WRITING COMPETITION
Win
Every month we will be giving away a year’s membership to the John Muir Trust, plus £100 of Mountain Equipment clothing, for the best 400word mountain anecdote.
This month’s winner is TOM KEIRLE
‘The Day A Mountain Changed My Life’
D
espite not growing up in the mountains, I did grow up with mountains. If Little Mell Fell in the Lake District was my baptism aged three, then Bruach na Frithe on Skye’s Cuillin a decade later was my confirmation – a coming of age for a boy for whom mountains then became a religion. The drive on our yearly pilgrimages to Skye from east London was a gently building crescendo of arresting scenery which reached its climax at the Black Cuillins (though were often obscured by characteristic murk – a quality which taught me the lessons of delayed gratification). Billed as the peaks of ‘Alpine Britain’, they are unquestionably special – true snarling, jagged mountains in a land of hills, made all the more tantalising by my father saying, “Maybe when you’re older.” These were mountains for big boys. My hillwalking rite of passage came in my 14th year, now competent at turfscrambling, bog-yomping and battling midges in the Red Cuillins and Macleod’s Tables. I stumbled much of the way on the lengthy walk-in, unable to look at my feet and instead drawn to the mountains ahead as they slowly got bigger and more imposing. No longer on an isolated grass lump, I was humbled by the foreboding and bizarre world of dark, compassnegating rock of the Fionn Choire, where grippy gabbro and soap-like basalt blended indecipherably into one another. The previous year’s slog up Marsco, the highest Red Cuillin, produced false summit after false summit. An endless grassy purgatory. Here the view and
wind smacked me in the mouth instantly upon reaching the Bealach nan Lice. The short, airy stride to the summit produced the view that changed everything – the sweep of the Cuillin Ridge that I’d only ever viewed from below as a world for those far bigger and better than me. Now before me was a tick-list in the sky... in addition to the rapidly forming tick-list
in my head, after learning that there are 281 more of these in Scotland alone, and that’s just the ones over 3000ft! I live some 600 miles away from Skye, but a trip there is always like a homecoming. The British hills are immeasurably special to me, but nowhere more so than the place that started it all off. T
Enter the Trail Writing Competition Send us your 400 words on ‘The Mountain That Changed My Life’ and every issue we will publish the best. Your story could be one of inspiration, revelation, an epic adventure, or a near-miss! Every published entry will receive a year’s membership to the John Muir Trust (the charity that manages mountains including Helvellyn and Ben Nevis), plus
Mountain Equipment clothing up to a retail value of £100. The story of the year will win its author the grand prize of a day of adventure on a John Muir Trust-managed mountain with a Mountain Equipment expert guide, some Mountain Equipment kit and the opportunity to write a fulllength feature article for Trail magazine.
Enter at: www.livefortheoutdoors.com/changedmylife
APRIL 2018 TRAIL 21