A Last Taste of Winter?

Morning in Glen Feshie

June and still waiting for the summer to start, the wintry weather having continued through May and into the new month. The last weekend of May I went out anyway, hoping for sunshine but expecting rain and cold and maybe snow.

A glimpse of the hills

Late afternoon I set off down Glen Feshie in a cold wind that brought frequent heavy showers of icy rain. The clouds were low over the hills, sometimes tendrils drifted down to the highest trees. Just briefly I had glimpses of the summits, white with fresh snow.

A sunny morning in Glen Feshie

I camped at dusk, eager to get under cover and into my warm sleeping bag. The night was stormy with gusts of wind and bursts of rain hitting the tent. The temperature fell close to freezing. The weather calmed as the sun rose however and Glen Feshie was bathed in sunlight and the sky above was blue. I wandered round camp looking at the fresh green leaves on the trees and the scattering of woodland flowers - primroses, dog violets, wood sorrell.

The path in upper Glen Feshie

The sunshine lasted only a few hours. By the time I set off dark clouds were covering the sky, driven by a cold north-west wind. The last birch trees were bright with spring colour but otherwise the landscape was dark and brown and grey.

The wind was cold

Leaving the glen I climbed steep heathery slopes to the open vastness of the Moine Mhor plateau. The wind here was bitter, gloves, hat, fleece, hood were all necessary and I kept moving, there being little shelter. I crossed the wind blasted summit of Mullach Clach a'Bhlair, spattered with fresh snow, and headed towards the distant pointed peak of Sgor Gaoith. Across the plateau Braeriach, Sgor an Lochain Uaine and Cairn Toul came and went in the clouds.

Sgor Gaoith

Braeriach, Sgor an Lochain Uaine and Cairn Toul

Huge drifts of old snow lay on every north and east facing slope, however gentle. I crossed several. The snow was firm enough to support my weight. It won't be thawing quickly. Turning away from the Moine Mhor I descended over the shoulder of Carn Ban Mor and back to Glen Feshie. Out to the west snowy hills stretched out under the raging clouds.

View west from Carn Ban Mor

Thirty Years Ago:The Continental Divide Trail

At the start on the US/Canada border in Glacier National Park, May 31, 1985

On May 31, 1985 I walked 10.5 miles in Glacier National Park in the Rocky Mountains.They were my first steps on the Continental Divide Trail, a 3100 mile walk that would take me from the snowbound Northern Rockies to the deserts of New Mexico. En route I encountered deep snow, searing heat, floods, droughts, forest fires, blizzards and thunderstorms. I saw bears, moose, mountain goats, bald eagles, rattlesnakes and much more. I camped out on 149 nights, often in the most spectacular places.It was a wonderful, glorious wilderness walk.

Here are some of my pictures from the CDT.

The Chinese Wall, a huge limestone cliff in the Northern Rockies

In the Scapegoat Mountains

Camp on Vista Pass in the Wind River Range, Wyoming

The Front Range, Colorado

Bivouac in the desert, New Mexico

Photographic note: This walk was long before digital cameras. I used a Pentax MX manual film SLR with Tamron 35-70 and Pentax 75-150 zoom lenses and Kodachrome 64 transparency film.

Reforesting the Hills

Bynack More rising above Abernethy Forest

This article first appeared in The Great Outdoors a year ago. I've been thinking about rewilding, forests and land use recently and have had various discussions on social media sites on related topics so I thought I'd post it here.

How wild and natural should the hills be? Do you want them tame and docile so the walking is easy and secure? I ask in response to an online comment from a TGO Challenger who likes sheep in the hills because they make walking 'very pleasant'. Now sheep-cropped grassland certainly is easy to walk across but it's also an artificial and biologically degraded landscape. Natural landscapes are wilder, more diverse and, for the walker, more challenging. Where the terrain is impossibly tough - dense forest, tangled bushes - the answer can be a path. I'd rather see a narrow trail through a wild and natural landscape than sheep-cropped terrain where it's easy to walk anywhere. And if there's no path then I'd rather find a way through the difficulties than have them tamed.

Regenerating forest in Coire Ardair, Creag Meagaidh

A bigger question is how to achieve more natural and diverse wild lands. Just what does that involve anyway? Ideally I think it means leaving land alone, leaving it to be 'self-willed'. However whilst that's fine for pristine and near-pristine places it may not be for more damaged ones. The question then becomes how much interference and management is acceptable. In turn this raises the question of how long you want to wait and whether the rewilding of a landscape can be speeded up. The answers vary depending on your outlook and aims. Aesthetically I think any management should be as unobtrusive and unnoticeable as possible. I also think such management also produces a more natural landscape in the long run. However I accept that in some places it just isn't possible, at least at present.

Recently I was in Eskdale in the Lake District where some extensive tree planting is being undertaken by the National Trust. Because this is sheep country the planted areas are fenced and the trees are caged. This looks highly unnatural. In time I guess the cages and fences will be removed and the forest will look more natural though it will still have straight lines dividing it from the bare land outside it. Less obtrusive is the work being done by Trees for Life in Glen Affric. Again planting is involved but the trees are not caged. The new forests are simply fenced in to keep out deer. Again the line between the rich vegetation inside the fence and the sparse boggy vegetation outside it is stark.

Scattered pines at the edge of Abernethy Forest

 

Contrast these schemes, both of which I support, with that of the RSPB in Abernethy in the Cairngorms, a huge reserve that stretches from the forests around Loch Garten of ospreys fame to the summit of Ben Macdui. Having heard that the RSPB was to plant areas that as far as I knew were already regenerating and pretty natural anyway I contacted the RSPB to find out what was going on and was invited on a field trip so I could see for myself (thanks to Regional Director George Campbell for organising this and also to Senior Site Manager Jeremy Roberts and Ecologist Andy Amphlett). Before we headed out to look at the area the scheme was explained and I was shown detailed maps of the forest divided into different types of area. No planting was going on in the mature natural forest or in areas where there was good regeneration I was told. Overgrazing isn't a problem in Abernethy now as deer numbers have been reduced and sheep removed. However there is a wide band of higher ground where the sheep used to graze that runs up to what should be the natural treeline of 650 metres where there are no trees at all and so no seed source for regeneration. There are also areas of previously felled and then planted forest where many tree species are absent. It's in these areas that the RSPB is planting small groups of trees to provide a seed source. The planted areas won't be extensive, just small clumps, and there will be no cages or fences.

New growth in Abernethy Forest

Out in the  field I was shown some aspen that had been planted on some heather moorland. I would never have know they weren't the product of natural regeneration. Higher up we found the last tiny pines, still well before the 650 metre line. It was clear that there would be no natural regeneration here for a very long time. The RSPB has set a 200 year goal for the return of the forest so even with the planting it will take a long time. For walkers there will be no discernable sign of this management, unlike in Eskdale and Glen Affric. That's because the RSPB owns the land and has control of grazing, which takes us back to the start of this piece and the question of what sort of landscape we want. For myself the idea of the returning forest is exciting and unspiring. I'll only see it beginning but that is a joy in itself.

A last pine, Strath Nethy, Abernethy

Thinking About Tents

Pitching several tents together and comparing how they perform in wind and rain is quite instructive. Sit inside. How much does the fabric move? How noisy is it? Sit in the next one. Is it quieter, noisier, flappier?

Other aspects matter too. What about head room, floor length to stretch out in, storage space? Ease and speed of pitching? Cooking undercover?

I've been doing this testing on and off a fair bit recently, building up to writing a now nearly complete backpacking tent review for the July issue of The Great Outdoors. It began last autumn when the first models for the feature arrived. I mentioned it in this post in early April. The tents pictured then along with the one above and those below plus a couple more will all be reviewed.

Note how much greener the grass is in the above photo compared with the photos from April 3rd. Spring really has come, at least down here.

Viewing the Snow in Coire an Lochain

Coire an Lochain

May has continued wet and windy and cold with hints of snow in the rain at low levels and scatterings of the real stuff on the tops. Much snow is left from the winter too. From Aviemore great snowfields can be seen on the walls of the Northern Corries of Cairn Gorm and the scalloped north face of Braeriach. For a close-up view of the snow I wandered into Coire an Lochain on a day of racing clouds, patches of blue sky and a damp chill in the air. 

Below the dark cliffs high on the corrie’s back wall a wide band of snow swept across the slopes to merge with a much more extensive snowfield on the steep eastern flank, a snowfield that ran right down into the cold grey waters of the lochan that lies in the heart of the corrie. The snow isn’t as deep as it was in early June last year (see this post) but it actually covers a larger area. A speckling of fresh snow lay on the western sun-exposed side of the corrie. Although only a few miles from the car park it felt, as always, remote and wild here, the snow giving it a touch of the arctic.

Floating ice

Wandering round the lochan I stared across its dark surface to plates of dirty snow floating in the water. Spattered with mud and earth these looked like the debris from avalanches. Many little slides were visible on the slopes above the lochan and there were bare patches where the snow had slid off.

Unstable slopes

 

Turning away from the snow and the lochan I pondered on whether to climb to the summit of Cairn Lochan. The weather decided for me. I had barely reached the corrie rim when I felt the first spots of rain on my head. I looked back. The clouds were descending over the crags. The rain became heavier. I headed for the car.

The clouds come down