart audible in my ears, I took a deep breath and continued on down the ridge, not wanting to lose momentum until these dangers were passed.
I rejected the crest of the precarious rocky sail in favour of the lower grassy terrace, moving to the right of the ridge’s frightening-looking apex. Trying to move as smoothly as I could, I traced the skinny path with my eyes then followed it with my feet, taking care – great care – not to trip. Writhing cloud had now clogged the void to the right, momentarily taking away the psychological impact of the drop. It parted as I approached the end, and I caught the glint of the river far below and the edge of Beinn Dearg’s mighty south-west buttress. There it was: that memory, that feeling of height – the kind of feeling that hits you like a nine-iron to the back of the legs. It was exactly what I didn’t need at that precise moment, but I stayed focused for the last few feet of the traverse. Then suddenly it was over. I scrabbled over a few rocks onto a little ledge, and when I saw that the mountain was considerably tamer from here on and that there were no more surprises in store, I let out an audible groan of relief, crumpling against the rock, my legs buzzing, arms shaking, breathing rapidly. That had been unexpectedly hairy.
Although I wasn’t off yet and the descent was still going to be difficult, I now knew that I was going to get down. After that, dinner was going to taste particularly good. I might even have an extra beer to celebrate being able to have an extra beer.
But this was only the first. As it would go, fifteen more mountains lay ahead – each with its own challenge, its own particular conditions, feel and story to tell. Beinn Dearg wasn’t the hardest. It also wasn’t the highest. But for me this was the mountain I’d always associate with this feeling of height; of that elevated perspective you can only get from a mountain, and of the exhilaration and the fear that grips you by the stomach – the basic elements that make these places so special. In 1911 the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir wrote that ‘Nature, as a poet … becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains: beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.’
I rose, and as I did so I pushed my wet hair out of my face and felt a substantial deposit of sharp sandstone grit upon my forehead. Confused for a moment, I realised my hands had picked it up off the rock and I’d wiped it onto my brow every time I’d mopped it. I was literally sweating grit.
My eyes followed the rock at my feet up towards the ridge I’d just climbed. The stuff I was carrying down the mountain on my forehead, these mountains are made of it. That brown, course-grained sandstone is even named after the area best exhibiting it: Torridonian sandstone, they call it. The whole range has rocks made of this grit as their bedrock. It’s why Beinn Dearg is called Beinn Dearg: for the way the sun lights the brown sandstone and deepens it to red in the westerly glow of sunset. It’s famous for this.
But nobody ever tells you about the lichen. Brilliant white whorls of it, augmenting almost every rock. Unless you were on the hill you wouldn’t see it or know it was here. But up on the ridge it’s everywhere. It looks as if the mountain is pinned with white rosettes; silly little patches of prettiness adorning its hard skin.
* Which was of course said by ill-fated climber George Mallory at a lecture in 1923 when asked, ‘Why climb Everest?’ Nobody really knows what he meant, or even if he said exactly this; it could have been something profound, or it might simply have been irritation at the question. Either way, it has passed into history as the most famous three-word justification of the ostensibly pointless.
* Most famously, Sgùrr Dearg’s notorious ‘Inaccessible Pinnacle’ on the Isle of Skye. There are other summits in Britain – indeed, more on Skye – that require the use of a rope, and ability is of course subjective, but there are ways up most of our principal mountains without additional aid, certainly in summer.
It was May, and southern Britain was drowning. Winter had been hard, and spring hesitant to commit in its wake. The last six weeks had seen new lambs arrive along with the first, anaemic, blush of colour to the landscape; both were soon buried in snowdrifts. For mountain climbing, this didn’t bode well. Whilst such seasonal false starts were happening so dramatically in the valleys, the weather on the tops would be even more alarmingly fickle.
Six months after I returned from Torridon the thaw finally came – and with it rain, on a seemingly biblical scale. It was in between two of these May downpours that I went out to the garage to resume packing the bag I intended to take on the journey of sorts that, with the albeit damp foundations of spring firmly bedded, could now begin.
One of the most important aspects of this journey was my desire to see the mountains at their most wild, and experience their most extreme and dynamic moods. Happily, these conditions occurred every 24 hours without fail, and twice: sunrise and sunset. To really know a mountain you need to see it in all shades of the day and, preferably, at night – and in the high places of Britain contrasts are magnified far more than at sea level. A mountain feels intense and quite different in the dark. My plan, therefore, was to climb as many as I could at the frayed ends of the day, the time when the mountains lose the little civility they tolerate during the daylight and return to the wild. Where I could I’d sleep on them, drink from their streams, seek shelter amongst them and walk in all weathers. And whilst I’m not saying that I didn’t want to do the living-off-the-land thing and wander in with a stick, a cloak and a big knife (well, maybe I am), I was going in to enjoy the mountains, not survive them. But that still meant that a certain amount of kit was necessary.
It started out as a small bag; just the ascetic essentials for safety and warmth, crammed into a small rucksack that was light enough not to be an onerous burden, but fortified with enough to see me through any blip in the notoriously shifty mountain weather. I wanted it to be there, ready and packed – something I could stash in the car boot for deployment at any opportunity. As time passed, however, and I watched all manner of winter weather scrape by the window, additions inevitably began to creep in: another jacket, an extra pair of gloves, a second hat, my spare compass, the emergency map. There was, when walking at the extreme ends of the day, always the possibility of becoming cold or lost: and, as wild camping was on the cards, a tent – or bivvy bag, if I was feeling intrepid – a sleeping bag and a roll-mat needed to go in there, too. Now there was far too much for a little rucksack and so a larger rucksack was needed. And so on.
It’s