Welcome to the New Year: Thoughts & Plans

New Year's Day in Strathspey: clouds, wind, snow, touches of sun,

The year turns again. The winter celebrations are ending. The light is returning, albeit slowly. It's a time for reflection and for looking forward. In the immediate future lies winter, several more months up here in the Scottish Highlands. Plenty of snow I hope, and not too much rain.

This year I plan to do at least one walk of two weeks or more, unlike 2025 when four days was my longest trip. Will I venture beyond the Highlands for the first time since 2019? Maybe! I have no definite plans yet. There will be hills and camps wherever I go of course.

Blog posts, videos, gear reviews, stories of trips will all continue. You'll find my work in most issues of The Great Outdoors magazine. I still have the last trip of 2025, just three days ago, to write about. I hope to be working on a new version of an old book with Andrew Terrill again too. I'll be working on improving my video skills as well (sorely needed!). 

Looking back will take me to 1996, thirty years ago, and long my walk over all the Munros and Tops. I'll be thinking and writing about that this year.

Beyond my tiny corner of the outdoor world I'll continue supporting those people and organisations fighting for nature and wildness and campaigning on the biodiversity and climate crises. issues that are becoming more important by the day. I don't think I did enough on this last year. I aim to do better in 2026. 

I'll continue supporting those promoting diversity, equality, and inclusivity too. This is a shared world. Variety is good. 

My New Year's Day walk - more a short stroll really - took me along the edge of an old plantation that protected me from the bitter wind and then out into the full blast on snow-spattered fields. Exhilarating and life-affirming. I made a little video on the walk.

Happy New Year!

New Year's Day Walk & Thoughts

New Year’s Day came with fresh snow and layers of mist. 

The first walk of 2023, a stroll through the local woods and fields, gave rather more hard going than expected. The snow was soft and uneven, an insecure surface for walking, hiding ice and frozen clods of earth under its few inches of white.

The air was still, the land quiet. There was a feeling of expectancy, anticipation, a waiting for something to happen. Maybe that was just in my head, wondering about what the year will bring.

I thought about my own plans as I walked, much more aware than a few years ago how much circumstances could change them. The pandemic has had a long-term effect. Time seemed to stop in 2020 and has not yet resumed. Where have the last three years gone?

If all goes well I hope to finish my book on the Cairngorms, progress on which has been rather slow the last year – too much research, too much reading, too much thinking, too much revising, not enough actual writing. I also hope to undertake some walks longer than three or four days, ideally one of at least a month. Not since 2019 have I done that.

There are other writing and publishing possibilities, which I’ll say more about when they become more certain. And of course there will be features and reviews for The Great Outdoors magazine.

Outside my own little outdoor world I hope to see more progress on protecting and renewing our wildlife and wild places. Given the worldwide nature and climate crises this is important. As the old slogan goes “think globally, act locally”. I’ll be supporting various campaigns on these issues, sharing news and events on social media, and writing about them here at times – perhaps the last is something I should do more often.

Whatever the year brings may you all have wonderful inspiring adventures wherever life takes you.

 

Getting Back Into It: A First Short Walk With A Pack This Year

View over Strathspey to the Cairngorms at dusk

After a series of very short local strolls - 1-2 hours - without a pack I ventured out recently with a small rucksack and went a little further up a local hill, crossing some rough terrain en route, to see how my operated on hand would respond. 

I learnt that my hand, with the bandange gone and just a plaster over the hole, didn't hurt too much as long as I was careful not to press down on anything. I don't think I could comfortably handle a treeking pole or ice axe yet and a big pack could be awkward - that has to wait a week or two at least. 

I also learnt that little exercise for the last three weeks along with rather too much rich winter warming food means more than my hand needs to get used to the hills again! But it's a start.

Reminiscences and Thoughts on Long-Distance Walking and Writing, inspired by a piece by Alex Roddie

Writing notes on the Pacific Northwest Trail

In a thoughtful online feature called The Meaningof Adventure Alex Roddie recalls a tough day on the Haute Route Pyrenees and asks himself the question “If I could never tell anyone about this trip, never publish anything about my experience or share any of my photos, would I still put myself through this?” This is not something I’ve ever thought, and it started me considering the relationship between outdoor activities and communication and the huge difference between when I started out and the present. As I’ve written elsewhere the biggest changes in outdoor activities in the last few decades have not been in equipment but in electronics and digital communications. Alex’s article shows the effect this can have, especially on those for who have grown up with social media.

Back when I began long-distance walking the only means of communicating about outdoor activities was via club journals and a few commercial magazines. When I undertook my first long-distance walks I had no thoughts of writing about them. I simply wanted to see what it was like to walk in nature for days at a time. After a two-week walk (the Pennine Way) I knew I wanted to do something longer. After Land’s End to John O’Groats I knew I wanted to do something wilder. That desire became a round of the Munros in several 200- and 500-mile walks and then the Pacific Crest Trail. 

On the Pacific Crest Trail in 1982 with a ridiculous load.

After my Land’s End to John O’Groats walk I did wonder if anyone might be interested in reading about it. I enjoyed reading about outdoor activities (the walk was inspired by John Hillaby’s Journey Through Britain). Maybe others would enjoy reading my stories. I’d always kept a journal, going right back to nature notes on local walks when I was a young boy, and I liked writing. Tentatively I sent off some hand-written articles to outdoor magazines (of which there were very few). Eventually I had a couple of articles published in a long-gone camping magazine. I enjoyed writing them but didn’t think of them as significant. Other writing work came along, mainly gear reviewing, which has been a mainstay ever since. I could, I thought, perhaps make enough money from writing to fund other long walks. And so it turned out. A book contract came along, and then another, which surprised me. 

This is why I walk. In the Colorado Rockies last summer.

The long walks always took primacy though. This is what I wanted to do. I never doubted that if the writing work dried up I would find another way to fund the walks. I never felt under pressure to do walks in order to write about them. I did sometimes feel pressure to stay in and write when I’d rather be outdoors (and still do, deadlines are deadlines!).

Social media didn’t appear until well over twenty years after I’d begun writing. Suddenly there was a new way to communicate, a way that could reach unimaginable numbers of people. I had a small niche audience – books sales in the thousands, magazine readers in the lower tens of thousands. And everything took time. Books appeared a year or so after I finished writing them, magazine articles often after several months. Social media, including blogs, was instant. Communicate to the whole world just like that. Marvellous!

Going back to Alex Roddie’s question I know that I would continue long-distance walking if I suddenly had no audience but I can see that the pressures are different now, the opportunities to tell people what you are doing enormous, as are the opportunities to read about other people’s experiences. The online long-distance walking literature is vast. Alex writes about reading blogs and social media accounts about Pacific Crest Trail hikers. Some became jaded after a couple of months. I can’t imagine that. I’ve never become fed up with any long walk. Of course, there have been times during every walk when I’ve felt bored or exhausted or the weather has been awful or the terrain difficult, but I learnt early on that such times would pass and that the best thing to do was keep going.

This is why I camp. On the Cairngorm Plateau

Alex also wonders if his expectations of his HRP walk had been shaped by reading about ultralight trends online. It’s easy to look at many of these and see a proscriptive approach – this is the right way to do things, everything else is wrong. Alex meets an ‘Instagram influencer’ who typifies that view, criticising others with bigger packs. This reminded me of meeting someone like that on the John Muir Trail. This person really annoyed another hiker, who pointed out to me that he liked his big pack and anyway was walking further each day than his critic. I’m glad when I started out there were no pressures like this. It was difficult enough to find any advice, on or off the trail. There were no traditional, lightweight, or ultralight backpackers.

It's not always sunny.

At the end of his feature Alex Roddie answers his question. He was hiking for itself but sharing the experience was part of it. That’s what I feel too, though I internalised it long ago and hadn’t really thought about it until reading Alex’s feature. Maybe if I’d been able to communicate instantly and easily when I began I’d have had to think this through back then.

Writing notes in the Cairngorms.

Book Review: Walking Man The Secret Life of Colin Fletcher

Colin Fletcher is one of my literary walking heroes. I first discovered him over thirty years ago when a friend who’d been to California loaned me The Thousand-Mile Summer, saying he thought I’d be interested because I liked long-distance walking. How right he was! Reading that book, which tells the story of Fletcher’s walk the length of California in deserts and mountains, inspired me to discover and then hike the Pacific Crest Trail, and to go on and read all of Fletcher’s books. (You can read more of my thoughts on Fletcher here). 

Whilst little-known in Britain, although he came from Wales, Colin Fletcher became well-known in the USA as a writer and long-distance walker and was a key figure – perhaps the key figure – in the rise of backpacking in the 1960s and 70s after the publication of his most successful book The Complete Walker.

Reading his books I quickly became aware that there was much that Fletcher was not saying. There was little about his personal life away from walking other than a love of tennis. Occasional explosions of anger about conservation showed a keen love of wild places but there was nothing to suggest any activism. Fletcher comes across as a loner, a very private man, somewhat curmudgeonly, and careful only to reveal what he wants the reader to know. 

I was intrigued to learn more about him and hoped for many years that someone would write his biography. And now someone has. Robert Wehrman is another Fletcher aficionado but he didn’t wait for someone else to write Fletcher’s story, he did the research (including contacting me – I’m honoured to be quotedin the book) and wrote it himself. This involved masses of work – Fletcher kept just about every bit of paper that came his way including copies of all the letters he wrote. A treasure trove for the biographer but one requiring much time to sift and evaluate. Wehrman has done this admirably, telling Fletcher’s story from his upbringing in Wales and England and his formative years as a Royal Marine in the Second World War through to his fame as an author and his final years (he died in 2007). 

Fletcher’s life is fascinating and Robert Wehrman describes it well in this wonderful book. The stories behind the walks and other adventures, including events during them, are very interesting. There are many surprising revelations too – I’ll leave these for readers to discover. Some of the impressions of Fletcher I’d gained from his books proved correct but there were sides of him I’d never imagined. I’ll be reading his books again with a new outlook.

For anyone interested in the history of backpacking and long-distance walking the story of Colin Fletcher should be essential reading. Robert Wehrman has done the outdoor community a service with Walking Man.