Find, plan, and share your adventures with komoot.
12
Features
The outdoors is awash with lists and must-dos, but what's the point?
Mark Bullock
18 THE MISSING LINK
Understanding why lynx roam the forests of Slovenia again Carmen Kuntz
24 KNOW BEFORE YOU GO
10 things to consider before your first expedition
Alex Metcalfe
28 THE APPROACH
A personal account of finding place in the mountains
Adam Raja
34 LET MY DISABLED PEOPLE GO SURFING
The challenges of disabled access on our coastlines
Hannah Dines
Features
38 A ROLLING COMMUNITY
We hear from the riders of the 2022 Women’s Torino-Nice Rally Gaby Thompson
44 MENTAL MOUNTAINS
Grappling with depression amidst a life spent in big alpine environments Matt Glenn
48 TRAIL CONNECTIONS
Finding community, companionship and a change of pace in the Highlands of Scotland Hannah Mitchell
52 NAVIGATING BY THE STARS
Learn to navigate the open oceans using the night sky William Thompson
58 ATLANTIC ROCK
Establishing new routes on St Kilda, home to the UK’s tallest sea cliffs Will Birkett
Features
64 66°30 ′ N
Amongst ice giants on the first SKIRR Adventures expedition SKIRR Adventures
68 SWAT VALLEY SKI SCHOOL
Finding connection on a ski mountaineering expedition in Pakistan Tom Grant Regulars
10 BASE NOTES
The latest in adventure BASE
74 MAKERS AND INNOVATORS
How a small player in the feather industry changed the game forever Chris Hunt
Mark Bullock
Carmen Kuntz
Miha Krofel
Alex Metcalfe
Adam Raja Hannah Dines
Gaby Thompson
Editor Chris Hunt
Digital Writer and Sub-Editor Hannah Mitchell
Designer Benn Withers
Publishing Director Emily Graham
Social Media Manager Sam Andrews
Rue Kaladyte Weronika Szalas Matt Glenn Hamish Frost Matt Buckley Amelia Le Brun William Thompson
Tom Grant
Aaron Rolph
Dr Matthew Fuller
Fay Manners
Silvan Metz
Kat Bennett Ewan Harvey
Brand Director Matthew Pink
Publisher Secret Compass
Enquiries hello@base-mag.com
Submissions submissions@base-mag.com Advertising emily@base-mag.com
COVER: Robbie Phillips climbing a perfect gabbro splitter crack during the first ascent of The Last Queen of Scotland on the cliffs of Soay. Full story page 58.
I’ve often found that the most authentic and deep-running friendships I have were forged in the outdoors. Sure enough, it could simply be down to the meeting of like-minded souls, but I’d argue it has more to do with the experiences than the individuals.
Spending time outdoors allows many of us to shake free of the stresses of everyday life. It can be the perfect leveller as it deconstructs the social barriers we form that block authentic connection. It’s here that we’re often exposed to communities and individuals with whom we’d otherwise have little chance of interaction; where we might be thrown into strange, sometimes intimate situations. Add to the mix genuine vulnerability of unfamiliar grounds, the shared ups and downs of challenge and the camaraderie of struggle, and the bonds established in these environments can be extremely powerful.
In almost any capacity, time spent outdoors also connects us to the environment, be it our immediate surrounding landscapes or through aspirations of reaching somewhere far-flung. Temporarily, we’re immersed in an ecosystem, we become acutely aware of its nuances, the wildlife that inhabits it, of our impact and the threats we pose. In this process we’re taught environmental custodianship in a way that’s hard to match.
And, of course, perhaps most importantly, adventure is a means through which we connect with ourselves. As cliché as it may sound, a simple adventure can throw up all
the highs and lows of life, compressed into a much shorter time frame. Days outside can feel like weeks and provide us with genuine learning experiences and a gateway into the depths of our own minds we may not otherwise access. It’s often through adventure that we find what it is we’re really capable of.
And so, in all its forms and interpretations, it’s this theme of connection in the outdoors that flows through the following pages.
In The Approach, Adam Raja talks candidly about the challenges of adolescence, coming of age in the suburbs of Glasgow. Sharing the route which later led him to finding connection to the mountains he barely knew existed until his 20s, he draws on the parallels and the stark juxtaposition of a life spent in both environments. In The Missing Lynx, Carmen Kuntz explores the complex and important role of hunters and how, in Slovenia, they enabled the reintroduction of the lynx.
Will Birkett recounts an expedition to the Hebridean archipelago of St Kilda in Atlantic Rock, and, in Mental Mountains, Matt Glenn writes candidly about his own battles with mental health and the role alpine environments have played throughout his life.
Looking back on a ski mountaineering expedition in northern Pakistan, in Swat Valley Ski School, Tom Grant recounts how introducing skiing to the local team of porters, bonded an international team; and in Rolling Community, we experience the powerful bonds formed during the Women's Komoot Torino-Nice Rally.
You’ll learn how to navigate the open oceans by the stars in William Thompson’s fantastic guide, and Hannah Dines discusses what it means for open spaces to really be open and the barriers that still exist for disabled people in Let My Disabled People Go Surfing
In Mark Bullock’s In Favour of Ticklists, he debates his own methods in connecting to wild spaces and the relevance of route guides and indexes in an activity so aligned with freedom; and in Trail Connections, Hannah Mitchell finds companionship, whilst hiking the inaugural Fjällräven Classic in Scotland.
Here at BASE, we're also on the lookout to build on existing connections and to create new ones too. We're growing and we're looking to connect with investors passionate about our space to come on an adventure with us. Turn to page 80 for more information.
Thanks to all the legends who have helped piece this issue together and all the contributors who have entrusted their stories to us. As ever, we hope you’ll find something to inspire you to spend more time outdoors, something which can be particularly challenging but ever important at this time of year.
Enjoy the issue.
Hunt, BASE Editor
Tragedy struck the outdoor and adventure community on the 26th of September, as renowned ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson lost her life in an accident on Manaslu in the Himalayas.
Nelson was reported missing after she, along with partner Jim Morrison, summited the world’s eighth highest mountain in ‘tough conditions’. Nelson was swept off her feet and carried down a narrow snow slope by a small avalanche that was triggered as she followed Morrison down the mountain. Rescue efforts were initially hampered by bad weather, and Nelson’s body was found two days later at around 6,700m on the south face of the 8,163m peak.
Nelson became the first woman to summit both Everest and Lhotse within 24 hours in 2012, made the first female descent of Makalu Couloir in 2015, and in 2018 was awarded the National Geographic Adventurer of the Year award for the first ski descent of the Lhotse Couloir, accompanied by Morrison.
She leaves behind two children, a loving partner in Jim, and a hard-earned, impressive legacy on the highest mountains on Earth.
Surfing Prescribed by the NHS Trials by academics from University College London are underway to determine the effectiveness of social prescribing in combatting mental health issues. NHS Mental Health Trusts in 10 parts of England will offer activities including surfing, dancing and gardening to 600 young people aged 11 to 18 who are currently on their waiting lists for further care.
Dr Daisy Fancourt, the UCL mental health expert leading the trial, believes that social prescribing has ‘enormous potential’.
‘Young people’s mental health is one of the greatest challenges facing the NHS,’ she said. ‘Currently many young people referred to child and adolescent mental health services face long waits, during which time more than three-quarters experience a deterioration in their mental health. Social prescribing has the potential to support young people while they wait, by providing access to a range of creative and social activities that could enhance their confidence, self-esteem and social support networks.’
On October 18, 23-year-old Jasmine Harrison arrived in John O’Groats having completed the 900-mile swim along the entire west coast of Britain. Setting off on July 1st, Jasmine spent more than 110 days in the sea, swimming approximately two kilometres from the shore.
Spending as much as 12 hours in the water at a time, the maximum distance she swam in a shift was 14 nautical miles. The most distance she covered in a day was a staggering 27 nautical miles (31 miles or 50km).
Harrison endured multiple painful jellyfish stings to her hands and face, hair-raising night encounters with whales, navigated her way through busy shipping lanes and avoided military exercises during the swim. She experienced painful blisters caused by chafing in her wetsuit and a condition known as salt mouth, where salt builds up in the mouth, throat and on the tongue, eventually stripping skin from the areas.
In October, Cycling UK launched its sixth route, the Rebellion Way. The 232 mile tour of Norfolk starts and ends in the city of Norwich covers a varied mix of country lanes, bridleways, byways, cycle paths and forest tracks.
The charity has designed the route as an entry point for people interested in multi-day bikepacking trips and should be suitable for anyone with reasonable fitness on a variety of bikes, but believes experienced bikepackers will also be pleasantly surprised by the variety and challenges the route presents.
Designed to be ridden over four to six days in one go, the route can also be comfortably split in half at King's Lynn with easy onwards transport links.
Located in the east of the Cairngorms, Garbh Choire Mór is the snowiest corrie in Scotland. Carved out by a glacier during the last ice age, today it’s home to a stubborn patch of snow historically understood to be the last standing in the UK.
Situated beside a climbing route known as The Sphinx , it’s believed to have only completely disappeared nine times in the past 300 years. After the sustained heatwaves of this summer, likely to be a result of climate change, 2022 became the fourth year the snow has melted completely in the last six, with scientists warning of a bleak future for Scotland’s snow.
Making lists of outdoor objectives may seem somewhat at odds with the freedom of adventure, but for Mark Bullock it’s been a medium through which to broaden his exploration.
Hi, my name is Mark, and I’m a list-a-holic. But what’s more – before you scoff – I think you might be too.
Allow me to elaborate. If you’re passionate about spending time outside in the hills, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll have some sort of a list, however arbitrary, a bucket list or just a mentally-noted intention. There’s a good chance you have at least one mountain you really want to scramble up, some dream routes you’d love to climb, an idyllic tarn you dream of swimming in, or a classic horseshoe you’d like to run around.
For many of us, moments in the outdoors can be something of an epiphany. For those who discover it later in life, the newfound passion can feel so powerful and lifechanging, that the desire to absorb and immerse ourselves in the hills can feel all-encompassing.
That was the case for me at least. As if making up for lost time, I devoured outdoor magazines and literature with a ravenous curiosity. I discovered a new vernacular and terminology. I kept stumbling into phrases like Munro bagging and couldn’t decipher the code. This new world of gaiters, Rømer scales and map cases seemed somewhat nerdy to me, but I couldn’t resist the desire to clamber my way up as many mountains as my knees would allow.
There was soon a list of mountains. I was told I had to ‘do’ Crib Goch, that I really needed to ‘do’ Tryfan.
How absurd that felt at the time, this concept of consuming a mountain, and moving it from your in-tray to your done pile; it felt so disposable. I suppose it’s a notion more aligned with today’s modern attention spans, but I didn’t want to ‘do’, or even have ‘done’ Crib Goch. I wanted to experience it, not for a tick, but for the views, the thrill of the position, and hopefully as part of a lush afternoon around the horseshoe, maybe creating some memories with a dear friend.
But equally, I also knew as an enthusiastic newcomer, that there were just so many hills I really wanted to climb ASAFP. There were so many exciting mountains out there. From that perspective I could, at least in part, understand why you might have ‘done’ any given hill, and moved on to focus your energies on other objectives. I certainly did feel like I needed to go to Skye (rather for instance, than go to Snowdonia yet again). And Torridon, Mont Blanc, and many, many others. So picking a good day, and a good route up, came to mean really savouring a mountain before turning attention elsewhere.
The more I read, the longer the list grew. The outdoors, it seemed, was absolutely awash with lists. Welsh 3000ers, Seven Summits, National Trails, County Tops, Dodds and Corbetts, Munros and Marilyns. Reader-voted top 100s
“I’m still captivated by the way the wind plays with a waterfall, or how the clouds flow over a connecting ridge.”L-R: Neil Badavi coming off Hall's Fell Ridge (Blencathra) after Bob Graham Leg 1; View towards Nethermost Pike, from Striding Edge; Sail Beck in autumn tones, Buttermere; Looking across Martindale, from Steel Knotts.
and top 50s broken down into specific geographical regions. There was a lot to digest.
Back in those early B.C. years (before climbing), I allowed myself to go off on tangents, trying out the different mountaineering genres for size. Winter mountaineering, fell running, bouldering, trad climbing, ice climbing, these disciplines all had their own must dos, whether it be a question of aesthetics, challenge or even notoriety. So the lists grew longer, and more varied.
As the passion settled though and I became more familiar with my own personal tastes and techniques in the mountains, certain lists came to the fore, while others were
“I also knew as an enthusiastic newcomer, that there were just so many hills I really wanted to climb ASAFP.”
marginalised. Once I’d found out what it was, I knew I wasn’t a Munro Bagger – that I thought I would save for when my body had had enough of climbing (yes, that’s right, organising one's mountaineering career around lists). But I could be a Hard Rock ticker, that sounded sexy and seductive and I pored over the pages of Ken Wilson’s famous climbing tomes. Equally, I would like, while the flame burned brightly, to do some of the very classical or iconic adventures before I hung up my mountaineering boots: I’d like to scale the Matterhorn, traverse the Black Cuillin Ridge, perhaps climb Half Dome.
There was a problem though. Each genre possessed its own lists, and in opening up a new list, or becoming aware of
completing a substantial chunk of any given list, I’d acquire the admittedly OCD, anally retentive desire to finish it. I’d have to prioritise my focus.
I’ll give you an example. Some years ago I ticked one off the bucket list by completing a Bob Graham Round. Starting and finishing at Moot Hall in Keswick, this entails travelling by foot over 42 prescribed Lakeland peaks, in under 24 hours. If you do this with witnesses you earn the right to join the Bob Graham Club and you get a certificate (yes, I am a grown up and my 25m breast-stroke certificate from St. Gregory’s is no longer on my wall, but I remain proud of my BG certificate and Club membership!).
Completing that Round had taken months of effort, and not just the training – but with multiple weekend trips to the Lakes for recce runs and gaining an intimate familiarity with the route. By the time I finished, I had climbed the same 42 fells five or six times each. It almost goes without saying that there are dozens of other beautiful hills in the Lakes, and so on subsequent trips I thought I should experience some of the others. I was very definitely done with Skiddaw. Six times I’d expended the energy to climb it from Keswick. That relentless inclined rubble-strewn treadmill was pretty uninspiring and I begrudged the idea of doing it again, when I could be spending my energies on other mountains. So I started running little loops of Wainwrights.
The Wainwright Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, are a beautiful set of pocket books lovingly hand illustrated and written by Alfred Wainwright. Unlike Munros (Scottish mountains over 3000 feet catalogued by Sir Hugh Munro) the Wainwright list is definitive. Modern mapping technology has changed the Munro list several times over the years and people have quibbled over the amount of elevation,
MAIN: Neil admiring the glaciation of Mickleden, from Stake Pass.
INSET: Zoe Wood on Hard Rock tick A Dream of White Horses.
declination or separation between peaks – for example, what actually constitutes a neighbouring peak being regarded as a different mountain? With Wainwright's books, the hills are either featured, or they’re not. So his 214 chosen fells felt like a nice goal as part of ongoing, loving pilgrimages to the Lakes. A way to see new views, areas, have fresh adventures, to literally broaden my horizons, and to carry on enjoying running in the home of fell running.
But on two occasions my quest was forced into question. The first, was when I’d taken a non-climbing friend up the photogenic Pinnacle Ridge on St. Sunday Crag. At the top of the jagged toothed ridge after packing away the rope, we made our way along the shoulder of the mountain where the ridge meets the whaleback top of the fell, and he turned left to walk back to the car, as I turned right to go to the top of the hill. A philosophical debate ensued.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the top of the hill.’
‘What for?’
‘To go to the top of the mountain.’
‘Come on mate, you’ve climbed your ridge, let’s get to the pub.’
‘But we’re not at the top of the hill.’
‘Mate, it’s right there. 200 metres walk away. Do you need to prove something to yourself? An ego thing? All that walking over there to that pile of stones and then walking back here to me is going to achieve is that we’ll be having our shandy 10 minutes later. Come on: Pub.’
‘But…’
‘Mate it’s not Everest, you don’t need to stand on the tippytop! Look, I’ll give you this one, okay?’
‘But I’m not at the top, and if we take your logic then I may as well say I’ve climbed all the Lake District fells because they’re all just walks and of course I know I can walk them, but I haven’t, so I’m going to.’
He stood obstinately while I dropped my bag and jogged to the top of St. Sunday Crag, and then back to him. I shouldered my pack for the walk down.
‘Happy now? You’ve lost it,’ he said. ‘I thought it was supposed to be about adventures with friends. It’s getting a bit… puerile isn’t it?’
A year later with a less contentious friend, I was walking a circuit of Wainwrights near Blencathra. It was a very dreich day, spent entirely in the clag from Sharp Edge until we descended via Doddick Fell. It wasn’t raining but the air was just wet. Like walking through skimmed milk. Bannerdale Crags was a very nondescript summit. We ate a sandwich and then, hastened by the chill, set off for Bowscale Fell. When we got there, my less contentious friend did still, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, query the slight absurdity of our afternoon.
‘So let me get this straight: We’ve just walked from one point to another, with no noticeable change to the view,
or terrain underfoot, purely to satisfy your desire to have climbed both hills. An out-and-back walk that was completely unremarkable – not that you weren’t lovely company the entire way – but that served no obvious purpose aside from you being stood on one grid reference, and then, on another, with all the varied views of the inside of a ping-pong ball. And now, mission accomplished, we can go down? It’s… well it’s a little odd. Isn’t it?’ I had to concede, she had a point. The lack of view certainly added to the hollow sensation of merely being in a slightly different place on the map.
As I write, I’ve done 189/214 Wainwrights, 41/282 Munros, 10/61 Hard Rock routes (from Ken Wilson’s 1974 book Hard Rock), 45/83 Classic Rock routes (from the 1978 book Classic Rock from the same author), 29/50 routes from the West Country Rockfax Top 50, 15/82 Alpine 4000m Peaks and still have all six of Starlight and Storm (the great north faces of the Alps) to do. I know all this because [cringe] I have an app which I use to record and track my progress. I’m subscribed to seven ticklists on my UKC Logbook, including the esoteric Parois de Legend (120 of the nicest multi-pitch climbs in the world) – which is certainly not getting completed any time soon.
I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten the names of some of the hills I’ve climbed, which wasn’t always the case. For many years I was great at identifying mountains from photos, even from lesser-known viewpoints. But while maxing out the memory is a price I’m prepared to pay, it’s also the case that there’s a point where the desire for more does perhaps in the end dilute the experience.
But despite having more lists than I can reasonably keep track of, let alone hope to complete, I can honestly say I’m immensely thankful for the new places those lists have taken me, whether that be days out with various lovely people or solo. I’ve taken some nice photographs, adored coming eye-to-eye with raptors in flight, been hypnotised by Brocken spectres and cloud inversions and cherished fleeting encounters with deer. I’m still captivated by the way the wind plays with a waterfall, or how the clouds flow over a connecting ridge.
Additionally, I’ve come to realise something I perhaps already knew: You haven’t done the Lakes when you’ve completed the Wainwrights. Even when you’ve been up all the hills, there are various other routes up the same hills, and other seasons to experience them in. If you really love a mountain then be sure to see your favourite hill in its autumn colours as well as its winter coat. There are more than enough ways to experience the same mountain range to bring a lifetime of happiness.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed stepping off the beaten track and learning about new valleys, views, villages and pubs. Cor! A list of the best mountain pubs in the UK… I wonder if anyone has thought of that? Anyway, I digress. If you’ll excuse me I really must get on. I’ve got things to do.
“The more I read, the longer the list grew. The outdoors, it seemed, was absolutely awash with lists.”
Hunters are the reason that lynx roam the forests of Slovenia again
Using hiking poles like antennae, we feel our way through the thick beech forest trying to stay on the winding hiking path. It’s pitch black. We chased the setting sun up the mountain road behind our home, catching it at the trailhead, watching the orange orb drop behind the mountains and the last rays of sun reflect off our extended backyard and Slovenia’s Soča River Valley.
An unusual hour for a hike, my boyfriend Rok and I finished work late and decided to spend the night in our sleeping bags under the stars on a local mountain. Rok will fly home in the morning (with the help of his paraglider), and I’ll run down to the car and meet him at home some 1500m below. We weave around the grey-white karst limestone boulders that are the main ingredient for the Julian Alps, of northwestern Slovenia. After I almost lead us off the trail for a third time, we surrender our night vision and switch on headlights.
Scanning the forest for the boisterous dormice that squeak and squeal from the trees in autumn, Rok’s eyes catch the glow of another pair of eyes. A big pair. Too wide-set to be a wild cat or fox. Too close together to be a deer. And they don’t disappear into darkness like a deer or fox would. The eyes flash behind tree trunks, then find a perch above us with a deep karst gulley separating us. They watch us and we watch them. Rok sneaks up the trail and from the side angle of my headlight glow, catches a glimpse of a stubby tail. ‘Carm… I think it’s a lynx!’
Story by | Carmen Kuntz Photos by | Miha KrofelScanning the forest for the boisterous dormice that squeak and squeal from the trees in autumn, Rok’s eyes catch the glow of another pair of eyes. A big pair. Too wide-set to be a wild cat or fox. Too close together to be a deer. And they don’t disappear into darkness like a deer or fox would. The eyes flash behind tree trunks, then find a perch above us with a deep karst gulley separating us. They watch us and we watch them. Rok sneaks up the trail and from the side angle of my headlight glow, catches a glimpse of a stubby tail. ‘Carm… I think it’s a lynx!’
In Canada – where I come from – encountering a feline in the mountains is frightening, not exciting. Especially in the dark. The British Columbia backcountry is home to cougars, so my instinct is to make noise; scare it away and keep moving. But Rok once told me that lynx have recently returned to the landscapes of Slovenia, after being extirpated over the 19th century. So, I abandon my Canadian backcountry training and steady my light on the cat, enjoying the jittery feeling inside that comes from being in the presence of such a regal animal. After a few minutes, it slips away, dissolving into the darkness. We walk on in silence and awe.
Two days later, I’m back on the same trail heading to the same spot, this time during daylight. Our friend Tilen Hvala and I hike up the mountain forests, the crunch of fall leaves under foot. We are looking for confirmation that it was indeed a lynx. A trace of hair, or a recent kill could provide proof –but after a day delay due to heavy rain, our chances are even slimmer than usual. ‘It’s very rare to find something,’ says Tilen as we check a wide radius around the boulder where the eyes were perched. Tilen is a forester and a local hunter, he said the description and behaviour of the animal we saw is
consistent with that of a lynx. A fox or wild cat would have fled immediately. But lynx are curious. ‘It could be passing through the area hunting dormice, but it could be hanging around if it made a larger kill.’
Tilen is employed by the Slovenian Hunting Association but he would never hunt lynx with a rifle, only his camera. ‘Lynx was a species that interested me well before I became a hunter. It’s a very mysterious and charismatic species that only a few people have the privilege to see,’ he tells me. His job is to help a team of researchers monitor and track lynx, while working directly with hunters to educate them. He also works with the police to improve the prosecution and sanctioning of illegal killing of lynx and other protected wildlife.
‘When I hunt, I feel I am deeply connected with nature and my actions become part of the processes that occur naturally in ecosystems,’ he explains as we walk. ‘Of course, hunting also gives you the ability to bring home the healthiest possible meat, which is highly important to me.’ He is both hunter and
conservationist, and while that might seem contradictory, hunters are actually the reason that lynx roam the forests of Slovenia again.
The Eurasian lynx is a wildcat, easily distinguished by the long tufts of black hair on the tips of its ears, red-brown coat with black spots, long legs, thick webbed paws and…a telltale short tail. The limestone rock formations and thick coniferous and deciduous forests of Slovenia are prime habitat for lynx, who thrive in healthy forests with ample hiding and stalking opportunities. But despite its wide distribution – which can range from most parts of Europe to Central Asia and from Siberia to the Tibetan Plateau – it is threatened by habitat fragmentation and poaching, the reason they disappeared from Slovenia and many other European countries.
Today, Tilen is carrying on the important, and some would think unlikely role of Slovenian hunters, that started in the 1970s when a rare opportunity to bring lynx back to the forests of Slovenia – and ultimately Europe – was pounced upon.
In 1973 Yugoslavia, the Slovenian hunter and forester, Maks Konečnik, took a wealthy Swiss hunter, Karl Weber, roe deer hunting in the forests of the Dinaric Alps. Comparable to the Carpathian Mountains in ruggedness, this wild mountain range stretches for over 650km from Italy, through Slovenia and the Balkans all the way to Albania. While trekking through the dense, virgin beech and fir forest, Karl commented that these wild forests would have been where lynx once roamed. He then made a bizarre and surprising offer to the local hunter. ‘If you are ready to bring back and settle lynx (in Slovenia), I will finance it.’
Hunting is an old and respected tradition in Slovenia. Much like hiking and mountaineering, it has deep roots that go back before Yugoslavia. The small country is divided into over 400 hunting grounds, each managed by a ‘hunting family.’ Hunters must undergo rigorous training, follow specific rules including attending lectures and carrying out volunteer work each year. In Slovenia, hunters are the protectors of the forests and are directly involved in managing wildlife populations. They allow people and nature to coexist in overlapping landscapes with minimal negative interactions. They ensure Grandma’s garden doesn’t get eaten by an overpopulation of deer, and that corn fields aren’t decimated by wild boar while also ensuring wildlife have the space and resources to thrive in healthy numbers. Sure, hunters also hunt for the meat and any deer or boar that gets shot, gets eaten. ‘We (hunters) are in charge of protecting all indigenous animals,’ said Maks in response to the Swiss hunter’s offer. ‘If we don’t jump on this opportunity, then we are not needed.’
It was a visionary move at the time and true to his word, Karl paid for six Carpathian lynx to be translocated from the Czech Republic to Slovenia in January 1973. Hunters worked with the national forestry institute before, during and after the release, and today the European Union-funded Lynx LIFE project, which Tilen is a project advisor for, is continuing their work.
Tilen and I didn’t find any sign of that late-night lynx. But the sighting provided researchers with valuable information, as this would be the second lynx sighting in this region since the inception of the Lynx LIFE project. A couple weeks later, I’m in the office of Urša Fležar, a biologist and monitoring expert with the project. We sit down in front of her large computer monitor where GPS points are sprinkled in clusters on a map of Slovenia. Her desk has neat piles of camo-patterned motion sensor cameras; camera traps, the tools of her trade.
TOP LEFT: Fast food. During translation, lynx spend time in holding pens – to rest, gain strength and acclimatise – before being released into a new region. This offers researchers a chance for close up photography of these elusive carnivores. MAIN: Seeing a lynx in the wild is almost impossible, as they can easily blend in the natural habitat and avoid people. If only we knew how many times they notice us without us knowing it…
INSET, LEFT: Mist weaves through the rolling hills of the Dinaric Alps. These dense beech-fir forests host rich communities of mammals, with the lynx, wolf and bear at the top of the food chain.
INSET, RIGHT: Covered in moss, the deadwood and rocks offer ideal ambush cover for lynx. As a stealth predator, it must approach its prey unnoticed, making as little noise as possible.
“Hunting is an old and respected tradition in Slovenia. Much like hiking and mountaineering, it has deep roots that go back before Yugoslavia.”
Urša has been involved in large carnivore research for over five years. First studying bears, she now manages camera trap monitoring for the Lynx LIFE project, while simultaneously completing her PhD on the effectiveness of camera traps for determining lynx population numbers. And the population in question needs help. ‘The goal of the Lynx LIFE project is to prevent the lynx population in Dinaric Mountains and southeastern Alps from going extinct,’ she tells me. The project has determined that the lynx population created by those six lynx introduced in the 70s is near collapse due to inbreeding. ‘We know we don’t have much time to keep the population genetically healthy,’ she explains. Genetic diversity is increased by introducing new individuals, but also by connecting isolated lynx populations, which in Slovenia means connecting the lynx in the Dinaric Alps with those in the Alps proper. This connection plays a unique role in Eurasian lynx conservation as it is the link between wild populations in the Dinaric Mountains and in the rest of Europe, specifically in Switzerland; connecting the two Slovenian populations basically means creating a corridor between European populations.
Urša points to a cluster of dots on the map, explaining that each reintroduced lynx has a telemetry (tracking) collar that sends out GPS points daily. She is able to read these points and infer what each lynx is up to. ‘Monitoring lynx is very intense and is key to ensure each release is successful,’ Urša says. Tracking collars are integral tools for gathering this information but they are also unreliable. ‘Tracking collars have no geographical limit because they use GPS satellites, but once
they stop sending data, we need to rely on other tools to know if the animal is still present in the area or not. Cameras are so important because collars sometimes fail,’ says Urša as she loads her laptop, cameras and batteries into her hiking pack. ‘Cameras are the best available method for population level monitoring of lynx, which is the basis of conservation models and decision-making.’
The Lynx LIFE project has over 200 camera traps in Slovenia. Local hunting families check the cameras once a month and email the data to the Slovenian Forest Service. ‘Less than 1% of the photos from our camera traps are of lynx,’ says Urša. Last year the project had approximately 45,000 photos with just over 300 of lynx. The challenge of tracking lynx would be even more daunting without the involvement of hunters.
We leave the office and head for the forest where we will check and repair two camera traps. Urša concisely explains complex concepts as we drive out of Ljubljana and into the mountains of Postojna, a nearby town known for one of the longest karst cave systems in the world. With hiking pants, boots and a cotton t-shirt with a drawing of a lynx, she looks like a hiker. With her vizsla Ruby at her side, she could also be mistaken for a hunter.
Ruby is trained to help Urša find kill sites, and the connection the two have as a working relationship is evident as Ruby looks up at Urša, awaiting direction. And interestingly, Ruby is about the same size as an average Eurasian lynx with similar height and weight.
ABOVE: Connecting the two populations of lynx in Slovenia is key to creating a genetic corridor between European populations in the Dineric Alps and the rest of Europe.
Our first stop is to pick up a local hunter. ‘Building relationships is the biggest challenge of this work,’ she tells me as we pull into his driveway. The relationship between hunters (who are protective of their hunting grounds), and researchers (who will ultimately feed data from those hunting grounds to the government to determine allowable take limits) is fragile and takes time to nurture. ‘We focus on having open communication with hunters and tell them everything we are doing.’ Anytime Urša and Ruby head into the forest, she makes sure that specific hunting family knows. ‘It is so important we don’t lose their trust.’ This relationship and mutual respect is also important when Urša and the team want to share information with hunters about lynx conservation.
Branko Peternelj slides into the front seat and immediately starts telling Urša stories. He is a slight man, around 70, and has been a hunter his whole life. They chat like old friends as Urša navigates the forest roads. The laugh lines around Branko’s eyes deepen as he starts another story, his eagerness to share, a clear depiction of his interest in the project. Now on foot, we slide down a steep pitch and arrive at the first camera. Urša’s laptop is open on the ground and Ruby dances around us, kicking leaves onto the keyboard as we flip through images from the camera’s card, revealing a couple of roe deer and a big brown bear, neither of which surprise Branko. The hunting family he belongs to is very open to lynx research and also to using their hunting grounds for other uses, like bearwatching tours. But not everyone is – or was – happy about lynx returning to the forests. In the 70s Maks received threatening letters from other hunters angry that ‘bloodthirsty beasts’ were being reintroduced.
The Lynx LIFE project has only had a couple of hunting families today refuse to have camera traps on their hunting territory, while others participate the bare minimum. But overall Urša has not had any negative interactions and the project has collaborated with between 40-50 hunting families for the five years of the project.
‘Scientific studies have shown that lynx predation helps keep the environment in balance and keeps deer populations viable,’ says Tilen. ‘In Slovenia, we harmonise the presence of lynx in deer management plans and include the impact of lynx predation in yearly deer cull quotas. This ensures lynx have enough food and there are still deer for hunters to hunt.’
Despite concern around the impact lynx will have on game populations, it could be said that many hunters quietly recognise the privilege of having lynx roam their forests, a rarity not only in Europe but in the world. One hunter in the 70s put it simply; ‘We are confident lynx will do what a man cannot with a rifle.’
En route to check the second camera, we take advantage of an abandoned logging road, and it feels like we are out on a
hike, with the soft evening light filtering through the golden beech leaves.
Urša tells me we aren’t the only hikers to have spotted a lynx and share the information with the project. In June 2021, a couple of hikers came across a heap of lynx kittens on the side of a gravel road. They called Urša who recommended they hike on, assuring them that the mother would be back soon and was likely moving the family, one-by-one, from one den to another. This sighting was big news and confirmation of the first reproduction in the Alps from the LIFE Lynx translocated lynx and proof of increasing Slovenian lynx populations. It was also encouraging that the hikers knew where to call to get advice.
Public education is an important element of the Lynx LIFE project, and of successful lynx reintroduction in general. The Lynx Walk is a hiking guide that was created to help people – locals and tourists alike – experience the forest from the perspective of a lynx. It’s a free downloadable document that gives hikers information on lynx ecology, habitats and behaviour and how to recognise typical signs of lynx. ‘It also helps remind people that they are walking through someone’s home,’ says Urša who urges people to stick to trails, and be respectful of the forest.
Coexisting with large carnivores has, and will continue to be, a contested topic. Some see them as an added value, while some see them as a problem. The work Urša, Tilen and Branko are doing requires people from different user-groups and different countries, backgrounds and organisations to work together. A day in the field with a hunter like Branko reminds Urša that they are making progress. ‘It works because we are all working towards the same goal; preserving the lynx,’ she says. And Tilen agrees. ‘Hunters and biologists should not be on two poles but should work together. This (project) offers a tremendous opportunity to bring biologists and hunters closer together and show we have the same interests.’
As we rumble down the forest road, I carefully ask Branko a few questions, cautious not to impede on the delicate relationship Urša has been nurturing with hunters. Using my rudimentary Slovenian, I ask him why he wants lynx back in his home forest and hunting grounds.
‘The forest is complete with lynx in it. That’s why I want lynx back in the forest.’ A simple but very telling answer, and the same reason those Slovenian hunters started this effort back in the 70s. And while that sentiment is not shared by all of Slovenia – or Europe for that matter – the complexities of reintroducing this short-tailed, long-eared cat that humans previously erased from the landscape is reduced to a very simple, almost philosophical idea.
The forest is richer when it’s complete. And that is something hunters, hikers and biologists can all agree on.
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Genetic diversity is increased by introducing new individuals, but also by connecting isolated lynx populations, which in Slovenia means connecting the lynx in the Dinaric Alps with those in the Alps proper.”
Embarking on your first fully-fledged expedition is a huge undertaking. There’s inherent risk and uncertainty – you’ll face unfamiliar territory, challenging conditions and perhaps an ambitious step up from what you’re used to. There’s also a huge amount of reward on offer, but, as is the case with almost anything in the outdoors, preparation is key.
With two climbing seasons in the Alps under his belt and having recently relocated to Scotland for his first winter season in the Highlands, Alex Metcalfe was after a bigger challenge, in bigger mountains. So when he stumbled upon an advert in the Alpine Club newsletter requesting team members for a ‘small but challenging expedition to Central Asia’, he spared no time in joining and, with the support of Montane, was soon on his way to Tajikistan to embark on new unclimbed routes in the Pamir. With all the makings of an epic foray into bigger mountain environments, the expedition team were the first to climb a 5300m peak and, due to heavy snowfall, were forced to turn around close to the summit on another just shy of 6000m.
Here he shares ten tips to help you make your first climbing expedition a successful one.
Your choice of partner can make or break a trip, so it will pay to be selective in choosing your team and ensuring your climbing styles and abilities are compatible.
National organisations like the Alpine Club are a great place to find budding expedition partners and was where the team came together for this summer’s expedition. But it’s important to make sure you have enough time before the expedition to get to know each other well.
Stepping into bigger mountains, it can be easy to get carried away, so while it’s important to pick objectives that get you stoked, it’s important too that they remain within your ability. Speak to your team and be honest with each other about your abilities and also your expectations for the trip. Logistics, altitude and relationships will all make it tougher to climb as hard as you do back home. For me, Central Asia was a great place to start with opportunities to access new routes
1. Flight logistics: Times, restrictions, how to get there, connecting flights and transfers to and from the airport.
2. Baggage allowance: Checked and double checked! 3. Visas: Confirmation in paper and digital versions. Are there any entry requirements to follow for airport transfers? 4. Insurance: Booked with sufficient cover for the worst case scenario. 5. Vaccines: Covid certificates printed/ downloaded on NHS app. Proof of any vaccinations you might require. 6. Last minute travel changes and restrictions: Check your airline and the FCDO websites. 7. Accommodation: Get the first day and night booked up.
8. Currency: Sufficient local currency with backups in US Dollar / Euros / Sterling. 9. Photocopies: Passport, visas, insurance, fight details, team contact details, accommodation, day-by-day itinerary and spare passport photos. 10. Electronics: A ll charged, updated, synced and working as intended. Check the inReach device works before you need it. Turn it on, check the subscription and send a test message. Save all expedition contacts to an address book. 11. Download: Music / audiobooks / travel documents and area maps for offline use. 12. Kit packed: Check against your kit list. 13. Contingency plans: Make sure the whole team agrees on and are familiar with any back-up plans.
14. Local contacts: P ut out a request for any local contacts that might enhance the trip. 15. Trip Details: Photocopies and online copies left accessible for reliable contact.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Trekking through the Pair Mountains on the way to basecamp; Chris Lewis & Sarah Wysling looking towards a potential objective. Checking the radios work before the evening’s summit attempt; Expedition team member Alex Hale eyeing up the team’s first objective. Alex wears the Montane Phase XT jacket; The ancient fortress of Hisor, Tajikistan.
and first ascents on mountains starting as low as 3000m. For me, I always make sure accessibility by foot is an option when choosing my objectives.
A local contact is invaluable when planning any expedition. They can help to handle logistics such as travel and permits, and help you navigate the complicated and time-consuming bureaucracy that expeditions inevitably throw at you. Ask around among other climbers who have been to the country, and they’ll usually be able to recommend someone. We were introduced to our fixer in Tajikistan by a contact we met in Kyrgyzstan the year before.
Check your insurance carefully and ensure you’re covered for the worst case scenario. Keep your documents and funds accessible, even at advanced basecamp. Some in-country rescue services may demand payment before pick up.
A few providers to check out first would be the BMC, Austrian Alpine Club (UK) and Global Rescue. Remember though, policies differ massively depending on the type of climbing you are planning, height and the country you are visiting.
Expeditions can be expensive, but thankfully there is help at hand. In the UK, there are three main grants to consider; the British Mountaineering Council (BMC), Montane Alpine Climbing Club Fund (MACCF) and Mount Everest Foundation (MEF). Each comes with their own criteria so ensure you meet the requirements before applying.
If you can write, and shoot content, brand sponsorship is another area worth considering. Have a think about what you can offer before contacting the brand in question and limit your sponsors to stop things getting complicated – meeting climbing commitments and sponsorship obligations can be demanding.
#6
What time of year offers the greatest window of success? What is the prevailing wind direction? Are there any idiosyncratic weather patterns in the area? Getting a handle on the local weather will infinitely increase your chances of a successful expedition and help keep you safe.
Sometimes though, regardless of how much research and planning you put in, you’ll just need to accept bad weather and get the book out. Don’t beat yourself up if circumstances are out of your control. That’s what rest days are for.
#7
Expeditions require as much mental as they do physical.
Physically, it’s of course important to build solid fitness and competency. Being fit and healthy will help fend off injury or illness while you’re away and the better, more confidently you climb, the more you’ll get out of the expedition. But it
is important to shape your training to match the terrain and objectives you’ll be facing as much as possible.
Mentally, you’ll need resilience for tough days facing challenging weather conditions as well as the potential of extended periods stuck at basecamp. Envision the realities of what that will feel like and try to replicate similar situations as much as possible. Run through any problems you foresee arising and make note of solutions to them.
Distribute gear evenly among your bags. Keep any vital items in your hand luggage, and wear your mountaineering boots during travel. If the airline loses a bag make sure you can still proceed as planned. The same thing applies if you use porters or pack animals.
Consider your impact at basecamp. Think carefully about where you’ll be cooking, washing up and going to the toilet. If possible, keep all activities 50m away from water sources and avoid putting any contaminants like soap and food scraps into rivers and lakes. As the old adage goes, ‘take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints’.
Before you head off, inform yourself about the country’s laws and cultural customs. Even if you disagree with them it’s important to respect these whilst in-country. This can ease awkward misunderstandings and endear you to people you meet. Years from now you probably won’t remember much about the climbing, but you will remember the people, so remember to embrace these interactions.
Be prepared for the unexpected. It’s rare for an expedition to go to plan and stay on schedule. Be adaptable, and be aware that situations can and do change suddenly. Even the most unexpected things can catch you off guard, like waking up to find a herd of yaks eating your supplies. Nevertheless, you’ll certainly have fun and learn a lot in the process. As an old friend once told me: ‘Go for an adventure, any climbing is a bonus.’
“As the old adage goes, ‘take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints’.”
Climber, adventure photographer and climate activist Adam Raja shares a personal account of finding place in the mountains, and discusses the importance of alleviating the barriers of access for all.
Story and photos by | Adam Raja
I was perched beneath Vanishing Gully, my first truly vertical winter climb on the north face of Ben Nevis. Not cold, but nervous; a shiver ran across my shoulders as I took in the dark buttresses above. The approach had put me on edge. It was the end of the winter season, and the fickle Scottish weather meant that multiple freeze/thaw cycles had turned the lower slopes into steep sheets of ice that led to the rocky cavities below. Willis stopped for a breath and turned to Rob and I, ‘You don't want to fall here.’
He was right, I didn’t. I peered down the steep slopes to the rocks below and questioned what it was I was doing there. I'm always battling self-doubt, but beneath the anxiety I was excited. I had spent the last few years soloing low-grade winter routes, fantasising about having a group of friends to climb with. And here I was, staying at the CIC hut beneath Ben Nevis for a 4-day climbing trip with 15 other climbers.
I was relieved to reach the base of the route. We faffed with gear, flaked ropes, and laughed amongst ourselves as we prepared for the first climb of the trip. Then the radio beeped.
‘Willis, it's Matt. Come in.’ Matt’s voice was shaky, and the crackle didn’t conceal the urgency.
‘All okay, Matt?’ Willis replied.
‘Hannah’s fallen. We need a rescue.’
Excitement turned to dread. That sick, sinking feeling pushed its way from my chest to my stomach. A feeling I had already become acquainted with as a teenager. Willis, the most experienced among the group, set off to assist at the base of the route where the fall had happened. I called Mountain Rescue, passing on the details to the operator the best I could and we waited in the snow hoping for good news.
As the cold set in, a thought entered my mind: mountaineers often die. I shook my head and muttered to myself: so do gang members and drug dealers. Unfortunate timing for such intrusive, but nonetheless real, thoughts. I dwelled on it over the next few days on the mountain. It was the first moment I
LEFT: Self portrait at blue hour on An Teallach, Dundonnell. © Adam Raja
recall being confronted with the reality that I was once again living a high-risk lifestyle; where violent injury and death weren’t uncommon, where your peers could be here today and gone tomorrow. Threats which had plagued my adolescent years that I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to bury.
I grew up in Cumbernauld, a satellite town of Glasgow that inherited the city's overflowing population, as well as the social issues that gave it its rough reputation. I reached adolescence in the ’00s, a time when alcoholism, drug misuse, gang culture, and violent crime were all too prevalent. In 2005, the number of violent deaths was so high that the World Health Organisation reported that Scots were three times more likely to be murdered than people living in England or Wales. Glasgow was dubbed the Murder Capital of Europe and in 2020, drug-related deaths increased for the seventh consecutive year, with a rate 3.7 times greater than that of the UK as a whole and higher than any other European country.
When I dwell on my childhood, what I remember the most is feeling like an outsider, and inferior to my peers. My
father is from Pakistan, and a paki, I soon found out, was the last thing you wanted to be, but despite our entirely typical Scottish upbringing, the label soon found my sister and I. English was our first and only language; I had never been to Pakistan; our mother and grandparents were both white and Scottish, and we enjoyed Irn Bru and square sausage as much as anyone else. Still, our brown skin and second name were enough to single us out and push us down the pecking order.
The first time I recall being called a paki was when I was in primary school, perhaps 8 or 9 years old. A friend and I were playing together after school when, in an underpass, we ran into a classmate of my sister’s. Martin was four years my senior, and he was drunk. As we approached, without warning, Martin grabbed me by my school jumper: ‘You and your sister are fucking pakis!’ he said and punched me in the face. I cried and ran back towards my gran’s house. I wiped my face, sat in her living room, watched cartoons, and ate cereal.
I never told anyone about that encounter or the many other incidents that followed. I didn't know it at the time, but for years I struggled massively with my identity because of these experiences. I wanted to be anyone, or anything, other than that which I had been labelled as and punished for. I felt Scottish, but it became apparent that I wasn’t – or at least not Scottish enough. I became increasingly sensitive and reclusive, opting to sit in front of the television and play computer games rather than play outside and expose myself to those kinds of situations. I looked to food for comfort, and my weight increased as my happiness decreased. I also grew to hate my absent father for what I had inherited from him, and
“
I had never been to Pakistan; our mother and grandparents were both white and Scottish, and we enjoyed Irn Bru and square sausage as much as anyone else.”
when he chose to indulge in alcohol over family, distancing myself from him became an easy choice. I craved acceptance, belonging, and respect, but I wasn’t going to get those things with brown skin and a surname like Raja.
As I entered my early teens, these experiences, and perhaps the lack of a positive father figure, left me vulnerable to the negative influences that plagued Glasgwegian culture. Postcode gangs, known locally as young teams, were common, and I inadvertently found myself amongst them hoping to find the acceptance and mentorship I couldn't find elsewhere. Alcohol and drug abuse at a young age wasn't just accepted, they were the status quo. I drank heavily and often. It was one of the few things that would lift the unease I felt in my brown skin. It was also something that later, finally gave me the courage to stand up for myself when I was targeted for my ethnicity.
As we grew older, and despite my gentle nature and a strong aversion to violence, exposure to it became a common occurrence. I saw my peers become both victims and perpetrators. One evening after school, I went to my friend Rambo's house with another friend, Brian. I liked Brian. He had a don’t fuck with me vibe about him, but he’d always been friendly to me. We sat in Rambo’s small bedroom listening to 50 Cent and playing PlayStation before deciding to head to the local park to see if any of our other friends were around. Brian was originally from another scheme in Glasgow, and unbeknown to me, the local young team had taken a dislike to him for it.
On our walk to the park we passed a small shop that sat within a tunnel beneath a block of flats. Stood in the tunnel but concealed by the harsh shadows, was a group of boys that I knew from the area. One of them was Rambo’s cousin. Without talking, they emerged and produced weapons – a hammer, and glass bottles. We scattered in separate directions, and they gave chase. The boy with the hammer pursued Brian. Another two ran after me and I was eventually cornered in an underpass. Scared and winded, I put my hands up. ‘I don't have a problem with any of you,’ I said in defence. I was punched and a bottle was smashed over my head. Rambo watched from the entrance to the tunnel. The attack damaged my right eye and left a deep gash across my eyebrow. I was 14, but I still carry the scar on my face today.
As I stumbled home to my mum, Brian ran home to get his baseball bat. He found two of our attackers later that evening and retaliated. He nearly killed one of them, leaving him in intensive care with serious head injuries and a permanent loss of smell. The other escaped with a broken arm – he and his father sat across from my mum and I as I awaited treatment for the wound on my face in A&E. We never acknowledged one another, and I suspect neither of our parents knew how we really got those injuries.
I never saw Brian after that night – he returned to the city to hide from the police and was eventually arrested and imprisoned for the attack. I never found acceptance either. My affiliation with the local young teams, and the courage I gained from alcohol may have meant that the average kid in school treated me a little better because they heard about the company I kept. However, I was also exposed to increasing violence and crime, and found myself living a life of angst. I couldn't walk home from school, or go to the shops with my mum without worrying about who we might bump into. I watched my peers, like Brian, go to prison, and I saw others abuse alcohol and drugs to the point that some went to sleep and never woke up. As we grew older, options and opportunities dwindled and we had no one and nowhere to run to. We certainly weren’t dreaming of mountains.
I can’t justify Brian's actions but I do understand them. We were young men, without positive male role models at home, trying to stay afloat in a place where a propensity for violence was rewarded and weakness punished. If Brian hadn’t put his attackers in the hospital that night, I suspect that he would have found himself in the beds that they occupied sooner or later.
I never became comfortable with violence, but the constant conflict taught me how to function in places and situations that scared me. Leaning into my fears removed the confines they created – if I hadn’t, I’d most likely still have been sitting on my gran’s living room floor watching cartoons, temporarily sheltered, but stunted by fear of the next encounter.
You can draw ironic parallels between the extreme privilege of those who explore the mountains for leisure and those living in deprivation in the communities below them.
Danger presents itself often, and the risks and repercussions are almost equal in severity. Make the wrong decision on Ben Nevis, or simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you too could find yourself in a hospital or worse. A rockfall or avalanche is just as deadly as a hammer or baseball bat in the wrong hands.
I thought about these parallels on the Ben that day – and I still think about them now. I wondered if our lives were at risk. Was this any better than the life I had escaped? Had my childhood trauma steered me toward the mountains in search of danger? And was I not happy unless I put myself at risk? But despite the parallels, the similarities stop there. One is a lifestyle choice that requires significant privilege, the other is a set of circumstances that come from deprivation and struggle.
I don’t seek danger in the mountains, I seek adventure. The Scottish Highlands are a playground that’s a startling juxtaposition to the Scotland I had come to know. Scrambling and climbing my way across the mountains isn’t me reliving my precarious youth; I’m exercising my newly found and untethered freedom by intimately exploring a world that was once veiled beneath despair but now represents hope. There are risks yes, but for the most part they can be managed, and are a small price to pay for the joy and optimism I feel when I find myself in the most incredible situations.
I’ve seen Scotland from above and below – from its rock bottom to its highest peaks. Something most of my peers never got to do. But it wasn’t an easy transition, there are a lot of barriers to overcome and I was in my 20s before I even realised there were mountains in Scotland – certainly, before I entertained the idea of climbing them. People from my background didn’t climb mountains. Our role models were crooks, our fathers were absent, and our mothers were tired and constrained by the pressures of being a single parent.
It was social media that introduced me to the outdoors. I was amazed when I first saw photographs of Glencoe, and its rocky ridgelines and conic peaks. I couldn’t believe that
they were just a stone's throw away from Glasgow, and yet I had never seen them. Glencoe, and Scotland's other outdoor havens, were only put on my radar once I had acquired a certain level of privilege. University played a huge role. It’s something of a cliché, but the opportunities offered at university, particularly an Erasmus exchange to France, broadened my horizons and opened me up to new experiences. This meant that when I became aware of the mountains, I approached them with curiosity and intrigue rather than apathy.
Even with this awareness, it wasn’t until I had a job, disposable income, and a car that I could actually make my way to the hills, regardless of their proximity to Glasgow. Once I had these things, one of the first trips I made in my new car was to Glencoe, which in hindsight, was maybe one of the most important decisions of my life. As I drove through the glen my jaw sat in my lap for much of the journey. I had never seen a place like this, and it was almost incomprehensible that I had left Glasgow less than two hours earlier. As I sat in a layby, eating my lunch, I stared up at the daunting Buachaille Etive Mòr. I had to climb it.
Glencoe's mountains captured my imagination that day, and I’ve been captivated ever since.
My career, my hobbies, my interests, and my free time all revolve around the outdoors. It may sound a little melodramatic, but the outdoors and the experiences I've had in the outdoors have been truly transformative. I can’t say the outdoors saved me, but what I can say is that my time and experiences among the mountains have given me a significantly better quality of life than I had in the many years prior. One that I had lost hope of at one point. I have an identity, something that evaded me and I’ve struggled with most of my life. I also have a community and feel a sense of belonging, which has been missing since I removed myself from the gangs and other negative influences that surrounded me in Cumbernauld. Most importantly, I have found purpose in life, and it’s what drives me to do the work that I do today. The outdoors has been good to me, and I think it would be a
tragedy if we robbed others of that opportunity. So welcoming others, especially those who have historically not been or felt like part of the outdoor narrative, has become very important to me. It may turn out that it’s not for them or just simply doesn’t impact their life in the same way. And that’s fine, at least they have had the opportunity, and isn’t that what matters most? Because it was the lack of opportunity, or the barriers that concealed them, that held me and my peers in place for so long.
The other facet is climate action. Without my experiences in the outdoors, I would never have forged a connection with nature or been able to join the dots between environment and climate change. So a failure to remove those barriers and welcome more people into the fold in the first place is a failure to protect these places from climate change, thus further robbing future generations of these experiences. I think that’s why all of us, who find ourselves in the position to play in the mountains, should do our bit to protect the places we play and open the door for others who aren’t so fortunate.
Hannah sustained some severe injuries that day on The Ben, but I’m pleased to write that she’s made a heroic recovery and is back training and climbing. I’d like to imagine that I too would demonstrate such grit and spirit. Mountaineers and climbers do die on occasion, but it’s a risk that comes from opportunity, freedom of choice, and privilege. The risks we faced growing up were neither – they were the result of a lack of. As soon as I had an opportunity to remove myself from the situation I found myself in, I took it.
I don’t care how fast I climb a mountain, what grade the route is, or how many footsteps precede mine. The fact that I’ve stood on a mountain at all is what's meaningful to me - especially when I know where the steps of my peers led them. I’m grateful every time I get to stand on or amongst the mountains. I can’t say I felt the same way when it was only concrete that towered above me and the most prevalent risk was falling victim to violent crime. I’ll take the risks associated with mountaineering over that any day of the week.
“I’ve seen Scotland from above and below – from its rock bottom to its highest peaks.”MAIN: On the slopes of Beinn a' Chrùlaiste in winter. The impressive Buachaille as a backdrop. © Adam Raja.
Open spaces aren’t always open to everyone. Para athlete Hannah Dines explores the challenges of disabled access on our coastlines.
Full disclosure: I’m trying to become the UK’s first female prone surfing World Champion. So, this article, mostly written in desperation, is written from the perspective of a girl with cerebral palsy who has driven around almost every coast, trying to access the surf.
My cerebral palsy affects all of the muscles in my body and, as an added bonus, my balance. On uneven terrain I often fall. All parts of your average coastline are barriers: rocky beaches, soft sand, hills and the distance between car park and shoreline too. To be fair, I have been known to fall on perfectly flat concrete. It’s why I love water, even the washing machine spin cycle in huge waves is preferable to skin-ripping tarmac. Still, I use a car or mobility scooter to prevent constant bodily harm. Most mobility aids are not made with sand in mind, just like my scooter. So, when I am not with a fully equipped surf school, accessing the coast in the UK means I’m left to look on from the nearest tarmac path.
I used to be a Paralympic trike racer and I’d get a lot of time in green spaces training, if they had roads through them. I would often stop and look up into leaf canopies, hug trees, bury my face in grass. Blue spaces were something I only saw from afar and which I longed for. Looking back, there’s a certain part of my brain that has needed water all along.
Once, I got in trouble at a Cycling World Cup by the Belgian coastline in Ostend. I felt this need to be at sea, free of the strict competition environment. Myself and another wobbly trike racer plotted together and decided to hold each other up to make it over the sand to touch the water. The British team watched, all together, from the glass-panelled hotel and apparently gasped at how often we almost fell, how strenuous it was. We decided it was too hard and turned back half way. Still, I was severely reprimanded for exhausting myself before a major race. It wasn’t even twenty metres. Barely more metric distance than my age at the time. Really, we were just holding hands and trying to have a romantic walk on the beach, feel the ocean and escape with each other.
Would it have been different if there had been beach matting there, as standard? Beach mats are cheap, foldable, portable mats that allow individuals with existing mobility equipment to access the beach themselves with their own kit and also make walking much easier.
Support in the sea isn’t so rare anymore, thanks to initiatives from Surfability UK and SurfABLE Scotland; the only full-time, adaptive surf schools in Europe. Surfability, the surf-school who taught me to surf and that I train with most, run courses in best practice for existing surf coaches to support adaptive surfing at their existing schools. There’s the Wave Project too – often mistaken for the same thing but is a charity set up to provide wave therapy for vulnerable children and young people, who may or may not be disabled.
It was Surfability UK on the Gower Peninsula who took me in, when I phoned, desperate to surf. I managed to get through to head coach Ben’s personal number and speak to him. He said I could come down and stay as long as I needed. Now, at the school it’s the stuff of lore that I van-camped for two months with a gap to travel to Hopeman in the Highlands with SurfABLE, and then went back to South Wales and surfed again and again, never sated. It had everything, the accessible hot shower, wheelchairs to access the sea and adapted boards.
To me, a sea-change is visible. Some standard surf schools and The Wave, Bristol’s wave pool, have bought off-the-shelf prone boards made by Flowt (before you would have had to adapt your own) and have coaches who have been trained in the art of water assistance. Several master shapers, JP and Skindog, regularly make adapted competition boards. Deck grip is also paving its adapted grippy way, through Surfdek with adapted handles and leg fenders which stick to deckside rails and stop leg slip.
With the schools, pools and coaches primed and ready to offer adaptive surf coaching, one last bastion stands in the way of me and others with a range of mobility impairments. Other schools offer adaptive surfing opportunities but almost none operate from beaches with beach matting or wheelchairs: not Newquay, Constantine, Bournemouth, Scarborough, Whitby, Croyde, or Pease Bay. On these trips I have needed huge amounts of help walking and it takes about half the session to haul me in and out of the sea. Now almost a decade older, I know British Cycling was right. Oh for the swift beach wheelchair wheels at Surfability surf school who understand that preventing pain and energy expenditure is as important as good surf instruction, so I can surf well, at full power.
But an important point to note is that these beach wheelchairs are not self-propelled. Their use assumes company
in the way of assistants able to push them. But as a young, disabled, solo-adventurer, for me this is not the case.
Even with all the adapted surf coaches in the world at Surfability headquarters, I want to move myself and my board. Oh to be a lifeguard with rippling abs, bare-foot and running with surfboard under arm to jump over the spray and let the swell take me. To self-direct, to set one's eye on a distant point and be able to get there, is one thing I will never take for granted. Not least on the way back up from Caswell Bay, because there’s an incredibly steep ramp and my rippling-abbed surf instructor has just been treading water and taking waves on the head with me for hours.
While electric models are heavier than life itself and won’t give you lifeguard abs, they do enable you to zoom down the beach under the steam of a sand and salt-proof lithium battery, with surfboard attached to a homemade rack on the side. If I had a ramp-entry van and a significant lottery win, I’d invest in an electric chair in an instant.
So, those beach mats and beach chairs are one thing, but the gold standard, in my opinion, has to be what Bruno Hansen has constructed. Danish by way of South Africa, he’s a world champion surfer, and spends his time between Bali and Cornwall. In Bali, he can take a quad bike on the beach and he welded a side-car to it for his wheelchair (he’s paralysed from the waist down but that’s beside the point, except that he has those rippling abs I was talking about). In the UK, there is no beach mobility and no quads allowed, so the master engineer that he is, he built the Bruno Beach Beast.
Taking tank treads from some kind of old all-terrain wheelbarrow, he welded them to a 200cc lawn mower engine, moving all the controls to hand height; he bent steel tubing into a board rack and built a base for a tractor seat, creating the ultimate go-anywhere wheelchair, ready for any beach on the
planet. ‘No beach too big!’ he says, unable to mask a grin as he beams like a big old sunshine.
While we can all revel in engineering mastery, why must Bruno spend weeks in a workshop just to access a public space? My surf school is incredible but it segregates me to my one beach on this huge, blue planet. My surfing is about being tossed into the unknown. A lot of the time it is about being forced to let go, pummelled into this calm oblivion where panic nevers surfaces. In my favourite, big swells there’s a brief sensory overload, waves in ears, nose and mouth, sunshine searing my eyes and then, nothing but a swishing sound as the wave takes my rail and delivers me to shores anew. However fanciful this imagery, surfing takes me to a place where the weight of the world does not exist. The sea does not discriminate but beach access does.
To a disabled kid or newly disabled adult, that blue horizon shrinks down to almost nothing, unless of course they live by Caswell Bay or near Hopeman where the adaptive surf schools are. If we made beach matting as common as say the lifebuoys we see by the coast, rivers and on harbours, how many could we save from tarmac and monotony? How many could we teach that they belong in these places and how many new ways of doing things could we be taught? We must make coastlines free to all, with public investment in existing or homemade beach accessibility options.
This looks like a deck chair with wheels and huge orange arm rests. It also feels like a deckchair. Its height means that it’s easier to self-transfer into. It fits people of all sizes and is by far the comfiest. It also comes with the perks that it floats on water but my surf school, who use manual slings to support the highest support needs individuals into their seated tandem, would rather it sunk and stayed stable.
I’ve gone down a flight of steps in this chair. The suspension of the wheels is insane. I’d call it a bouncemobile. I believe the company also offers conversion kits so you can convert an old wheelchair. The wheelchair it comes with is not as easy access, for me at least, but it’s got the standard lift arm at the side entry.
This is the most adaptable for high support needs individuals but the extra components don’t come as standard. You can ensure a head and body is entirely cradled and stable if you need to. However, the most basic frame is both very low to the ground and has no safety features, without a defined space for feet or arms. For this reason it is hardest for me to get into. It is the most portable and most easily stored with its slim frame, even if its wheels are as big as the rest of the three-wheeled profile. It could also manage steep slopes and has a pulley rope on the front.
“Even the washing machine spin cycle in huge waves is preferable to skin-ripping tarmac.”
Dividing north west Italy and the south of France, the southern Alps form a rugged border of snow-capped summits, historical trading routes and modern day ski towns. One of the world’s most famous bikepacking routes sees riders zigzag a route along this border and across these mountains for 700 kilometres between the industrious Alp-fringed city of Turin and Nice on the French Riviera. A perfectly balanced mix of smooth switchbacks, rough dirt roads, rolling ridgelines and ten iconic mountain passes before eventually descending down to the Mediterranean.
An open invite for women around the world to start the route together, the 2022 komoot Women’s Torino-Nice Rally saw 48 women from across the globe come together to
take on the route as one rolling community – leapfrogging one another, riding, camping and getting to know each other along the way.
Riders are self-supported, choosing where and when to eat and sleep and how far they want to travel each day. The riding has a rhythm. The challenge is straightforward: climb the mountain, descend to the valley, eat pizza, pack provisions, fill water at the fountain, camp in the olive grove behind the church. But this is not a race. The only goal is to make it to the finishers’ party in Nice a week later.
We hear from four women from the 2022 Women’s Torino-Nice Rally share their insights and experiences from this iconic ride.
We hear from the riders of the 2022 Women’s Torino-Nice Rally, a bikepacking route that is widely considered Europe’s best.
BELOW: Crossing the border from France into Italy, this is the view riders get crossing the stunning Col Agnel overlooking the Upper Varaita Valley. © Gaby Thompson
Interviews by | Gaby Thompson Photos by | Gaby Thompson, Rue Kaladyte and Weronika Szalas
Originally from Alaska, I'm an ultra-distance bikepacker. I started riding when I was 20 to commute to work at a brewery. That quickly turned into travelling by bike and eventually long-distance racing. Then I worked for half the year in restaurants to save money to bike for the other half. Now, I get to ride full-time. I love every minute I get to spend on my bike. I’m motivated to create opportunities to get more women and girls on bikes and I organise a girls’ riding program, women’s adventure scholarships and most recently, I’ve been collaborating with Gaby Thompson and komoot to host women’s bikepacking rallies.
The rallies are an opportunity for women from around the world to take on a challenging route together. Generally, these routes are about 700km with a mix of gravel and tarmac and plenty of climbing. Everyone starts together, but along the way, we ride at our own pace and take care of our needs –deciding when and where to eat and sleep and how far we want to go each day. Women tend to naturally form small groups so we spread out and smaller groups meet up for camping, meals and helping each other when difficulties arise. It’s hard, but it’s also a lot of fun. The rallies are some of my favourite weeks of the whole year. It’s incredible to see women gain confidence and support each other along the way.
I learned to ride a bike as a child but it only became important to me when I realised it was easier to bike to and from work in the Philippines. That realisation and the knowledge that I could potentially go anywhere on a bike opened up so many doors. Being part of an outdoors club that was just as passionate about cycling helped make me feel less like an outsider cycling in Manila, where it wasn’t common to see women on bikes.
TOP: A rite of passage: reaching the top of the famous Colle Delle Finistre, a rider adds the Women’s Torino-Nice Rally sticker to the crowded showcase of those who came before. © Gaby Thompson
MAIN: Another day, another set of perfect gravel switchbacks.© Gaby Thompson
RIGHT: The women head off from Turin, with 700km of remote alpine gravel roads between them and the Mediterranean Sea. © Gaby Thompson
“It’s incredible to see women gain confidence and support each other along the way.”
I first heard about the komoot Women's Torino-Nice Rally on Lael’s Instagram in 2021 when she put out the invite for the first year. At the time, I was heavily pregnant, but I still signed up. A few days before the rally started, I had to bail out. I was gutted. Then, I saw the chance to sign up for Montañas Vacias (another komoot women’s rally). But four months postpartum, I was still recovering from an emergency C-section and I didn't have the strength yet. I was so happy when a second chance to ride Torino-Nice appeared.
I made it to Turin, and 8 days later arrived in Nice, together with 47 other women. There are too many stories to share but what stands out are the bonds with the women in this rally. It was them that made this experience so unforgettable. Not knowing anyone coming into this rally, I was surprised to find I was never alone. Suffering together was way more manageable than alone. It takes a village to get you from the moment you commit – organising your time a bit better so that you can train more – to the women who pull you up and over the mountains. Not too many tears were shed. There were complaints but so, so many more laughs.
The struggles and the fun times. I think everyone learned something and by the end of the rally, there was a real feeling of empowerment and enthusiasm to take on more. So we all came away a bit stronger. Plus, of course, the Torino-Nice route is so beautiful! It’s glorious and tough – for everyone –but the great thing, which I didn’t realise beforehand, is how many options there are to shortcut and resupply, which makes it a lot easier mentally and physically.
I moved from the UK to Switzerland about 17-years-ago, where I’m an engineer with a side-gig in sport, cooking, and writing. I started road cycling in my 20s to cross-train for a running injury, then ended up racing professionally for a few years. I was lucky enough to go to a few Olympic and Commonwealth Games in cycling, and a few World Championships in both cycling and multi-sport. Three years ago I got into off-road cycling thanks to the encouragement of my friend Katherine Moore, who also persuaded me to try a ‘gravel’ event. Now, all-terrain bike adventures are my favourite way to travel and explore by bike, and bikepacking helps me train for ultra-running on the trails.
The komoot Women’s Torino-Nice Rally is a great way to try bikepacking and longer, more challenging routes for the first time. I wanted to be part of it to help encourage other women to try new things in the sport, because I remember how much the support of friends helped me when I was starting out. Even though everyone is self-sufficient on a rally like this, it’s reassuring to know that other people are around. And it's so, so much fun to meet new people, ride together, camp together, seek snacks together, share the challenge.
Born, raised and still living in the Netherlands, I have spent a big part of my life on two wheels, racing bikes all over the world as a professional cyclist. A few years ago, I exchanged speed for experience and now I just ride for fun. In daily life I design cycling apparel, commentate on women's cycling on Eurosport and run an international women’s cycling union. And when there’s time left I love to ride gravel and mountain bikes for fun.
Joining the Torino-Nice adventure was a very special experience to me. The route was absolutely amazing, it was really hard but also so much fun. But what I found even more special was riding with a group of women from different ages, backgrounds and such a big variety in equipment, preparation, fitness and experience for a trip like this one. It felt very special to take on such a challenge together with a big group of women which definitely brought us all together in just a few days.
INSET:
To see the full route collection for the Women’s Torino – Nice Rally, scan the QR code.
“I think everyone learned something and by the end of the rally, there was a real feeling of empowerment and enthusiasm to take on more.”
As a climber and skier, Matt Glenn is at home in big alpine environments and has been fortunate enough to chase his passion around the world, from the French Alps to the Greater Ranges. Here, he candidly shares his experiences of battling depression and subsequently the positive steps he’s made to create change in his life.
Why do people put a hose on their exhaust and put it in a car window? There are far more efficient and less grim ways to kill yourself.
This was how my mind drifted along at 4am as I lay on the sofa trying to sleep. We were staying somewhere in Scotland, and I had been drinking and watching Netflix with my brother. I was with my family, I had everything I needed to be content and happy, but I couldn’t keep my mind from casually leafing through the options of how I could best escape the obligation to exist. The crux of it is, finding a way that doesn’t leave everyone around you thinking they could have done more, blame themselves or feel they should have seen it coming.
I lay there in the dark and wrote a note on my phone, trying to articulate the great anvil of dark clouds building in my head: It’s getting harder to keep the fear and despair down, it’s all I have. Moments of pretending, between the slowly gathering darkness that threatens to consume me every time I stop to think. It stalks me every day and grows until it will not be ignored. I’ve let it fester and rot in my head. Let the idea bed-in like a tick until it’s too swollen and grotesque to ignore and I must act now or be overrun with disease. I want to go without ceremony or noise, just a vacuum, a space where nothing used to exist.
A few months later, my body sore from climbing and postclimb celebrations, I stumbled slowly towards Lukla, Nepal. As the sun beat down on me, my mind wandered back to this occasion just a few months previously and my determination to find a way out of the endless obligation to remain on this planet. I realised that determination had dissipated, not instantly or fully but something had changed. It had taken me the previous three weeks of sitting with myself, to finally get sick of talking myself into a desperate dark oblivion. I decided I wanted to change. I wanted to get better, really get better.
Five months later, I sat again in Chamonix, unmotivated and frustrated. The sun was shining, but my clouded mind had decided that drinking alone in a dark room forever was
the best course of action. Nothing was exciting or engaging, I had nothing to offer the outside world but indifference and apathy. Nothing had changed since my epiphanies in Nepal. I was back in the same pit once again.
My life has been punctuated by periods like this. Moments of extreme highs quickly overshadowed by desperate lows brought on by what I now know is and was depression. It follows that I have been trying to write this short piece for around two years. When I feel motivated words come easily and I enjoy the idea that my thoughts might resonate with others – perhaps encourage them or motivate them to make necessary change. But most of the time, I just have nothing to say. Even if I did, I couldn’t summon the energy to put it down on paper.
It’s a word I have heard and used often and flippantly when referring to other people – friends, family and acquaintances. It comes so naturally to me to listen, console or offer advice and direction, but to say the words ‘I think I might be depressed’ has taken me two years. Really more like fourteen but two years in the grip of regular depressive episodes, the type that makes me dangerous, to myself and to other people. The danger to others is not violence, but slow exhausting sadness which seeps from my very being into those around me. The type of talk that over time permeates into the most resilient of minds. My constant refrain that it’s all pointless anyway had started to really take hold and I had actually started to hear it repeated back to me. This was one of the many recent wake-up calls.
The danger to myself is somewhat more immediate: self-harm, self-loathing and increasingly suicidal thoughts. Years have slipped by while I told others to seek help, to talk and be open. Meanwhile I continued to fully believe that carrying the same depth of sorrow that I did was simply a part of being human. The mental war of attrition I had waged against myself resulted in my conviction that self-harm was a good way to cope with those emotions. ‘It’s better than the alternative’ , I would say, laughing as the jarring words tumbled out of my mouth. Reflecting on these moments I baulk at how easily I joked about such a deeply flawed coping mechanism.
“My life has been punctuated by periods like this. Moments of extreme highs quickly overshadowed by desperate lows.”
‘Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.’
– C.S. LewisAlthough Lewis is referring to the Christian Hell, these words are strikingly effective in describing my own experience of the road that led me to depression. I was unaware of just how gradually my thought patterns had become toxic, how much the default phrases, words and beliefs had built to a bleak cacophony of negativity. I imagine my thoughts over the years as a symphony – notes rising and falling, gradually darkening and swelling. Increasingly the composer weaves in more minor notes to sharpen the warming majors. The melody and instruments swirl and build, moments of joy, fast and light, stopping abruptly followed by quiet, slow drawn-out notes on the cello. Mercifully this piece did not reach the terrible clamouring crescendo and screeching halt with which it could so easily have done and does for all too many others.
The response I often get from people when I make myself vulnerable and speak about the reality behind my guise of carefree enthusiasm. Of course I do, don’t most people hide the majority of what they feel? Aren’t we all well practised at putting on a facade that the world can deal with daily? My experience has been that as long as I stay distracted and surrounded, I am safe from those thoughts. God forbid I should be alone for enough time to think. Repeatedly I have conversations with people I assumed to have it all together only to find they have battled hard or are still in the throes of dealing with something which I’d never have guessed at.
It’s too easy to believe the happy-go-lucky performance played out each day by many of my closest friends. We have become talented method actors, taking on a role until we cannot separate it from our true selves. Paradoxically, we hear that we are in a major mental health crisis at the moment, whether this is truly the case or not I don’t know. It certainly seems that throughout the pandemic, the isolation and stress associated with Covid has pushed people to despair and anxiety. I do think that part of this tidal wave is a real representation of our own willingness to talk about the parts of our lived experience that previously would have been considered a weakness. So these two intertwined realities exist: increased openness about our mental health but a seemingly endless ability to carry ourselves day-to-day, in a way that suggests nothing is wrong.
There are myriad professional climbers willing to speak openly about their journey with their mental health. The likes of Dave Macleod seem to have dealt with depression and
still attained levels of discipline and mastery that most of us could only dream of. Conversely, there are other top climbers and alpinists that I know simply do not experience the same depth of emotion that some of us encounter almost daily.
It’s interesting that the decline of my mental health seems to have followed the increase in the amount of climbing I’ve done. Although this seems contrary to the rise in nature as a fix-all for mental health issues, there are a plethora of factors that will have been influential in regards to the decline of my self-worth. My thought has always been that spending time in the mountains would be beneficial and could only bring me closer to a stable and positive mental attitude about myself and life generally. It’s very possible that, in fact, climbing full-time, having no structure and very little money isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!
Our outward and online persona never paints the full picture. It’s a minute sliver of reality which we allow the world to see. We parade our successes and good days around online, showing only the bits that affirm how well we are doing. Reality is rarely as sublime as the filters, editing and camera angles would have us believe.
Several months ago, I went on a climbing trip to Nepal; my friend Tom Livingstone and I had an incredible experience and it produced some good photos and a short film. The reality for me throughout the trip however was a constant mental battle to even want to be there.
As we walked towards our basecamp teahouse for the month, I wonder how Tom stays so positive all the time. Here I am battling to keep myself from slipping into the depths of sadness and selfloathing again... While Tom is struggling to contain his unbridled energy, I am trying desperately to contain the despair which threatens to consume me. I can’t break now, I need to push it down, I have to stay afloat.
– From my Nepal expedition notebook 2021.
My first experience of climbing in the Himalayas was something I had been working towards and dreaming about since I started climbing. I can’t say my whole life revolved around it, but I believed that this was where I could excel and would truly find my niche in climbing. Not a particularly strong rock climber, I had always imagined that I would be able to make my mark in the bigger mountains because it requires more than out and out strength or skill. I imagined that the mental fortitude I believed I had would see me through big expeditions on remote peaks and I could be proud of how I handled myself in this arena. Somehow, here I was, on my first foray into the Greater Ranges, trying to convince myself that I even wanted to be there. When I say there, it was beyond not wanting to be on expedition, I just didn’t want to exist anymore.
So what? Why invite everyone to share some of my most intimate and previously most guarded thoughts?
I know my experience is not isolated, articles by Sonya Pevzner, Ben Silvestre and Dave Macleod speak candidly of their experiences with depression. It almost feels unnecessary to add my voice to those of other climbers all of whom have articulated their thoughts so eloquently.
However, for me, normalising talking about the reality behind the mask feels like a good way to start to make the changes that I want to see in an uneasy world. Any time I have alluded to this type of thing online, I get messages from people I wouldn’t expect saying how they have been battling with one mental illness or another. Asking what my coping strategies are or just expressing that it’s good to see some real talk for once. If all these words do is start conversations and one of those conversations leads to someone acknowledging they need to make changes, then I am glad to have been open about this.
I’ve been taking antidepressants for about five months now and I don’t believe they are a long-term solution or a silver bullet. However, they have changed my life, they have shown me that I was ill. Like antibiotics going to war on infection, the drugs immediately began to balance the chemicals in my brain. Within days I felt a rush of enthusiasm, I felt excitement again – an emotion I thought I had lost completely. I wanted to see people, cook, engage and most of all I wanted to climb again.
For months at a time, maybe years, I had been acting, pretending I cared about people, pretending I wanted to go climbing, pretending I wanted to keep living. But pretending affects other people, being on autopilot is not the same as taking the wheel, sincerity is lacking in interactions but only those who know you best notice. I was lucky enough to have someone in my life who wasn’t afraid to tell me that I needed to make changes. I procrastinated hard, made excuses, employed diversion tactics which worked well for a while. I made it so that I didn’t actually have to confront anything or do the work on myself. Finally, I caved and went to counselling.
Three months ago, I had my first session and one month down the line, I started taking antidepressants. For the first time in my adult life I felt stable, happy and able to deal with the idea of a future beyond the next big route in the mountains. The twists and turns of the mental journey are many and although the trajectory trends up, taking antidepressants hasn’t been the solution. It feels more like a temporary ceasefire on the war in your head, to allow time to find a real and lasting solution.
The journey or outcome will likely be different for any other person, this is just my experience and outcome so far. All I can say is that it’s been a fight, and one which I know many people are going through each day. So look out for the people around you, even if they seem okay, we’re mostly good at hiding feelings, especially from ourselves.
By talking about the mental health battles within our community, we hope we can normalise these types of conversations, which can ultimately improve the quality of life for everyone around us. If you think you or someone you know might be struggling with their own mental health battles, why not reach out to one of the following groups either for support or consider donating to their cause:
• Black Dog Outdoors: A platform dedicated to reconnecting people with the outdoors to improve mental health and well-being.
• Problem Shared: Online platform deigned to provide access to the highest quality of care for individuals and institutions seeking mental healthcare
• The Samaritans: A registered charity aimed at providing emotional support to anyone in emotional distress, struggling to cope, or at risk of suicide throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland
• Mind: Providing advice and support for anyone struggling with mental health and campaigning to improve policy and services across the UK
“The melody and instruments swirl and build, moments of joy, fast and light, stopping abruptly followed by quiet, slow drawn-out cello notes.”
When it comes to walking, I often lean towards solitude. There’s something about stomping entirely alone, or in the quiet company of a dog – the lack of accountability, the freedom to find my own pace and to pause to observe mushrooms or birds of prey or eat snacks in silence and at my leisure – that suits me. So, the idea of walking a 65km circular route in the bustling company of 200 strangers was a bit of a daunting prospect, I’ll admit.
Arriving at the old hunting lodge in Braemar – that would first mark our starting point and later our finish line – felt more like stumbling upon a music festival than the hiking I was used to: rows of vans and clusters of tents, animated faces immersed in chatter and hands clutching camping mugs.
Ducking into the registration tent, my hiking companion Kat and I found ourselves met by deep belly laughs and Danish accents cracking jokes whilst standing in the queue. I’d missed the set-up altogether but received a welcoming pat on the back as the punchline landed. We were furnished with a map, trail passport, armfuls of dehydrated food and – my favourite – a Fjällräven trash bag for collecting litter along the way. Briefed in trail etiquette and now acquainted with a number of new hiking companions, we headed to bed already filled with a warm sense of camaraderie. Was it possible to have been converted to group hiking before even setting foot on the trail?
The first Fjällräven Classic took place in the wilds of northern Sweden in 2005, with 152 people taking on the 110 kilometre route from Nikkaluokta to Abisko, above the Arctic Circle. The concept was a ‘gateway hike’ of sorts. A route that presented challenge and opportunity in equal measure to hikers with a thirst for adventure who perhaps weren’t quite ready to go it alone. Guided in part by back country experts but at the mercy of the elements, participants would carry everything they needed for the duration of the trek, camping along the way. The format proved a success, and interpretations of the trek now take place across multiple different countries including Germany and Denmark, and as far afield as the US and Korea. This year, the first UK inception of the Classic followed that exact same format, trading the glacial peaks and Nordic vistas for the glens, corries and lochs of the Cairngorm Massif.
The morning of our departure, as we tramped across the dewy grass to the start line, I was surprised to hear a cacophonous orchestra of different languages and accents accompanying the bagpiper who was heralding the start of the hike. A sea of backpacks from all over the world, festooned
TOP:
ABOVE:
“The emphasis on simplicity, slow-living and almost total absence of phone service for the duration of the trek was a relief for a chronically busy person like me.”MAIN: Even a ‘dreich’ day in the Cairngorms did little to dampen spirits on the Classic. © Matt Buckley Waking up on the banks of the River Nethy, which rises on the northern slopes of the Cairngorms and flows northwards into Abernethy Forest. © Amelia Le Brun Fairy lights - the ultimate trekking essential? © Amelia Le Brun
with bright orange trail tags, were gathered. First-timers and die-hard Classic hikers, sporting patches on their jackets and bags from other events around the world, were wolfing down egg butties and necking coffee in the morning sun.
We set off en masse along forest tracks lined by the most dense population of vivid-red fly agaric toadstools I had ever seen. I wasn’t alone in stopping to admire them either. It wasn’t long before the crowds thinned out, the vast expanse of Scottish wilderness saw to that. Over those three days, we found a pace that placed us somewhere in the middle of the procession, snatching brief moments of cheerful chatter with those we passed and those that passed us. Conversation ebbed and flowed, perfectly balanced.
During the moments of silence when the wind and ‘smirr’ (a light but persistent form of precipitation these parts are known for) prompted us to tighten our hoods, get our heads down and trudge, I was reminded of the words of Nan Shepherd. In The Living Mountain, an ode to the Cairngorms itself, Shepherd describes the equilibrium of silence and speech amongst walkers:
‘The presence of another person does not detract from, but enhances, the silence, if the other is the right sort of hill companion. The perfect hill companion is the one whose identity is for the time being merged in that of the mountains, as you feel your own to be.’
There was a common sense of awe, perhaps even more tangible because it was shared amongst those many hill companions. If not expressed out loud in acknowledgement of our spectacular surroundings, you could see it in the
faces encircled by hoods, squinting into the sun or gently grimacing against the rain. Together we made our way through Caledonian pine forests, fragrant after the day’s downpour, and fields of glimmering, shattered rock surrounding the Pools of Dee. We paused on the sand next to the ethereal waters of An Lochan Uaine (the Green Loch), and negotiated a skintingling barefoot crossing at Luibeg Burn.
Privy to glorious late-summer sun, ominous grey skies and a liberal lashing of sideways rain, we made our way through the Lairig Ghru – the dividing valley in the Cairngorms. As night fell, we gathered, pitching our tents and warming our hands on sachets of gradually rehydrating camp food.
Coffee breaks and conversation are prized above personal bests on the Classic, it certainly isn’t a race. Each day on the trail was punctuated by checkpoints manned by Fjällräven folk who (whatever the weather) cheerfully stamped our trek passports and sometimes furnished us with a cup of tea and a tattie scone. On one particularly fortuitous evening when the weather had quite dramatically turned, we were met with a much needed and well received wee dram.
On the final evening, as we emerged from the shelter of the Rothiemurchus forest to arrive at our eighth checkpoint, a number of tents were already pitched for the night, as whispers of sleet were circulating amongst the walkers. We briefly debated the merits of proceeding through the rumoured ‘dreich’ conditions (another Scottish word to describe dreary, damp and bleak weather) in near-darkness, before an offer of whisky put our pondering to bed. We shimmied our tent in amongst the others, and settled into the evening’s festival-
like atmosphere. As hip flasks were passed around, the evercomedic Danish contingent made a welcome appearance, regaling us with tales from the trail, and Kat was both mocked and congratulated for sacrificing vital packing space for her luxury item of choice – a string of fairy lights.
That night, I picked my way by headtorch through a field of criss-crossing guy ropes to scramble up the heather-clad bank overlooking a patchwork of tents. Clustered satellite camps had sprung up over the last couple of hours, stretching to the other side of the burn and into the heathland beyond, safety in numbers, as they say. The emphasis on simplicity, slow-living and almost total absence of phone service for the duration of the trek was a relief for a chronically busy person like me. Momentarily alone in the dark, unrushed, unscheduled, uncomplicated.
Hastily chugging down coffee and stuffing the soggy tent into our packs, the skies darkened on the morning of the final day. My mountain goat-like companion set off at a strong pace – it was almost as if she could smell the beer waiting at the finish line. Once again any hint of a crowd thinned out as we began retracing our steps along the gravelly track that wound its way back towards Mar Lodge. The sudden solidity of the terrain made my legs feel heavy, and conversation lulled as we absorbed the last of the fungus-flanked paths.
Approaching the lodge, we were met by an almost eerie quiet as the flags of our basecamp danced into view. ‘Has everyone gone straight to bed?’, we joked in theatrical whispers. The near-silence was suddenly and riotously broken by clapping, whoops and cheers as walkers poured out of the communal tent to line the walkway to the finishing arch. Entirely unaccustomed to this sort of ceremony, our faint embarrassment quickly transformed to delight as our camping companions came into view, throwing their arms around us in genuine, hearty embraces. I couldn’t hide an ear-to-ear grin as we toasted our arrival with that well-earned beer that Kat had sensed many miles ago. This ceremony, by the way, was repeated for each finisher that crossed the line in their varying states of exhaustion and saturation, and in each one it prompted that same irrepressible grin.
There’s immense satisfaction and fulfilment to be found in the simplest experiences; in lingering a moment to look at the finer detail, in savouring that last sip of coffee or a conversation with a stranger-turned-friend. Walking the Classic was a gentle reminder to embrace a change of pace, to disconnect from modern distractions, schedules and our busy lives and instead connect with one another and the world beyond our doorstep. To quote Shepherd once more:
‘It’s
grand thing, to get leave to live’.
TOP LEFT: Blue skies preceded the ‘smirr’ - the weather in the Scottish highlands is famously temperamental. © Matt Buckley
LEFT INSET: Legend has it that the green colour of An Lochan Uaine is caused by pixies who wash their clothes in the water. © Kat Bennett
BOTTOM
TOP RIGHT: The trek’s starting point of Mar Lodge is a historic shooting lodge, whose estate occupies almost 8% of the Cairngorms National Park. © Matt Buckley
a
“I was surprised to hear a cacophonous orchestra of different languages and accents accompanying the bagpiper who was heralding the start of the hike.”LEFT: The Classic wound its way through ancient Caledonian pinewoods. The forests are considered to be one of the last remaining wildernesses in the British Isles. © Amelia Le Brun
In May 2022, I travelled to Tahiti on a mission to rediscover the lost art of navigating naturally. It was here in the South Pacific, millennia ago, that ancient seafarers ventured out into the vast ocean on canoes made with stone-age tools, using only natural clues to guide them. Starting in Taiwan around 2,000BC, over a period of three thousand years these intrepid explorers tirelessly pushed into the Trade Winds, discovering Hawaii in the north, New Zealand in the south, Easter Island in the east and everything in between. If that wasn’t miraculous enough, they then accurately charted this huge body of water, an area larger than the continental United States, without instruments or charts.
I wanted to know how these expert wayfinders achieved such phenomenal feats of navigation. And can we apply their skills today? To find out, I teamed up with the Royal Cruising Club Pilotage Foundation and set a mission to research how natural navigation can aid modern adventurers with high-tech kit. From watching birds to gazing at stars, riding waves and spotting clouds, we hoped to create a new way of navigating that brings together the best of both worlds, embracing technology while celebrating the timeless beauty of natural techniques. In this article I will share some of the techniques I discovered, focusing on stars, that you can use tonight to find your way by land and sea, anywhere in the world.
Polaris is the most useful star in the sky, guiding us true north more accurately than a compass (which points to the magnetic pole). But for its wonderful accuracy, the North Star has one great flaw; its brightness, or lack of. There are more than fifty brighter stars in the night sky, which means it doesn’t stand out at all when you look north. The trick to finding Polaris is to firstly locate the easily recognisable Plough, which famously looks like a saucepan. Depending on the time, it could be either way round or even upside down, but regardless of its position the two outer stars - Dubhe and Merak - will always point towards the North Star (see Diagram 1). Simply extend an imaginary line five times the distance between the pointers and Polaris will be the only star in that area of the sky. True north is directly below the pinprick of light. As a compensation for the North Star’s dimness, it more than makes up for it by dutifully staying in one place (unlike every other star that revolves around the sky). The great advantage of this is that once you’ve found Polaris you don’t need to worry about losing it, because it’s not going anywhere.
However, as you travel south, Polaris will drop one degree in the sky for every degree of latitude (60 nautical miles / 111 kilometres). At the North Pole it will be directly overhead, but if you were to continue all the way down to the equator, the North Star will be just a speck on the horizon and when you head into the Southern Hemisphere, it completely disappears from the sky. However, there is a technique the Polynesians developed to make use of Polaris in low southern latitudes, places like Tahiti; they would use the pointers in the Plough (which is visible during part of the night) to gauge where Polaris is lying beneath the horizon.
The point on the sea directly above this is north. While this lacks the precision of actually seeing the star, it does give you an approximate guide. For more accuracy, you want to
“Polaris is the most useful star in the sky, guiding us true north more accurately than a compass.”
turn around and find the Southern Cross. This is slightly more complicated because like the Plough, it’s perpetually spinning around the sky; unlike the Northern Hemisphere, there’s no single star in the Southern Hemisphere that sits directly above the South Pole.
To navigate using the Southern Cross you need to do another ‘line visualisation’ like with the Plough. But firstly you need to actually find the Cross. This is done most easily by scanning the horizon at twilight and finding the first two pointers (see Diagram 2), which are some of the first stars to appear after sunset. Soon after, you should see the Southern Cross appear nearby in the darkening sky. Now, for best results, you want to do a double line-up. Firstly, extend a line out from Gacrux towards Acrux and beyond. Secondly, imagine a line between the pointers and then extend another from the middle, going out at right angles. Now visualise this line bisecting the one from the Cross; the point beneath this is due south. As you can imagine, this technique is more complicated than using Polaris to find north, but with
practice it does become second nature. On my first attempt I couldn’t even find the Southern Cross (the SkyView App helped me out), but after a few nights I was confidently using it to find my way south.
The Polynesians knew that from your location a particular star will always rise at a specific point on the horizon, move through the sky in a predetermined path and then set in the same place. To understand why this happens, it helps to understand a little background theory. Firstly, we imagine all stars embedded into the ‘celestial sphere’ (see Diagram 3), which is like an orb that surrounds the Earth with its poles and equator in alignment with ours. Every star has a fixed position on the celestial sphere and its ‘celestial latitude’ (position north or south of the celestial equator) is called declination. This is what determines where a star rises; from the equator its horizon bearing north or south of east is equal to its declination. For example, Alnilam, the middle star in
ABOVE: Mountain top breakfast cuddles.
Orion’s Belt (see Diagram 4) has a declination of 1° north, so it rises almost due east (89°) and then sets in a mirror-image, almost due west (271°). Sirius, which is the brightest star in the sky found by following a line from Orion’s Belt, has a declination of 17° south, so it rises 17° south of east (107°) and sets 17° south of west (253°), when viewed from the equator. The bearings change with your latitude, but from the Northern Hemisphere Sirius will always rise approximately E-S-E and set W-S-W. By understanding this theory, all you need to know is a star’s declination and you can predict where it will rise and set; to find this information, you can download a DIY Star Calculator from tide-school.com
The Polynesians knew by heart the positions that dozens of stars rose and set, giving them a compass laid out in the sky every night, with shimmering lights guiding them to all the cardinal points, filling in the gaps between the pole stars. If that isn’t amazing enough, this knowledge created the
foundations of an even more incredible achievement; they used star bearings to chart the entire Polynesian Triangle, mapping everything within the area between Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island. This was done by undertaking a multitude of voyages between islands over multiple generations, perfecting the star bearing of each island in relation to the others around it. Combined with an understanding of average sailing times, the Polynesians had a mental map of the whole South Pacific, a vast maze of volcanic islands, reefs and atolls. To simplify learning, the information was converted into songs, poems and chants. Quite simply, all navigators needed to do was memorise their favourite tunes and they had a chart of the Pacific.
Naturally, you can only use the horizon star technique on stars that rise and set. Not all celestial bodies do; some stars are perpetually circling through the sky, neither rising nor setting. These are called ‘circumpolar stars’ and they can be found in both hemispheres. In the Northern Hemisphere,
they all spiral anticlockwise around Polaris, like the Plough. In the Southern Hemisphere, they all spiral clockwise above the south pole, like the Southern Cross. Whether or not a star is circumpolar from your position depends on its declination and your latitude. Firstly, the star needs to be in the same hemisphere in the celestial sphere as your hemisphere on earth. Secondly, your latitude added to the star’s declination must exceed 90. For example, from my boat Luna in Catalonia, where the latitude is 42° north, any star with a declination higher than 48° north will be circumpolar. This means these stars will neither rise nor set, but perpetually circle Polaris, an effect not made by the stars actually moving but by the earth spinning on its axis, giving the appearance of movement in the heavens.
Regardless of whether a star is circumpolar or not, apart from Polaris they all share the same pattern of spending half the time rising and then half the time falling. The moment they are highest is called ‘culmination’ and this is of great use to navigators. Firstly, this is because stars always culminate on a due north-south axis. Whether it culminates to the north or south of your location depends on the star’s declination and your latitude. If its declination is more northerly than your latitude, it will culminate due north. But if its declination is more southerly than your latitude, it will culminate due south. At the equator, Sirius will always culminate south because its declination is 17° south. In contrast, Arcturus (see Diagram 5) has a declination of 19° north, so from the equator
“Quite simply, all navigators needed to do was memorise their favourite tunes and they had a chart of the Pacific.”DIAGRAM 3: The celestial sphere
Polaris can be seen from everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere and it leads you due north more accurately than any compass. Its altitude in the sky is equal to your latitude!
The simplest way to find the Southern Cross is to go out at twilight and look out for the ‘pointers’. These are some of the first stars to appear in the night sky.
Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, found by extending out an imaginary line from Orion’s Belt. From the Northern Hemisphere it always rises south-east, is due south when highest, then sets south-west.
Declination is the celestial equivalent of latitude. If a star’s declination is the same as your latitude, it will pass directly overhead.
From your position a star will always follow the same path through the sky, rising at exactly the same point every day and then setting in a mirror-image bearing to the west.
it will culminate due north, exactly above Polaris. However, from Luna’s mooring in Catalonia (42° north) both stars will culminate due south because their declinations are more southerly than Luna’s latitude.
In addition to guiding you on a north-south axis, culminating stars can help you find your latitude. This is based on the rule that if a star’s declination is the same as your latitude, it will culminate directly overhead. This is called a Zenith Star. Polynesian navigators used the concept to find their way between islands, particularly along the ‘Sea Road’ between Tahiti and Hawaii. Because Arcturus’ declination is the same as Hawaii’s latitude, when they sailed the route from Tahiti, Arcturus would start low on the horizon. But with every 60nm north they travelled, its culmination would rise by one degree (a fingers’ width from your outstretched hand). They knew the precise moment of culmination because Arcturus would be directly above the North Star, once they got north of the equator. Finally, after more than two thousand miles, Arcturus would culminate directly overhead, at their zenith, and they knew they were on the right latitude. All they needed to do then was sail downwind and they’d find home. This was a principle called ‘getting your easting’; to account for the Trade Winds, they always aimed well upwind of their destination so that once they were on the right latitude, they knew whether to turn left or right. On the return journey, they then followed the same technique but using Sirius, which has the same declination as Tahiti’s latitude. If your destination doesn’t have a zenith star, you can still use the technique by learning the altitude different stars culminate from that place and measuring it with your hand, an invaluable skill.
Good luck !
“If a star’s declination is the same as your latitude, it will culminate directly overhead. This is called a Zenith Star.”DIAGRAM 4: Using Orion's Belt to find Sirius, the sky's brightest star.
In September 2022, a crack team of climbers set sail for St Kilda, the westernmost point of the British Isles. Their objective: to establish new routes on the tallest sea cliffs in the United Kingdom.
Is there even any point in going? It’s an unusual statement for a plan more than a year in the making. But like a lot of plans, this one hinged on the unseen; those subtle unpredictable tremors on the periphery of our own personal little bubbles.
Avian influenza was the simmering issue, one that had just begun to boil over, spilling onto these best-laid plans. Nature Scotland had just put out an advisory notice to stop public landings on Soay and Dùn, two of the main islands a team of climbers had pegged to explore.
Early Thursday morning, I was at work when I received a voice message:
‘Hey dude, it's Robbie, hope you’re well. I don’t suppose you’re free for a climbing trip to St Kilda are you? Guy hurt his elbow and we might need an extra climber. Only thing is, we leave tomorrow. Once in a lifetime trip!’
Story by | Will Birkett Photos by | Hamish FrostHow could I resist? But now it seemed this spontaneous sojourn could come to an end before it had even started.
The Outer Hebridean islands are world-famous for their marine and avian wildlife, from the docile Leach’s petrels which inhabit Dùn’s grassy slopes to the great skuas (or bonxies, as they’re sometimes called), famous for their kamikaze tactics when defending their eggs, while fulmars, gannets and guillemots all crowd the surrounding cliffs, making power plays for the best ledge to lay their eggs upon during nesting season. St Kilda alone hosts in excess of a million seabirds, boasting 210 different species. Climbers however, know these islands for a different reason.
Bands of dark and light patterned gneiss and gabbro characteristically flow through these cliffs, formed by ancient geomechanics of intense heat and pressure. The fingerprints of a chaotic pre-human world are stamped on these fantastic bullet-hard cliffs. The violent thrashing of the Atlantic Ocean against these unique formations leaves the cliffs cleansed of all loose rubble and king lines are to be found on many of the 100+ metre rock faces. But many of these lines remain unclimbed. Not least due to the islands’ remote location and the general foul nature of Scottish weather systems as well as the inherent challenges posed by nesting season.
Our team of five consisted of Robbie Phillips and Guy Robertson, two pioneering professional climbers of their respective generations, and adept mountain sports photographer Hamish Frost – collectively forming the Scottish contingent – our lithe sea captain Charles Smallwood, and me. We first sailed to Barra Head, also known as Berneray. Tilted on its axis as if a giant had sat on its northern aspect, sinking half the island while simultaneously raising the other half up, this is the most southerly island of the Outer Hebrides. Its largest cliffs stand proud at 200m and the flawless gneiss form steep, oppressing corners flaked in vivid yellow algae that protrude uninterrupted, straight from the seabed.
When your time on islands such as these is limited, it helps to be paired with some of the best adventure trad climbers in the world.
The first day, myself, Guy and Robbie spied an unclimbed line on the right hand side of the crag known as Giant’s Pipes, taking a stone pillar directly up the face. Robbie negotiated patches of seeping saltwater to lead the best pitch of climbing I had seconded all year. From a thinning crack to rounded smears and obscure, undercut power moves through a stepped
“Like some sort of Jurassic island, we half expected to see pterodactyls circling above us.”
out roof, continuing up pockets and crimps to a belay some 58 metres above the swell.
The following day, splitting into two teams, Hamish and Guy bagged two new climbs on a stunning, previously untouched face whilst Robbie and I smashed through the overhanging roof of a sea cave just left of the Giant’s Pipes –throwing his weight between blocky smears and rounded hand holds, Robbie was in his element.
You could imagine the route description as it would appear in a guidebook:
Immaculate climbing above good but spaced gear.
Abseiling down to a ledge above the crashing ocean swell and releasing the static rope into the wind is the very definition of commitment. We don’t end up in these places by accident of course, but for the lust for adventure. With no phone signal and no rescue party, we hoped Charles knew where to find us.
The night before, the Atlantic swell had raged several metres high as a purple dusk merged the sea and sky, welding them together into one large blank canvas of dark unknown. When the wind ferociously bit at the jib and mainsail Charles, cool as ever, fought with the helm to keep us on course as the yacht named Half Light leaned what felt like 180 degrees into the sea. I had positioned myself on the side of my rotated seat and accepted whatever fate lay before me.
‘On a scale of one to ten, how serious was that?’ Guy asked Charles.
‘Oh I don’t know, somewhere around a three I suppose,’ was his reply.
It certainly didn’t feel like a three to any of the four nonseafaring climbers who were just thankful not to have been lost at sea. As it turns out, a boat like that is practically unsinkable. Even if it capsizes it would self-right, but as a novice climber may believe that E1 is the living end, we believed we might drown that night. Well, at least three of us felt that way; throughout all of this, Robbie was lying face-down in the front cabin, inebriated by seasickness tablets and mostly unaware of any drama at sea. He had suffered badly on the trip from the mainland and continued to feel sick with any motion of the boat.
The main attraction of climbing Outer Hebridean sea cliffs in September is that the nesting season is finito. Once our feathered friends have fledged their cliff ledges, the options of ascendible rock are greatly increased. So naturally, looking for new lines at this more unsettled time of year made far more sense, even if the forthcoming autumnal weather might throw some curveballs our way.
Prior to our arrival on Hirta, we had been in touch with the Scottish National Trust, so we could discuss climbing on the islands of Soay and Dùn, both of which had been badly affected by avian influenza. When we arrived in the bay, we radioed across to their permanent base on St Kilda to arrange a meeting with the wardens in person. Our expectation was that they’d fob us off, but to our surprise they were extremely personable and helpful and we were soon given the go-ahead to climb on the sea cliffs of Hirta, Soay and Dùn as it was outside of nesting season. So long as we accessed the base of the cliffs
and left the same way via the sea, it was highly unlikely that we would disturb or even come into contact with the birdlife. They also asked that if we did see any bird remains that we take photos and report back each day with any finds. Elated that not only could we climb on our desired cliffs, but that our climbing expedition had been upgraded to an ecological survey, we went forth and looked for crags.
We remained in regular contact with the wardens on Hirta. Most days we would radio across or visit in the dinghy. One warden named Chris had mentioned in passing his recent acquisition of a racing pigeon who had likely been blown off course was now refusing to fly away. He fed it every day but was worried it would meet an untimely end if it stayed on the island much longer, and that equally if sent back to its owners they might themselves kill it. After some debate back on board Half Light, we ended up with guardianship of said pigeon. We named him Charles and he became a sort-of mascot to the trip, patiently minding the boat from his window view.
Yikes, is this it?
As we sailed around the archipelago anticlockwise, gigantic walls of jagged, vegetated gabbro blackened by a millennium of ocean waves loomed above us. Like some sort of Jurassic island, we half expected to see pterodactyls circling above us. Impressive, but nothing worth climbing. It wasn’t until the west banks that we found gold, first spying a huge, clean face around 130 metres high with two king lines; a right and left crack spanning almost the entire length of the crag. As more of the south westerly aspects became clear, there looked to be gems everywhere – some real treasures to behold.
Guy and I went to climb the left hand crack on the behemoth sea wall, topping out shortly before nightfall. It was
a smooth execution until the last pitch when a looming patch of dark fog started rolling in from the sea. The last 30 metres of gabbro crumbles slightly under a weighted foot and just after taking the lead, Guy shouted up: ‘You’d better go faster, it might rain any second!’ Run-out and exposed, we beat the night to the top – just.
To make any sort of crag assessment we’d all pile into a rubber dinghy, also captained by the fearless Charles Smallwood. As Charles steered the dinghy, shuttling Guy, Hamish, Robbie and I onto our chosen craggy, seaweedladen landing slip, Half Light was left bobbing in the nearby froth of the sea. From here we had to sync our timings with the swell; leaving it too long meant that the dinghy would be mispositioned by the sea, get impatient and the swell could suddenly drop a few metres leaving you to scrape down barnacle-encrusted rocks and into the drink. Charles would then buzz back to Half Light and we would later reconvene. This whole process felt quite addictive, each time looking nervously forward to a bigger swell to test our mettle.
ABOVE: Conveniently close to the coast for hotter days, you can find deep water soloing spots like this under an hour away from Manikia. © Petzl - Marc Daviet.
The epitome of our landing escapades was accessing the Dùn wall. Robbie and Charles set off to scope out a potential
“Manikia is quiet, almost forgotten. It feels like discovering a secret.”
“When your time on islands such as these is limited, it helps to be paired with some of the best adventure trad climbers in the world.”
landing point and to our horror, would momentarily disappear behind the huge rolling swell. At a guess, it was 3-4 metres high and it felt big. To the relief of the team looking on from the boat, Robbie somehow timed his jump with the swell to reach land successfully. Guy and Hamish made the perfectly sane decision to sit this one out, opting instead to find more sheltered waters and accessible climbing. Despite the knowledge that Charles might not be able to rescue us if the swell increased, I made the moral decision to follow Robbie onto the rock. And fate, it seems, favours the bold and we put up a new line of the highest quality: following a continuous crack through roofs and wonderfully steep, clean ground, the route rivals anything I’ve climbed in Yosemite.
Charles’ warning of rough seas reigned true as we huddled for warmth on a ledge ten metres above the sea, waiting for Half Light to emerge. When finally she did, our options were fairly dire. We set up a pullable line, dangling into the sea at the only point the swell might not capsize the dinghy. The vessel was hurled up and down against barnacled rock as Charles, with steely eyes, manoeuvred to get us off the cliffs.
‘I don’t think I’d like it to get much more exciting than that,’ I later heard Charles say. Which I think is the equivalent of anyone else saying that was some serious shit!
We weathered the final part of the trip on the island of Mingulay, one north of Berneray. The island too boasts an array of fascinating wildlife. Seals play and howl at all hours along the golden sandy beach, and a plethora of birdlife nests along its cliffs, some seasonally and some year round.
Regular showers rolled across the sea occasionally drenching us but we climbed when we could. Guy and Hamish found a whole new unclimbed sector over 100 metres high and quickly bagged an incredible looking 5 star route, climbing roofs, cracks and walls. Robbie and I spent a bit of time swinging around on Dun Mingulay, and eventually Robbie smashed a new E8 up through the roof left of Big Kenneth that hosted a surprise second pitch delaying our ascent and finishing in the dark.
I feel honoured to have had these experiences with these amazing people in such a wildly beautiful place, on what was truly a once in a lifetime trip.
But what happened to the pigeon? I hear you say.
After his epic journey back to the mainland, Charles the pigeon found himself driving to Edinburgh with Robbie. There he was rehomed in a pigeon sanctuary to live out the rest of his days eating seeds and hanging around with his own kind, safe from the perils he once oversaw from his bolthole onboard Half Light
Note that St Kilda is home to Europe’s largest seabird colony and there are currently advisory restrictions around access to parts of the islands due to avian flu. The trip in this story was done outside outside of nesting season, and on arrival to the islands the team consulted with National Trust Scotland rangers to discuss their climbing plans and ensure that they wouldn’t be impacting on the bird populations. It’s strongly encouraged that anyone hoping to climb on the islands does similar.
‘Nothing really prepares one for the reality of a huge iceberg which is larger than some islands I have visited’ – Rich, crew member on this year’s SKIRR Adventures expedition.
Two ocean-racing yachts, primed in some of the planet’s toughest conditions, spent this summer on a 4,820 nautical mile expedition to some of the most remote places on Earth. For eight weeks, the adapted Clipper 68 yachts voyaged to the high latitudes, from the Scottish Isles, to the Faroe Islands, Iceland and across the Arctic Circle into the infamous Scoresby Sund of Greenland.
The SKIRR Adventures expedition brings together adventurers from around the world to explore the planet’s hidden corners under sail. On the inaugural voyage, 49 sailors took part across the five legs, witnessing the raw beauty, exhilarating sailing and untouched wildlife of one of the most remote areas in the world.
LEFT: Navigating the swathes of sea ice on Leg 3. MAIN: “The icebergs have a scale to them that is really unimaginable until you see them.” A SKIRR expedition yacht dwarfed by one of the huge icebergs between Reyjavik and Tasiilaq.
“The land was completely barren, there is nothing green about Greenland at all.”
The third leg took the expedition crew to Tasiilaq, the largest town on the East Coast of Greenland, set inside a fjord that is often full of ice. On this occasion, there was so much ice that it denied the yachts access to land, but offered some of the most incredible seascapes with huge majestic icebergs and impressive ice packs.
‘The conditions were harsh,’ recalls Skipper Bob Beggs. ‘We did get close to the coast of Greenland, where we could see mountains and glaciers but the ice proved to be too thick. It would be another week before the ice dispersed.’
‘I can never get enough of seeing sea ice,’ says Toni Wilson, from London, who completed all five legs of the SKIRR expedition this year. ‘There is so much beauty in the colours and shapes that the wind and sea makes it into – it's really sculptural. The icebergs have a scale to them that is really unimaginable until you see them.’
Back in Reykjavik for crew changeover, the fourth leg of the adventure commenced. Having waited out several heavy weather systems, a fortunate window of opportunity emerged for the boats to get clearance to head to Scoresby
Sund – a 1,005 nautical mile route crossing the Arctic Circle. ‘The reports were that the ice was going to be scarce so we were able to push through and get to Scorseby Sund which was relatively ice free,’ explains Beggs. During the very early hours of August 4th, the two SKIRR Adventures yachts crossed into the Arctic Circle, a line of latitude around the Earth, at approximately 66°30’ N.
‘As we got to the entrance of the sound, the fog cleared and there was blue sky all around us. We could see the whole of Scoresby Sund and the villages around its perimeter,’ recalls Greg Glover, a farmer in his day job who also joined for the entire expedition. ‘The land was completely barren, there is nothing green about Greenland at all. We could see up to the mountains where there were glaciers and there were icebergs floating just off the shore of these little villages.’
Whilst the beauty of venturing to the most untouched corners of the globe is something extremely special, the reality is that these places are facing the rapidly increasing impact of climate change.
On the expedition, the crew marvelled at the pristine waters, stunning wildlife and of course, the enormous icebergs that dominated the landscape. Their decline however, was also a reality, and the crew witnessed ice melting in front of their eyes.
‘This expedition showed me how wonderful our planet is and also how vulnerable she is too,’ says Tom, a French crew member sailing on board. ‘These massive giants that are left alone to drift on the sea will eventually melt and return to the ocean without leaving a trace behind as they continue to perpetuate an infinite cycle of life.’
Interested in becoming an Arctic Circle explorer? Find out more at skirradventures.com.
TOP LEFT: The crew sail in watch systems day and night, and good navigation 24/7 is critical in passing through the tricky arctic waters.
TOP RIGHT: One of the twelve crew on board, and Skipper Jake Carter.
ABOVE: Darkness never quite falls this close to the arctic circle, approaching Tasiilaq, Greenland.
“Nothing really prepares one for the reality of a huge iceberg which is larger than some islands I have visited.”
– RICH, CREW MEMBER
In the extreme upper reaches of Pakistan’s Swat Valley, a region that between 2007 and 2009 was under Taliban control, a ski mountaineering expedition team share their craft.
The day started off frustratingly similar to those that came before it. Standing on a moraine wall a couple hundred metres above our base camp, I looked up towards the towering hulk of Falak Sar, our ski objective, nearly 2,000m above us. High winds whipped across its north ridge, blowing plumes of snow into the air. Fast moving clouds raced in and out, one moment clear and sunny and minutes later whirling with snow. Another morning and evening would be spent glued to the inReach while the tempestuous weather patterns had us waiting and second guessing its plans.
Story by | Tom Grant Photos by | Aaron Rolph
PREVIOUS PAGE: Basecamp at an elevation of 4200m, and the unnamed peak behind which we skied as we left the area.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Behind our basecamp stood this. An unnamed, unclimbed and unskied lonely peak; Juliette guiding Ahmad through his first snowplough turns; Juliette helping Ahmad to initially find his balance; Sattar showing his typical determination and enthusiasm, managing to dodge the odd rock and make it to the bottom of the slope; Acclimatising at the foot of Falak Sar while high winds and unsettled weather had us waiting for a summit push; Plenty of smiles from Ahmad as he got to grips with sliding around on skis quicker than any of us could have anticipated.
“While not famous for its skiing, in 2007 the Swat Valley did gain international notoriety following the takeover of the Pakistani Taliban.”
Today would be different though. I took my gaze off Falak Sar and watched while our team of Pakistanis donned our ski boots and ski mountaineering skis. There was Ahmad, our local guide, Sattar, our amiable police escort, Zaheer our talismanic head cook and his assistant Nazir. Ahmad had been involved in a successful Pakistani mountaineering expedition to the summit of Falak Sar in 2020. Sattar was an old friend of his and he took it upon himself to hike up to base camp carrying barely anything save his trusty kalashnikov rifle, which was practically an extension of his own being anyway. Clearly, the local police weren’t completely relaxed about our security
Our ski expedition team of five had decided it would be an enjoyable experience for everyone to introduce skiing to our Pakistani team members. Our Chamonix-based team consisted of Bine, an ex-professional Slovenian freestyle skier turned ski mountaineer, Aaron Rolph, a British photographer and skier with a real appetite for adventure, Juliette Willmann, a young French freeride star, and Beth Healey, a British expat doctor with multiple Arctic expeditions under her belt.
We were in the most extreme upper reaches of the Swat Valley, Pakistan, an area which, to the best of our knowledge, had never seen a ski mountaineering expedition. The landscape here is rugged but lush, branded as the ‘Switzerland of Pakistan’. These mountains are part of the vast Hindu Kush, where although not as high as the Karakorum or the Greater Himalaya, the range hosts endless virgin peaks. During the takeover of the region by the Pakistani Taliban and the fighting that ensued as the authorities sought to regain control, refugees sheltered at the end of this valley; the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) tents still stand but are now used as cafes for Pakistani tourists.
Ahmad and Sattar were ethnic Pashtuns from the local area, Nazir and Zaheer were Shia Baltis from Baltistan and professional expedition cooks. Sattar and Ahmad were Wahhabi Sunnis, meaning that on paper they aligned with the least tolerant form of Islam, yet they were open-minded and accepting of all of us, the two women in our group, Beth and Juliette, included. Both the Shia and Sunni contingent of our group seemed to share a jovial time in basecamp. If only it was that easy everywhere. Although women in this part of rural Pakistan have a completely different role in society and are treated very differently than in the West, Beth and Juliette were shown respect, even if at times they weren’t spoken to directly or eye contact was avoided. We all had a good bond and mutual respect between our eclectic team of nine.
Bine and Juliette, both ski instructors in the Alps, took the lead in getting the three Pakistani men to find their balance and start sliding around on the skis they’d borrowed from us. The slope above the moraine was as forgiving as any we could find, the snow firm but slightly softened on top. None of them had tried skiing in any form and Ahmad and Sattar had neither held nor seen skis in their lives. They were more than game for it though. As Juliette guided Ahmad through making his first snow plough turns, I considered the fact that having a French
woman teaching him to ski must have been an entirely alien experience.
Nonetheless, Ahmad and the others loved it and quickly found their balance. Sattar clipped into my bindings with the modified touring boots and was soon, with a determined glint in his eye, managing to haphazardly zig-zag between rocks. Veterans of fighting the Taliban a few years previously, Ahmad and Sattar were whooping with joy. After a few awkward crashes, any concerns that one of them would snap an ACL were soon ameliorated. They were natural athletes, impressively agile and flexible; getting to grips with the basics faster than we could have imagined. Being able to witness their enthusiasm and natural curiosity for skiing bonded us as a team.
We had travelled to the end of the Swat Valley looking for adventure and new experiences. The north face of Falak
Sar was our main goal, an enticing 1000m steep ski line on the highest peak in the region which had only been submitted twice from what we could tell. While not famous for its skiing, in 2007 the Swat Valley did gain international notoriety. This is where Pakistan’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head in 2012, when as a schoolgirl she defied the Taliban. Although the security situation in Swat is now stable, the region has seen virtually no foreign tourists of any kind for years.
After waiting out more uncertain days at basecamp, we finally got a solid two-day weather window. Bine, Aaron, and I set off with heavily laden packs on our summit push. Pitching our tent at 5,000m, we still hadn’t even laid eyes on our prize ski line. Getting Aaron’s drone airborne, we were able to scout the north side without having to climb higher ourselves. It
“He took it upon himself to hike up carrying barely anything but his trusty kalashnikov rifle, which was practically an extension of his own being.”
LEFT: Our full team of five booting up one of the virgin peaks behind our basecamp, which topped out at 4,800 metres. We skied this down to the lower valley on our last day in the mountains, eventually rejoining our Pakistani team and the porters and hiking all the way out to the road.
ABOVE: Looking down the lower section of the north ridge.
BELOW: Sattar wouldn’t go anywhere without his gun in his arms, and couldn’t resist a pose.
looked incredible. In the bitterly cold predawn air, we began our ascent of the north ridge the following morning, breaking trail up beautiful and exposed 45-degree slopes until we hit black ice. Still, progressing steadily, we pushed through the altitude-induced pain to the final slopes guarding the summit.
It soon became clear though, that our plan wasn’t going to pan out as we’d hoped. Our aim had been to drop into the north face via a traverse of the summit ridge, therefore bypassing the monstrous cornices that guarded the very top of the north face. But now, as we stood on the top of the peak, we could see that more cornices also guarded our passage around the back of the summit. Having surveyed Google Earth months before, our expectations of the terrain didn’t match the reality now we were faced with the facts.
We tagged the summit, and clipped into our skis. Our objective now shifted from a dream of shredding the north face to ensuring we all could get down safely via the only other way we could: our line of ascent. The first section involved putting in turns on 50-degree plus slopes above big exposure. The snow was grippy which was reassuring but it kept us on our toes. Multiple v-threads were needed to get over the icy portion of the ridge.
Finally, we were treated to some spectacular turns on the NW facing ridge. As the sun descended through the sky, the entire Hindu Kush range lay before us, stretching to the horizon. Our team was soon happily reunited on the same moraine above camp, and Sattar fired his gun into the air in celebration.
We didn’t get another weather window for the north face of Falak Sar. And while the region sheds the dark past of the Taliban from its skin, arms open to the prospect of tourism and the much needed injection of revenue it would bring, sadly it’ll be some time before this region of northern Pakistan welcomes visitors.
Since our return, the Swat Valley has been devastated by the worst floods the region has endured in living memory –roads, houses, hotels along the Swat River, all swept away. Despite contributing to less than 1% of global greenhouse emissions, Pakistan is paying a heavy price for climate change and the Swat Valley in particular is increasingly susceptible to such catastrophes. Insha’Allah, this amazing region will get back on its feet.
While the down jacket has now well and truly transcended the world of high alpine mountaineering, there are no prizes for guessing its origin. Perhaps more surprising though, is the geographical location from where that spark of inspiration first came. The icon of alpine clothing actually originates from the hottest and flattest continent on Earth.
The story leads back almost 100 years, to George Finch –a farmer's son, from a small town in New South Wales who, in the race to be the first person to climb Mount Everest, became rival to George Mallory.
In 1922 he was invited on Britain's first Everest expedition but the choice was a controversial one. Having moved to Europe with his family, he gained a huge amount of experience, quickly climbing many of the iconic peaks in the Alps. In doing so Finch opted for the more challenging and dangerous routes, earning him a reputation as something of a maverick. Despite the audacious nature of his ascents, Finch was too brilliant not to be invited, and for the expedition, he invented two iconic mountaineering technologies that are still used in the highest mountains today: bottled oxygen and the puffer jacket.
This first iteration of the insulated puffer was bright green and constructed from fabric taken from the shell of a hot air balloon, filled with the feathers of the eider duck. But the design was too unconventional for the gentry of the Alpine Club, as was the use of bottled oxygen and Finch was ridiculed for his creations.
After being seen to repair his own boots – something well beneath the aristocratic classes of the Alpine Club — Finch was ostracised and the expedition banned the use of supplementary oxygen. Colonel Edward Strutt, the expedition deputy leader who’d later become president of the club was heard to remark, ‘I always knew the fellow was a shit’.
But Finch’s innovation didn’t go totally overlooked, and eventually his jacket caught the eye of John Noel, the expedition’s photographer. ‘Finch, who had a scientific brain, invented a wonderful green quilted eiderdown suit of aeroplane fabric. Not a particle of wind could get through,’ he wrote in his diary.
We take a look back at the genesis of the down jacket, what makes it so good, and how a relatively small player in the feather industry changed the game forever.LEFT: Sunrise rituals for Fay Manners and Michelle Dvorak on Cassin Ridge, Denali, Alaska. © Fay Manners
Mallory was given the opportunity to be first to climb the mountain, and he did so wearing a tweed suit and without the assistance of oxygen, ultimately failing to reach the summit. Days later Finch was finally allowed to climb using his down jacket and oxygen system, reaching 8,360 metres — the highest any person had climbed — before his exhausted partner forced his retreat.
Two years later, London's Alpine Club returned to Everest in 1924 in an expedition that saw Mallory leading the climbers, but George Finch was not invited. Instead Mallory's partner for the attempt was Andrew Sandy Irvine, a chemistry student. Famously, the two died high on Everest in their tweed, carrying Finch's oxygen system.
Robert Wainwright, author of The Maverick Mountaineer, a biography of George Finch, ponders what might have been if only it were Finch climbing with Mallory: ‘The two Georges could have, should have, conquered Everest that day. And they both should have survived.’
Finch went on to become one of England’s most senior and celebrated scientists and although he’d given up climbing himself, thirty years later he was an advisor and mentor on Edmund Hillary’s successful Everest ascent in 1953. For that expedition, Fairydown, a New Zealand clothing company improved Finch’s original design, creating something remarkably similar to today’s puffy down jacket.
Nearly a century later, if there were to be an unofficial uniform of the outdoors, the down jacket would surely be it. Head to the hills or out on a dog walk and that distinctive design is sure to make an appearance soon enough. Attend any outdoors or adventure gathering and you’re guaranteed to be among a sea of brightly coloured baffles. You’ve probably got your own, perhaps a selection, and for good reason.
Down boasts the most impressive weight to warmth ratio
of any natural fibre and insane compressibility and recovery attributes making it an undeniably good choice for insulation, be that in a jacket or sleeping bag.
So what is it we’re referencing when we say down specifically? The down of birds is a layer of finer features under their tougher outer feathers. These feathers are simpler than those elsewhere on the birds: they have a shorter shaft (the spine of the feather), fewer barbs (think branches of a tree) and their barbules lack hooks (if barbs are branches, barbules are the leaves). In simple terms, these are smaller, softer, lighter feathers whose sole purpose is to trap air providing warmth and, for some birds, buoyancy in water too.
For decades though, the outdoors has been an industry led by performance and feel above all else. Until relatively very recently, brands overlooked the environmental and
ethical impacts of manufacturing as well as the life cycle of those products.
‘For the last 35 years I have done my very best to consume only organic food, especially when it is food from animals,’ explains Tom Strobl, Managing Director of Mountain Equipment in Germany. ‘For the last 33 years I have lived mainly from the sales of down sleeping bags and down jackets. It took me quite a while to think about the animals that deliver the down. Shame on me. I then realised that I can make a much bigger difference if I do my very best to help establish ethical sourcing for our down.’
In 2009, the brand took to redesigning their down supply chains in order to address environmental, ethical and welfare concerns in a project that would later become known as CodeX. The objective was to place animal welfare
FACING
MAIN: Martin Feistl and Amelie Kühne, layered up for a night on Säkularis, Grossglockner, Austria. © Silvan Metz
ABOVE, TOP TO BOTTOM: Goose down magnified at at x20 show the sheer quantity of individual barbs from the shaft of the feather; Magnified at x 400 it is possible to really see the details within individual barbs and barbules of the feather; At x30 the separate barbules start to come to light. All images © Matthew Fuller/The University of Leeds.
isn’t green, it’s greenwashing.”PAGE: Cocooned in down, leaving the tent – even in stunning bluebird conditions is never going to be simple. Michelle Dvorak eats breakfast on Denali’s Cassin Ridge. © Fay Manners
and sustainability first in all their down insulated products, developing best practice, backed up by comprehensive and transparent auditing.
But, as is the case with most things worth pursuing, it was a bigger challenge than they had first perceived. Largely a bi-product of the meat industry, tracing down is not simply a case of locating the responsible farm, instead it’s a complex network operating at numerous different levels.
‘Indeed a typical down supply chain doesn’t exist, and that’s where the real difficulties began,’ explains Dr Matt Fuller, Product Engineer at Mountain Equipment. ‘One supply chain might have had a mother goose farm, a couple of subsidiary farms, and then a slaughterhouse and down processing plant. Another supply chain might have had two down processors, and multiple slaughterhouses each fed by hundreds, if not thousands, of small farms. Some supply chains relied on a collector-based system with workers riding scooters collecting hundreds of grams of down at a time from rural smallholdings spread out over whole provinces and then taking it to one central processor.’
With such complex models and so many parties involved, carrying out assessments and audits to provide any form of traceability to implement meaningful change was a mammoth task. And these supply chains weren’t the only problem.
‘The down and feather industry is worth well over a billion US dollars per year and over 270,000 tons of down and feather are traded every year. If we were to come out with difficult demands that suppliers couldn’t achieve, they might simply have decided that we were too much effort to deal with and ignore our small-value orders, instead sticking to larger customers, or those from other industries, who were less demanding,’ explains Fuller. ‘Compared to the down and feather industry, Mountain Equipment was and still is a relatively small brand. Us trying to influence the practices of the down and feather industry would be akin to a non-league football team trying to influence the contracts of football’s highest profile players.’
And, for a team of climbers and fabric specialists with a relatively tiny influence, how would they realistically go about analysing the conditions of animal welfare? Fortunately, as a brand obsessed with quality and performance, they had been working closely for years with the International Down Feature Laboratory (IDFL), the world’s largest down testing facility. They approached them for help in auditing their supply chains and went about building a fundamental framework for animal welfare with the help of the RSPCA’s Freedom Food initiative. The project gathered momentum and before long, horror stories were making headlines from force-feeding and bad living conditions to live-plucking.
‘When the Daily Mail printed the headline in 2012 Gaping flesh wounds, birds crying in pain: The barbaric reality behind the fashion-forward feathers on your winter coat, ethical sourcing of down was suddenly centre-stage and everyone was looking for answers,’ remembers Dr Fuller.
“For the last 33 years I have lived mainly from the sales of down sleeping bags and down jackets. It took me quite a while to think about the animals that deliver the down. Shame on me.”
This relatively small brand suddenly found itself at the centre of a huge debate around global animal welfare and international corporations, and massive feather companies were all at the table. To make meaningful change, collaborating over shared information and the knowledge that traceability has no final destination would be vital. More than a decade on and the brand still holds regular meetings with suppliers, auditing and certification bodies as well as competing brands within the outdoors space. ‘We are yet to turn down a meeting with a ‘rival’ outdoor brand,’ he says. ‘In animal welfare, rivals shouldn’t really exist.’
But creating ethical, more sustainable clothing is about more than animal welfare. It’s estimated that globally, 92 million tonnes of textiles waste is created each year and that by 2030, we could be discarding more than 134 million tonnes a year. As a whole, the clothing industry consumes a huge amount of natural resources. It’s an environmental polluter as well as being one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions and creates a huge amount of waste, owing to problematic end-of-life solutions. Down garments are no exception.
But, unlike many other technical products designed for the outdoors, recycling down is quite straightforward, with as much as 95% of a down jacket or sleeping bag able to be successfully repurposed for another life.
As part of CodeX, Mountain Equipment introduced the use of post-consumer recycled down into a range of insulation, but responsible
manufacturing isn’t purely about the sourcing of material. To account for their impact, they wanted to take responsibility for the after-life of their products too, and they went about creating a closed loop recycling system to ensure that unwanted down clothing and sleeping bags aren’t simply thrown away.
In this process, they gather down garments along with unwanted bedding and upholstery to be processed. The down is separated from the other fabrics which can then be chopped and processed to be used in synthetic recycled insulation. The down is then sorted, with damaged feathers and clusters destined to be broken down for use in organic fertiliser. The remaining down is washed and sterilised – with a small percentage of the highest quality reused in recycled down outdoor garments while the remainder makes its way to domestic products like bedding and cushions.
But of course, a recycling loop can only play one small role in creating a more ethical and environmentally friendly solution. Beyond bold claims, sustainability is a delicate and holistic balancing act, taking into account a product’s overall footprint including how it will be used and for how long. Despite progress over the past decade there is still much to do, as we see suppliers and consumers grapple with many of the same existential questions faced by the meat industry, like what ‘humane slaughter’ or ‘good living conditions’ in reality equate to.
‘Simply encouraging the recycling of usable but worn products isn’t green, it’s green washing. Recycling only works alongside meaningful steps to reduce consumption. That means taking care of the products we do buy; caring for them appropriately, washing them but only when necessary and repairing them when they become damaged. Above all else it means valuing products for what they have done and the places they have been,’ explains Dr Fuller.
‘This is something that the entire sustainability movement needs to consider. It is becoming increasingly difficult for genuine progress to be recognised among the noise of marketing and the clamour for attention. Greenwashing boldly puts environmental issues front-and-centre, but with these issues hidden behind exaggerated claims or even lies, the real messages are lost and consumers lose out, not knowing what to believe. If environmental and sustainability messages become merely another way for brands to peddle more products, ultimately they have failed.’
Very exciting things are happening over here at BASE HQ. We’re raising investment and currently offering the opportunity for new investors to join the round. We wanted to start with our own passionate community first. That’s you.
Perhaps you’re an investor yourself, or perhaps you know someone else who would be a perfect partner for BASE. If either is true, we’d love to hear from you. This is not a crowdfunding exercise. That time might come, but for now we’re looking for individuals or small groups who can make a real impact with BASE.
We tell incredible adventure stories across print, digital, video and TV. With your amazing support, BASE has grown immensely over the last couple of years. We’ve distributed over 100,000 magazines, built a digital community of over 20,000 people, worked with over 100 brands and established a profitable content production business model, resulting in over £600k sales.
But that was just the start.
With adventure sports and travel exploding in popularity after the pandemic, now it’s time to supercharge BASE. This explains the investment round and with it, comes a rare opportunity to be part of our business. We have a clear plan, a brilliant team and an incredible community. For the next stage of our growth we need the capital (plus we’re always open to additional voices, expertise and new ideas!).
Our ideal angel investment partner looks like this:
• Is looking to invest £20k+ ticket size (we have SEIS eligibility)
• Is passionate about the outdoors and adventure and would love to build something special, as we make BASE the world’s number one media brand for adventure
Think you or someone you know might fit the bill? Let’s do this!
Simply email us at growth@base-mag.com to signal your interest and we’ll take it from there
