Alladin's Couloir

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It was one of those mornings where getting out of bed seems like an almost impossible task. I was warm and comfortable and still half asleep. "It’s still dark." I said to myself. "Only postmen and cat-burglars get up in the dark." What’s more, it was unpleasantly cold outside of the duvet. I thought about the freezing run to the shower over cold floorboards. I thought about the unholy, shivering purgatory of drying myself in the arctic chill of my unheated bathroom.
The day’s planned activities had entirely lost their attractive glamour of the night before, when I had been discussing them with Scott. I toyed with idea of phoning him, but what could I say? "I’m sorry Scott, I know I was all bristling machismo and reckless bravado last night, but now that I’m all cosy under my TOG 24 duvet and its slightly chilly in my flat, I don’t want to go extreme snowboarding anymore." Hmmm. It sounded pretty damn feeble, even to me, and would undoubtedly elicit the withering contempt one of Scott’s infamous raised eyebrows. Should that eyebrow be accompanied by the offer of a half of shandy or some kind of fruity cocktail… well, the shame would eat into me for months.
No, I would just have to grit my teeth and brave the elements. Just leap out of bed and jump in the shower. Get it over and done with. No time like the present… Come on, like ripping off a plaster… Although, if I don’t brush my teeth that will give me another two minutes in bed…
By the time Scott had arrived, I had somehow dragged myself vertical, ingested a quantity of Shreddies that would have killed a lesser man, sucked up a pint of coffee and presented myself on my doorstep with a hastily gathered collection of sports equipment. Scott slotted my snowboard into the roof-rack and turfed my pack into the boot of his rusty old Volkswagen. Soon we were rumbling up the A9 on the way to Aviemore – his skis and my board humming musically in the slipstream above us.
I was awake now, slowly coming to consciousness as the dawn broke over Fife, and I felt a renewed enthusiasm for our venture. The plan was to ride Aladdin’s Couloir in Coire an t’Sneachda in the Northern Corries of the Cairngorms. A steep, sinuous gully which often holds a good thickness of snow, we felt it would be a great descent on skis or board. Many years ago, it had been one of the first winter climbs I had ever done. It occurred to me belatedly that Aladdin’s was a popular route for many novice winter climbers and that this may cause us problems. Trying to ride down a route that somebody was trying to come up would not be fun – I didn’t fancy trying to ollie someone’s climbing rope halfway down an extremely steep descent like Alladin’s Couloir.
By the time we arrived at the car-park at Cairngorm Ski Resort, the morning had blossomed into a bright, sunny day. A few heavy white and grey clouds hung in the blue sky, suggesting that the weather could go either way, but we chose to be optimistic and threw on our rucksacks enthusiastically, eager to get onto the mountain and away from the ski-lifts.
We took the well trodden path that heads west to the Northern Corries. Quite soon, however, we left the path and headed up the Fiachaill ridge, which forms the eastern side of Coire an t’Sneachda. This corrie, unlike its neighbour Coire an Lochain, lies hidden on the approach until you get quite close. As one climbs, the corrie slowly reveals itself, the sheer black and white cliffs rising upwards as you draw closer - a gradual unveiling that never ceases to enchant me.
About an hour and a half after leaving the car we had reached a point where we could get a good look at the couloir. I felt that familiar stirring of butterflies in the gut as I gazed across at it. I hadn’t remembered it looking that steep, perhaps it was our viewpoint that was making it look so precipitous? At least the run-out didn’t look too bad. There was just a chance that, if I messed up, I’d slide to a halt before I hit those rocks at the bottom.
At this point, there was enough snow for Scott to put on his skis and start skinning across the plateau. I followed in his wake, cursing this disadvantage of snowboards and promising myself I would learn to ski. Fortunately it was not far to the top of the couloir from here and by the time Scott had pulled the skins off his skis, taken a swig out of his water-bottle and had an initial peek down the couloir, I was standing next to him, un-strapping my snowboard from my pack.
Before putting the board on my feet I climbed down the gully a short way, to see how steep it really was and to check out the condition of the snow. I was relieved to see that the gully didn’t appear quite so absurdly vertical from this angle, and looked like it would be within my abilities. The snow was reasonably good too; soft, even spring snow that had formed into a well consolidated pack. It should provide a predictable descent.
A predictable descent is very definitely a good thing – there’s nothing like suddenly hitting a patch of ice in the tightest part of steep gully to remind a chap of the fragility of his mortality. I smiled briefly to myself as I recalled such a moment off the back of the Grands Montets in the French Alps. That had been a very hairy moment indeed; but as with most hairy moments that end happily – it was nothing but funny in the rosiness of retrospect.
Stomping back up to the top of the couloir, I returned to where Scott was stepping into his skis. I strapped on my board and stood ready.
"After you."
"No, no, after you."
We both wanted to go first, but courtesy meant we both had to offer the privilege to the other. My graciousness eventually crumbled, however, and I edged closer to the lip of the couloir. Fortunately there was no cornice to negotiate, but it was still very steep and the view down to the rocks below was unsettling. The first turn in these circumstances is always a nervous moment, but the predictable quality of the snow gave me confidence and I’d soon linked some nice turns into the narrowing of the couloir. Fortunately, there were no climbers on their way up.
Lower down the snow was not quite so well consolidated, and little white slabs sloughed off, trundling downwards until they broke up into fragments. These slabs were only a couple of inches thick, however, and presented little danger to the skier or boarder.

As the blocky crag to our left dropped away, the couloir opened up and became less steep. Pulling out onto an unexpectedly large slope of untouched snow, I let rip - carving out sweeping, exhilarating turns on its smooth surface. I failed to supress a laugh as I tore over the pristine snow, free from all thought but the pure joy of speed and skill. It was the best moment of the day... Hell, it was the best moment of the last six months!
Reaching the jumbled rocks that lurked so menacingly at the foot of the slope, I popped a joyful ollie 180, slammed to a halt and turned to watch Scott follow me down. By this time he had exited the tightest part of the couloir and was coming down fast in that "comin’-to-getcha" stance that skiers seem to have when they are charging over beautiful unspoilt snow off-piste. He pulled up hard in front of me. The goggles went up, the grin cracked.
"Ha, ha! Pretty good, eh?"
"Pretty good." I agreed.
"Worth getting up in the dark for?"
"Definitely worth getting up in the dark for."
Indeed, the very next weekend, I would be up in the dark again and heading for ‘The Couloir’ in Coire an Lochain.

Canoeing Kolovesi

Ray Mears made me do it.

There I was, minding my own business – sitting down to my dinner after a hard day at work, I flicked on the TV and started the usual hopeless progression through a succession of talent shows, reality shows and house-doing-up-and-selling shows. Then I found it.
“Ooh! Ray Mears!” I said, through a carefully engineered forkful of sausage, mashed potato and baked beans. “Exffellent!” (partially ingested sausage and mash is not helpful to proper enunciation). Ray was in the wilderness again; this time paddling his canoe over the smooth evening waters of a Finnish lake.
Having parked his boat on an island he leapt out, prepared a Salmon (which he’d presumably caught earlier in the day using a hook of thorns and line made from elk-gut) to Michelin Star standards and shared a bottle of malt whisky with an old friend over the warming embers of an open fire. By the time the programme credits were rolling I’d made my decision – by hook or by crook, I was going to Finland.
To be fair, this time I was relatively well prepared. I had taken up canoeing the previous summer, having built my own boat in a brief period of unemployment, and used it about half a dozen times. Compared to my cross-country skiing trip to Norway, I was a seasoned exponent of the art.
I sent a group email to my various adventurous friends, promising a mixture of beautiful Finnish girls, glorious sunshine and high adventure; none of which I was sure I could provide. However, I did get a positive response from my old mate Col, who is partial to a bit of all three. Some internet research later (mostly performed by Col, who is more suited to these things) and we had flights, hotels in Helsinki and Heinavesi, and a man with a canoe who was willing to rent it to us for a week. What’s more, he was willing to drop us off in one place and pick us up in another, so we wouldn’t have to back-track.
Col had only ever been canoeing once before and it was clear he hadn’t quite got the grasp of its peculiar pleasures. A phone call not long before departure went along these lines:

Col: “I’ve got all the gear I need. I’ve packed it all into a small hold-all. I thought I'd travel as light as possible.”
Me: “Really. Why?”
Col: “Um, well.. you know... I don’t want to weigh down the canoe.”
Me: “I suppose. How did you get your chair into a holdall?”
Col: “I’m not bringing a chair.”

Not bringing a chair? The man had clearly gone barmy.

Me: “Not bringing a chair? You’re barmy.”
Col: “Well, we are going into the depths of the Finnish wilderness.”
Me: “Yes. In a canoe. The whole point of going in a canoe is that you can take everything with you – including chairs, hardback books and duty free whisky... I hope you’re not going to try to restrict the cargo of beer and crisps?”
Col: “Good God no! Some things are non-negotiable.”

And so, towards the end of August, we found ourselves in the arrivals lounge at Helsinki Airport; Col swinging his holdall like a handbag and me staggering behind under the weight of my monstrous 80 litre dry-bag and luxury folding chair. Helsinki was nice, but we had wilderness to be in and early the following morning we were on the train to Heinavesi.
Finland, it would appear from the admittedly limited viewpoint of the top deck of a train (Finnish trains have two decks; they are also clean and punctual – it’s quite staggering), consists entirely of a vast forest punctuated by lakes. It bode well for our intended activity of paddling round lakes in a forest, but made for an extremely tedious railway journey which, if memory serves, lasted for fifteen days (Col insists it was more like five hours, but that doesn’t fit with my recollection at all).
We stayed overnight in Heinavesi, having arrived too late to set off that day. Our hotel was nice and clean, the staff friendly, the restaurant served tasty food and Col got chatted up by an utterly plastered woman of advanced maturity and admirable persistence. All in all, the perfect evening.
It took us most of the morning to sort out the canoe and supplies, although a significant proportion of this was getting fishing permits arranged. According to the guidebook, we needed no less than three separate permits if we wanted to go fishing. One would assume that these would be readily available at the local fishing shop, but no, the Finns take their fishing so seriously that they keep their permits in the bank. So we queued up with all the people cashing cheques and arranging mortgages and scored ourselves one fishing permit each. Apparently we were supposed to have another permit as well, but we couldn’t understand where the teller was saying we should buy it. We did try the petrol station and the off-licence, but they just looked at us as if we were crazy to want to buy a fishing permit anywhere other than a bank, so we gave up.
By lunchtime we had everything we needed for six days on the water and had loaded up the canoe. As we pushed the boat out onto the gently lapping waters of Lake Kermajavi, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and we had six days and hundreds of square miles of lakes and forest to explore. It was a great feeling.
The first day’s paddle was purposely a short one. Time to get used to the feel of the boat; work out roughly how far we could expect to paddle in a day; to decide where to store the camera, lunch and the other things we might want while out on the water. We were headed for an island just a few kilometres from our starting point on the far side of the lake. The map said it had an ‘official’ camping spot and we thought this would be a good place to start our adventure.
This part of Finland is simply a vast area containing millions of interconnected lakes and millions of acres of birch and pine forest. It is wonderfully unspoilt and incredibly wild. The silent passage of an open canoe through this ancient landscape is as serene an experience as can be imagined. In the week ahead we would travel through tight channels between broken cliffs, across wide lakes and on the sheltered waters amongst countless islands. And always, to our left and right, ahead of us and behind us, we would have the forest – endless, unbroken, wild and beautiful.
We arrived at our island in the late afternoon, with the baking summer sun still hot on our shoulders. The gentle breeze that had cooled our faces on the paddle over had died away and the water lay smooth and calm, with the cool clarity of a pool in a mountain stream. As Col would say, some things are non-negotiable and soon we were floating in the water in our board-shorts and life-jackets, supping our first cold beer in the wilderness.
The ‘official’ camping spot surpassed our expectations. Situated in a sheltered clearing amongst the trees, it even had a few facilities to make life more comfortable – a place for an open fire, a shed full of logs, and a long drop toilet. There were enough clear spaces to pitch perhaps three or four tents, but we had the place entirely to ourselves.
At sunset we did some fishing with the lures we’d bought at the fishing shop in Heinavesi. It wasn’t long before I had a perch wriggling and writhing on my line and he was soon reeled in and released. He was lucky that I was unaware that perch are edible, or he might have found himself in a sandwich. It was getting dark and I was just packing up my gear, when Col shouted over, indicating that he’d caught something.
“Uaargh!” He said, not quite managing to retain his composure.
“Ooh! Have you got something?” I asked.
“UUAAARGH!” He repeated, indicating that he had caught something rather more impressive than my 6 inch perch. Running over I saw his rod bent in tight curve, pointing like a twitching finger at the dark water of the lake. Col was playing something very large indeed. Unfortunately, neither Col or myself are experienced fishermen and we were at a loss to know what to do. We had only the most basic of equipment with us; just travel rods, reels and a few spinners – and we had no landing net.
Whatever it was, it was big and strong but was fighting a slow, heavy fight, completely unlike the wriggling of the perch or the vigorous thrashing of the trout I’d caught in Loch Awe earlier in the summer. I tried to see what kind of fish it was, but the dark shape remained resolutely below the surface, pulling relentlessly on the line and keeping its identity anonymous. It seemed to tire quite quickly, however, and within ten minutes Col was reeling it slowly in.

As he dragged the fish ashore, it suddenly exploded in a new burst of energy – a final attempt to regain its freedom - and began to thrash violently across the rocks. It was a huge thing, easily the biggest fish I’d ever seen caught - and it was a pike, meaning it had a set of razor sharp teeth to contend with.
“UUAAARGH!” said Col one more time, skipping back to avoid the wildly snapping jaws. “What the hell do we do now?!”
I had to admit, I was momentarily stymied. The only fish I’d ever caught were small things with small teeth which seemed to know when they were beaten. Landing this monster was a completely different experience - dealing with it would be much more like picking on someone our own size. Fortunately, I had not only seen a few Ray Mears programmes in the last few months, I’d also caught one or two of Steve Irwin’s. I dropped to my knees, grabbed Moby Dick behind the gills and, using all my strength, managed to hold it still.
“Right.” I said, in the manner of the noble huntsman, “Bash its brains in with a rock!”
Col ran off along the beach and had soon returned with a boulder the size of a basket-ball.
“That should do the trick.” I gasped, between gritted teeth.
“Move your hands back!” said Col, “I don’t want to smash your fingers!”
“If I move my hands back the damn thing will have ‘em off at the elbow. Just be bloody careful!”
“Are you sure? I could get a smaller rock…”
The pike was twitching and snapping, straining at my grip. It’s thick, muscular body was covered with slime and threatened to slip from my grasp at any moment. In fact… was I imagining it… or was the vicious brute actually growling at me?
“For God’s sake! Just kill it, will you! I’m going to lose my grip any moment and if that happens it’ll probably grab me by the legs and pull me into the lake! Remember that bit in ‘Jaws’ where Quint gets dragged off the boat? It’ll be like that, only I will be screaming like a girl…”

WHACK!

A pause…

WHACK!

Another pause…

Whack-whack-whack-whack!

“I think it’s dead old chap.”
“Just making sure.”
“Looks smaller now its dead, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe its swim bladder has deflated.”
“Possibly. Anyway, let’s see what it tastes like.”

We had soon gutted it and carved off two long fillets of its white flesh. These we wrapped in foil with a bit of butter, before pushing them into the heart of our campfire. A little later, with a clear sky of stars visible through the branches of the surrounding trees, I sat by the warming embers of an open fire, sharing a bottle of malt whisky with an old friend and eating the fish he’d just caught. It was the perfect start to one of the best adventures of my life.

Chamonix - To the grandeur of the Alps.

I left school at seventeen with just enough Highers to get me into Aberdeen University. Why I signed up for another four years of education (or five as it turned out, ahem…) when I’d been so desperate to leave school is something that puzzles me still. I have since worked out that for the same money as getting a degree in Mundanity at the University of Grey Skies and Freezing Winds, I could have gone to Calgary and learned how to do the luge. Given that Great Britain is not famous for its proliferation of lugists, I am fairly confident I could have made the British Olympic Team.* Now that would be something to tell girls and put on job applications…
Staggering euphorically out of school with the ink still wet on my UCCA form, I realised I had six glorious months of freedom before I had to be a student. More importantly, I had six months to save up the money I needed to go to the Alps.

Within weeks, I had got a job with Stirling District Council Roads Dept. and was loafing and skiving my way to a holiday fund. At the weekends I went rock climbing and hill-walking, or ‘training for the Alps’ as it came to be known. It was a beautiful summer that year and, what with working outdoors and being in the hills every weekend, I developed the first (and probably last) really good sun-tan of my life. By the middle of August, all preparation was complete. Myself and six friends boarded the bus for Chamonix.
Thirty-two hours we were on that bus. Thirty-two hours from Stirling to Chamonix. Thirty-two of the longest and most boring hours of my life. I discovered that a Sony Walkman accompanied by two Pogues compilation tapes, The Joshua Tree, Yo! Bum Rush the Show and Tougher Than Leather can stave off boredom for about three hours. A copy of Viz passes another hour. Inspecting my sandwiches – two minutes. Discussing with my friends the relative merits of our sandwiches, another six minutes. Eating my sandwiches - around 30 seconds. Which left 27 hours, 51 minutes and 30 seconds to do nothing but stare out the window trying not to look at my watch.
We got there eventually, however. Older, wiser and massaging aching buttocks perhaps, but we got there. We sat at a table outside a café in the main square. It was cloudy, so we couldn’t see the mountains, but it was great to be there. The adventure had begun, there was no stopping it now. There was something very humbling about being in Chamonix: the undisputed centre of Alpine climbing. Nowhere else in the world could claim quite such a distinguished mountaineering heritage. Pretty much every notable climber the world had ever known had probably sat in this square at some point, sipping a beer and watching the world go by. From the first tigers – Whymper and Balmat; through Bonatti, Whillans and Bonnington, to the current crop of extreme alpinists – Profit, Destivelle, and Tardivel.
As we sat there, sucking on our Kronenbourgs, the clouds parted a little. Not much; just a small tear in the thick, grey blanket, but it was enough. For a few brief moments the needle like spire of the Aguille du Midi had appeared above us. We were silenced. No mountain we had ever seen had been so steep, so viciously ragged - or so incredibly, absurdly high.
That trip to the Alps was a phenomenal experience, it lived up to my dreams in every respect and threw some unexpected pleasures our way as well. It was our first trip abroad without ‘responsible adults’ (Gordon, at 22, didn’t really count) and the sense of freedom was extraordinary. We could do what we wanted, when we wanted. There was no-one to tell us what we couldn’t do. We rock climbed in the valley, went swimming, bivvied out on the Brevent ridge, practised our glacier technique on the Glacier des Bossons and even climbed a few mountains. We knocked off the Petit Aiguille Verte and made a failed attempt on Mont Blanc, but the mountain that really summed up the Alpine experience for me was Mont Blanc du Tacul.
We got up at 6.30 am (an impressive feat in itself for an 18-year-old) in order to catch the early cable car up the Aiguille du Midi. The only noises to break the serene hush of that early morning on the camp-site were our excited whispers and the clink-clunk-clank of climbing gear being loaded into bulging rucksacks. Over our heads, the sky was the clear pale blue of an alpine dawn. A hurried breakfast of muesli and coke and we were off, striding through Chamonix on our way to climb a mountain.
The cable car was crammed with climbers, rucksacks and skiers with touring equipment. My friends and me were the most visibly excited of the occupants; but despite the languid facade of the local alpinists, the same sparkle of anticipation shone in their eyes. We all felt the same thrill, the same trepidation, the same impatience to be on the mountain: if we hadn’t – we would not have been there.
When the cable car finally reached the top of the mountain, we stepped out into a tunnel which was like something out of a James Bond film - all pipes and whirring noises and men in overalls. Passing through the cable car station we then came out of another tunnel into the ‘ice cave’. The mouth of the ice cave led out onto a precipitous ridge, which in turn led down on to the Col du Plan; a huge expanse of snow surrounded by vast peaks of ice and rock.
The air was still and cold and noticeably thinner. I could feel myself taking ever so slightly longer and deeper breaths as my body strove to take in the oxygen it needed. Above, the sky was the deepest blue I had ever seen. With less atmosphere to get in the way, it was closer to the colour of space.
After this momentary reflection on the beauty of my surroundings I threw off my rucksack and eagerly pulled out the gear I needed – crampons, ice axe, harness, rope, ice screws, prussick loops. Pulling on my harness and strapping on my crampons, I clipped my glacier rescue gear to the loops on my harness and tied into one end of the rope, tossing the coils to Evan, who was next to tie in. Once he was tied in, he passed the coils to Chris, who tied in to the other end. Looking across at the others I saw that they were also ready. Ready to descend the knife-like ridge to the glacier below and to ascend an alpine mountain 13,936 feet high!
Just as we were about to step out onto the ridge, an excited babbling came echoing from the tunnel. Looking round, we saw a Japanese tourist clad in trainers, a yellow jumpsuit and Mickey Mouse ear-muffs, running full-pelt down the tunnel waving his camera in front of him. He was clearly excited by the altitude, by the view and by the awesome nature of his surroundings. He was also clearly unaware that the broad concrete walkway ended abruptly in an icy shelf which led in turn onto a narrow ridge with a drop of several hundred feet on one side – and several thousand on the other.
We watched in horrified fascination as he ran into the ice-cave. In slow motion, it seemed, he lost his footing on the ice. He lurched - swinging his arms in a blurred and hopeless windmill motion, striving to retain his balance. He tried to stop – running backwards in a comic flailing of arms and legs. I saw the toothy grin disappear, replaced by a look of sheer terror, as he swept out of the ice-cave and onto the ridge. I was convinced I was about to watch a man fall to his death.
He didn’t die. Somehow he managed to stay on the ridge – sliding in a screaming crouch, fingers clawing at the hard packed snow, feet splayed in a desperate attempt to slow his progress. He came to a stop a few yards down the ridge, to lie clinging to it for a few seconds, staring down at Chamonix, thousands of feet below. Slowly, he regained his composure, and then, looking extremely sheepish, crawled back to the ice cave to receive the deafening brunt of his wife’s contempt. Me and the boys laughed and laughed hard, but it was relief, not humour. There’s nothing like watching a man die to put a damper on your day.
We stepped out of the shade of the ice-cave into the stunning brilliance of the day, our heart-rates slowly returning to normal. Raising my glacier glasses briefly I was amazed at the crushing intensity of the sunlight reflecting off the snow. I was damn glad of my glasses and my factor 50 sunblock. We crunched down the ridge, being careful not to catch our crampons in the rope. In a few minutes we were on the Col du Plan and heading straight for the towering pyramid of Mont Blanc du Tacul.
We could see two sides of the mountain from our approach route. To the left was a steep jumble of cliffs, covered with narrow ribbons of blue ice; to the right was a steep slope of snow, smooth save for a few places where the surface had cracked into deep crevasses. We were heading for the right hand side, it should be fairly straightforward as long as we could get over those crevasses.
We walked across the glacial plain, towards our destination, dwarfed by the enormous mountains around us. The world was deep blue, bright white and granite grey. Mont Blanc du Tacul seemed to grow in stature the closer we got. What had seemed like a reasonable days outing from the Aiguille du Midi, loomed darkly above us, blotting out the sun, as we stood on its lower slopes.
Stepping into the shade of the mountain, the temperature dropped sharply and we pulled fleeces and Gore-Tex on over our thermals. Out in the sun, on the open space of the Col du Plan, it had felt almost ridiculously balmy - a Sunday stroll in the summer sunshine. Here, in the darkness under the Tacul’s cliff’s, our breath hung in the air in frigid clouds and the cold pinched at our ears and fingers. We got moving quickly, the temperature did not encourage inactivity.
We cramponed slowly up the steep neve towards the summit high above. It was hard work, unused as we were to the altitude, but technically straightforward – just a simple slog up steep snow. About half-way up we came to a crevasse that we could not bypass without a huge detour, and decided to climb over it. It wasn’t especially wide, just a short jump of a few feet, and we were roped to our friends for safety. Staring down that seemingly bottomless crevasse, however, I could feel my heart beating against my ribs. I had stared down innumerable cliffs in my time, some of them hundreds of feet high, but there was something altogether more disturbing about this dark hole in the ice. Something about disappearing forever into the deep blue depths of the glacier was far more frightening than falling off a cliff onto the rocks below. I took a deep breath and jumped.
My crampons bit into the hard snow on the other side of the crevasse with a satisfying crunch. At the same time, I swung my ice-axe, burying its pick up to the shaft. No problem at all – dunno what I was worried about! I couldn’t help grinning back at my mates on the other side of the crevasse before advancing a few yards to sit in the snow and wrap the rope around me in a body belay. Taking up the slack, I nodded to Evan, who leapt effortlessly across the crevasse. Shortly after, Chris was over as well and within minutes the whole party was safely on the other side.
Right at the top of Mont Blanc du Tacul is a rocky outcrop – the final step before reaching the summit. Clambering up, we finally came out of the shadow and felt the warmth of the sun washing over our faces and soaking into our chilled bodies. Above us the sky was an unbroken dome of blue so dark it looked almost black. All around us, in serried ranks, were the Alps. Thousands of hulking, jagged, broken and soaring peaks, crowned with pure-white mantles of sparkling snow. It remains one of the most spectacular landscapes I have ever seen.
We stayed there for a while, relaxing after the climb and eating our lunch (cosmopolitan fare – Baguettes, Brie and Irn Bru brought from Scotland). Our success had given us the confidence to dream and we searched the horizon for future conquests. Perhaps one day we would climb Mont Maudit and Mont Blanc or maybe the Aiguille du Plan? Perhaps one day, who knew, we’d even find ourselves on the North Face of the Grandes Jorasses?
Whatever the future held, one thing was for sure – there were plenty of mountains to climb. Feeling a little light headed with the altitude and the grandeur of our experience, we began our return to Chamonix. We had earned our steak et frites.

*This confidence is, admittedly, based on nothing. I have no more than average sporting ability.

The First Taste

My first taste of adventure was climbing Everest. Or it might have been sailing a balsa-wood raft to Easter Island. Then again, it could have been flying a second world war bomber to the Antarctic to search for a missing ship with a cargo of gold. These first tastes were not due to an extraordinarily exciting childhood (I grew up in a town so dull I could regularly be seen kneeling in my parents garden, shaking my fists at the sky and imploring the gods to make something happen). No, these first tastes were thanks to books.

.

For a ten year old boy, shackled by his youth to the safety of home and the turgid misery of school, there were two genuinely great human endeavours – the pursuit of adventure and the art story-telling. Combined, they provided the formative experiences, albeit vicariously, that would shape the man I am today (short attention span, unrealistic expectations of life, steadily worsening limp) and would determine the direction my life would take. Sometimes those stories were true - like ‘The Ascent of Everest’ or ‘Kon-Tiki’. Sometimes they were just stories – like ‘Biggles Breaks the Silence’.
Fiction or non-fiction, it didn’t really matter in the end - as long as ‘exciting stuff’ happened. You know the kind of thing: men (tough, monosyllabic, moustachioed men) falling in crevasses, fighting off cannibals, discovering buried treasure, shooting Jerry out of the sky with a single blast from their Vickers machine gun, scaling unclimbed mountains and sailing unchartered seas, eating their boots and being eaten by sharks - all without so much as a raised eyebrow of surprise or a murmur of complaint. As a ten year old, I was convinced that if a man couldn’t have his arm chewed off by a hungry lion without remark, then he was no kind of man at all.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before I got a crack at this adventuring thing myself. It might not have been conquering Everest, but joining the Scouts was as close as an eleven year old was going to get. Cruelly misled by my peers into believing that the Scouts was all about helping old ladies across the road and singing ‘Ging-Gang-Gotcha-By-The-Goolies’, I resisted, until rather better informed friends dragged me along to a mid-week meeting.
I was amazed to discover that, far from being constantly urged to ‘Bob a Job’ or earn my handicrafts badge, I was being positively encouraged to carry around fire-raising equipment (ahem, that should probably be ‘fire-starting equipment’) and a sodding great bowie knife (yes, they were more innocent times). Not only that, I was being trusted to do this in a responsible manner. Of course, this trust was sometimes abused (my parents never found out how close the Ochill hills came to having one less forest) but more often than not, we were responsible Scouts. I like to think that Baden Powell, whilst perhaps not being proud of us, would not have been abjectly ashamed of us, either.
Suddenly, I was going camping and canoeing, building fires and constructing bivouacs. I found myself in a world where I could easily imagine myself paddling through the Canadian wilderness, climbing some savage Himalayan Peak or in a tent three days from the next cache of supplies and having to eat my boots (yes, my Scout leader’s mashed potato really was that bad).
Of course, as I got older, the adventures became more ambitious - I can remember my ascent of Ben Ledi, twenty five years ago, like it was yesterday. To appreciate why climbing Ben Ledi was such a momentous occasion for me, you have to understand that I was a twelve year old boy who had just read The Ascent of Everest, thought Chris Bonnington was the coolest man in the world and would rather be seen in Dachstein mitts than a ‘Frankie Says’ t-shirt. Ben Ledi was not just a mountain, it was the mountain that dominated the view from my back garden and, crucially, my maths classroom (a school report of the time beautifully summed up my lack of progress with the line: “Matthew would do much better if he spent more time on his schoolwork and less time staring out of the window at the mountains”). Not only this, but Ben Ledi was the first mountain I ever climbed. Sure, I’d been up a few hills in my time, but this was the first time I’d ever been up something that could even remotely be described as a mountain.
It was a crisp winters day, some thin high-altitude clouds perhaps, but otherwise a perfect day for mountaineering. On my back was the bright red rucksack I’d got for Christmas and in my hand, a second world war commando issue ice-axe that had belonged to a friend of my father. With me were four of my close friends and two of their dads; who had come along to make sure we didn’t fall off a cliff.
The path to the summit started slowly up through the dark, conifer forest that cloaked the lower slopes. Every now and then we would get a tantalising glimpse of the snow-caked mountain above and I became impatient to break out of the tree-line. Down here, among the trees, it was really just a pleasant wooded stroll where at any moment one might turn a corner to find a young family feeding the squirrels. And, as any budding adventurer will tell you, nothing ruins the aura of savage wilderness than young families feeding the squirrels. I’m pretty sure Shackleton didn’t have to put up with young families feeding the squirrels in Antarctica.
Soon enough, however, we broke free of the trees and onto the open slopes of the mountain. It was covered with a deep layer of heavy snow. Not the mere dusting we so often see in this country – like the thin coating of fine sugar on Grandma’s sponge cake; this was more like the thick icing plastered onto a wedding cake. Only in a few places were black rocks and crags visible. This, for me, was as close to climbing Everest as made no difference. It was the most exciting day of my life.
We waded on through the white blanket, stumbling occasionally on the tussocks of grass and heather below, heading for the craggy ridge above us. Ben Ledi had never looked so beautiful. Not even in the most achingly boring maths class had its perfectly proportioned peak appeared so attractive, never had I felt its call so strongly. For the first time in my life I had ‘summit-fever’!
It wasn’t more than a few minutes before the wet snow began to seep through my second-hand Czechoslovakian walking boots. Clearly they had been £4 for a reason. I didn’t really mind, however. Shackleton probably did have to put up with cold, wet feet in Antarctica. Having cold, wet feet was far better than coming across young families feeding the squirrels and ruining the aura of savage wilderness. After a while, my feet went numb and I could no longer feel anything. At the time I thought this was probably a good thing. At the time I had never experienced the unspeakable agony of ‘hot-aches’ – the pain one experiences when the feeling comes back.
At last we reached the summit ridge and the going became slightly easier. The wind had torn away most of the snow in this exposed location, leaving only a thin layer over the rocks and grass. The snow was also harder here, more frozen - and had developed into crisp sastrugi that swept across the ridge in delicate, sinuous lines. The wind buffeted us gently, bringing with it subtle aromas from the valley below - the sweet, fresh scents of pine forest and melting snow.
Our pace quickened as we neared the top, all of us keen to stand on the summit. Then suddenly we were there; a tiny huddle of schoolboys surrounded by the wild majesty of the Highlands. We were so high we could see for miles. None of the nearby mountains were nearly as tall as the one we stood on. To the south we could see the Trossachs and the Forth Valley; to the north an unending procession of snow-clad mountain ridges, one behind the other, as far as the eye could see. I could feel the cold air rushing into my lungs and the tops of my ears stinging in the freezing wind. In all my life I’d never seen anything as beautiful as that view and never done anything as exciting as climbing that mountain.
As I sat in my friend’s father’s car on the drive home, the ‘hot-aches’ setting my toes on fire, I knew without a shadow of doubt what I wanted to spend my life doing. I wanted to get out into the world and experience it. See it, smell it, hear it and feel it - first hand. Feel the biting arctic wind on my face and the scorching desert sun on my back. Explore the mountains, lakes, rivers, seas, deserts and forests. There was so much to do and so little time to do it in. I was already twelve years old and not getting any younger. I had better start planning the next adventure immediately.