Wild Cairngorm Weather

After drifting through the Yellowstone Wilderness in sunshine, gentle snow showers and the occasional gust of cold wind returning to the wet cold brutality of the Cairngorms was a bit of a shock. My first day out on my home hills was a short venture up little Meall a’Bhuachaille above Glenmore on a day previously spent sitting in the Mountain Café in Aviemore staring out at torrential rain. Flashes of blue sky and an easing of the rain stirred me out of my lethargy and onto the hill where a brisk cold wind kept me moving. On the summit I was leaning into the wind and looking across the Glenmore woods to clouds tearing across the big Cairngorm summits. I was glad I had gone no further and no higher. By the time I was back down in the glen the rain was pouring down again.

A week later a reasonable weather forecast lured me out again, this time on skis and intent on the crossing of the Cairngorm Plateau to Ben MacDui, one of the finest ski tours in the area when conditions are good. The forecast had said the effect of the wind would be “negligible”, a statement I remembered as a bitter north-easterly blasted me up onto the plateau through squalls of hail and wet snow and into dense damp clinging mist that condensed and froze on my clothing and equipment, coating my poles with ice. Hood up over a warm hat, overmitts over my gloves, goggles on my face for better visibility and for protection against the stinging wind, I was wearing more than I ever needed while skiing in Yellowstone. Temperature isn’t everything, this damp cold penetrated and chilled far more effectively than the dry air of the Rockies. A navigation exercise across the plateau and a return into the storm didn’t appeal so I headed for Cairn Gorm instead, needing a compass bearing to navigate the few hundred yards to the start of the summit slopes as I was in a complete white-out. Rocks scoured clean of snow by the wind gave depth to the hillside and confirmed that I was still climbing. When the ground and sky merge it can be very disorientating. Soon the terrain flattened out and I glimpsed the surreal snow plastered contorted shape of the Cairngorm Weather Station, behind which I sheltered for a quick snack and a warming drink of hot Rock’s Organic Ginger cordial from my flask. A thinning and lightening of the clouds suggested the air might be clearing. A touch of blue flickered above, astonishingly bright in this otherwise black and white world. Revived by the hot ginger and visibility that stretched farther than ten yards I skied over to the rocky top of Cnap Coire na Spreidhe, a wonderful viewpoint for the deep straight cleft of Strath Nethy which led out beyond the snow clad hills to the green and brown fields and moors of the lowlands, a different, colourful world. The wind was still strong and cold so soon I turned and skied carefully back down the wind blasted snow. The weather had been wild and unforgiving but for a few minutes the wind had torn apart the storm and revealed some of the beauty and majesty of the Cairngorms, reminding me of why I love these hills despite the rain and wind and snow.

The picture shows the weather station on the summit of Cairn Gorm. Photo info: Canon EOS 350D, Canon EF-S 18-55 mm IS@ 18mm, f8@1/2000, ISO 200, raw file converted to JPEG in DxO Optics Pro.

Yellowstone Podcast with Cameron McNeish

Yesterday I recorded a podcast with Cameron McNeish that has just appeared on his web site. On the podcast I talk about the reasons for my Yellowstone trips and the gear I used. The podcast can be downloaded from Cameron's site or via iTunes.

The photo shows the second igloo camp in the Firehole River valley on this year's trip. Photo info: Canon EOS 350D, Canon EF-S 18-55 mm IS @ 24mm, f8@1/640, ISO 100, raw file converted to JPEG in Capture One Pro.

TGO Gear Issue

The April TGO magazine, just published, is a special gear issue. It’s not however full of long lists of gear. In fact there are no lists at all. Instead there are masses of gear reviews, trip reports of how gear performed and interviews with outdoors people about the gear they use. There’s also a piece I wrote on the ethics of outdoor gear, which was an interesting piece to research and write and more encouraging than I initially expected. Other work of mine in this issue is a trip report on new gear used on a high camp in the Cairngorms (GoLite Xanadu 1 tent, MontBell Ultralight Super Stretch Down Hugger #3 sleeping bag, Primus EtaExpress stove, GoLite Trail Fly shoes & Mountain Equipment Compressor insulated jacket – all items shown at the Friedrichshafen show a few months before the trip), a trip report on the gear used on my Yellowstone ski tour last year (much of which was used again on this year’s trip), a piece on safety and lightweight gear in which I argue that the latter can be just as safe as heavy gear and eleven gear reviews including the FurTech Talon jacket, Baffin Mountain Boots, GoLite Shangri-La 3 shelter, Wild Country Sololite tent and the Inkapen. Small items are important too! There’s much else by other people too including Cameron McNeish’s latest contribution to the Alladale estate proposals, which I’ve commented on in several blog entries. The issue is introduced by Cameron in a short video on the TGO website.

The picture shows the camp on the Moine Mhor during testing for the “High Camp in the Cairngorms” TGO feature. Photo info: Canon EOS 350D, Canon EF-S 18-55 mm @ 55mm, f8@1/500, ISO 200, raw file converted to JPEG in Capture One Pro.

Yellowstone Wilderness

Deep snow, smoking rivers, geysers throwing water and steam high into the freezing, sparkling air, bubbling mud pots, magnificent old growth forest, winding canyons, vast pristine meadows – Yellowstone National Park in winter is a very special place, which is why I returned there last month for a second year’s ski touring and igloo building. For ten frosty nights I marvelled at the enormous starry skies, the brilliant waxing moon and the dark outlines of the forest before retreating to the cosy (really!) confines of an igloo for hot food and a comfortable night’s sleep. During the days our party of five skied through the forests and meadows, towing our gear on pulks between igloo sites, and touring with light daypacks from the igloos. We ventured down steep-sided river canyons, explored remote thermal basins and wandered across little-visited meadows. Eleven days of refreshing wilderness and natural beauty. Shoshone Geyser Basin was weird and wonderful, coloured thermal pools and steaming bare ground lying beside snow covered meadows below trees and rocks thickly coated with the frozen damp air from the thermal features. Lone Star geyser blasted water and steam high into the air at three hourly intervals, a display we could watch from outside our igloo. The high meadows at the headwaters of the Firehole river were quieter and more subtle, rippled white fields stretching for miles between dark forests to the final cliffs above Madison Lake. To reach the meadows we skied through silent groves of giant Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir, tremendous trees soaring into the sky. Wildlife was scarce in this harsh snowbound land but we were visited by foxes and pine martens, intent, sometimes successfully, on raiding our food supplies. One pine marten bravely ventured into our igloos while we were away, showing a great liking for chocolate. At another site a less bold marten hissed and chattered at us from a pine tree. Coyote tracks were everywhere but we never saw one of these wild dogs. Gray jays and Clark’s nutcrackers visited every igloo site, on the lookout for any scraps of food. Surprisingly, one of the commonest birds we saw were mallard ducks, which were often encountered in the creeks and rivers, open despite the bitter sub zero temperatures due to the warmth from the thermal features.

Ski touring in winter Yellowstone was a deep wilderness experience, an immersion into a wild, natural world. It will live with me for many years.

The picture shows the Lone Star geyser erupting just after sunset. Photo info: Canon EOS 350D, Canon EF-S 18-55 mm IS @ 29mm, f8@1/30, ISO 100, raw file converted to JPEG in Capture One Pro.

And The Snow Came

Two days ago it began to snow. And went on snowing, thick, wet flakes swirling down hour after hour after hour. Driven by a strong, gusty wind the sticky snow was plastered onto rocks and trees and piled up into great drifts, rippled like sand. I ventured out into the blizzard and wandered through a hazy landscape, ethereal trees fading in and out of the pulsating air, the ground and sky merging out in the meadows, the world lacking solidity. The ground collapsed and broke at each step, the snow sucking my boots down, making lifting them hard work. Soon I turned and trudged home, my body labouring slowly through the resisting snow but my mind swooping free, exhilarated by the storm and the sharp touch of real winter. By dawn the next day the snow had stopped falling and the land was white and pristine. Out to the west the high mountains were hidden in dark rushing clouds but here in the foothills of Strathspey only thin shreds of cloud, ripped by the wind, swept overhead and the sun shone hazily through their ice crystals. I went out on skis, the first time straight from the house this winter, and slid through the soft snow, drier and more powdery than when it fell due to a hard overnight frost. The ease of skiing, of slipping effortlessly over the snow, contrasted with the laborious postholing of the day before. The woods were quiet and still, the meadows white seas of undulating snow, blown into gentle frozen waves by the wind. The big pines had developed split characters. Towards the north-west, from whence the snow had come, they were white and cold, to the south-east they were green and brown and warm, their bark glowing reddish-gold in the sun. Tracks of rabbits, pheasants and roe deer radiated out into the meadows from the woods, heading for clumps of reeds and tall grass only partly covered by the snow. The thin prints of the pheasants ran across the surface of the snow, the deer and rabbits went in deep, showing what a struggle they had reaching essential if meagre food. A buzzard called overhead, drifting across the sky with barely a wing beat. A flock of chaffinches fluttered, calling shrilly, across the open space between two pines. Startled by my sudden fast approach a pheasant shot, squawking loudly, into the air and crashed off through the bushes. Mostly though the land was still and quiet, nothing moving, nothing making a sound, just the quiet hiss of my skis across the snow and the rustle of the wind in the tree tops. I slid down a bank into the mouth of a steep narrow ravine filled with a tangle of old trees, a hidden, secretive spot that is one my favourite local places. There is a sense here of the old wildwood, of an ancient forest untouched and undisturbed by humanity or civilisation. I looked in from the edge, up the little stream trickling through the dense woods, then turned away, there being no place for skis in the undergrowth, and skied home across wide, open meadows with the high Cairngorms finally appearing out of the clouds.

The image shows the little ravine the day after the snow came. Photo info: Canon EOS 300D, Canon EF-S 18-55 mm IS @ 43mm, f5.6@1/100, ISO 100, raw file converted to JPEG in Capture One Pro.

Wilderness Literature Thoughts

Back in December a piece of mine about the wilderness writers who’ve inspired me called Visionaries of the Wild appeared in TGO magazine. I described seven writers in particular, six of them being ones to whom I return constantly and one a new writer who has impressed me. Of these seven, three are American (Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey), two ex-pat Brits who moved to and wrote about the USA (John Muir from Scotland and Colin Fletcher from Wales), one Scottish (W.H.Murray) and one English (Robert Macfarlane). In the feature I said that I think Britain lacks a tradition of outdoor prose writing and that our outdoor writers tend to be either nature or adventure writers, few of whom present a vision of wildness. In the February issue of TGO Jim Perrin commented on this piece in his Contemplations column saying that he was “frequently brought up short by how overviews of what we generally term outdoor literature …. almost invariably ignore the riches of our own British version of that writing tradition and celebrate instead an American one”. Jim Perrin goes on to list British writers he thinks should be considered - George Borrow, Richard Jeffries, Edward Thomas, Seton Gordon, W.H. Murray, Robert Lloyd Praeger, Harry Griffin, Tom Weir, Bill Condry, Jim Crumley, Hamish Brown, Nan Shepherd and John Wyatt - and says “before we reach judgements on outdoor literature, we need to make sure we’re well-versed in all those writers and a whole host more”. Now I was not making judgements nor commenting on the whole range of outdoor literature but my views were based on having read all the writers Jim mentioned bar one (Jaeger, of whom I had never heard), plus many more (what about Gavin Maxwell, Showell Styles, John Hillaby?), and not finding them as inspiring on wilderness and landscape as the writers I mentioned (except for W.H.Murray, who I had included anyway). This is not to say that I don’t think these writers are good. Some are excellent. But none present a vision of wilderness and landscape in a big, over-arching sense in the way the writers that inspire me do. Most don’t even try to do this. Seton Gordon for example is a superb writer on Scottish nature, especially birds, and occasionally conjures up wonderful descriptions of Scottish wild land but there’s nothing in his works that I’ve read to compare with Muir or Abbey. Hamish Brown’s Hamish’s Mountain Walk is the best book about a long distance walk in Britain that I know but the author doesn’t have, or try to have, the expansive reach of Colin Fletcher in The Man Who Walked Through Time. Jim mentions the books that have an honoured place on his bookshelf – John Wyatt’s The Shining Levels, Thoreau’s Walden. Now Walden I have no quarrel with but much as I like The Shining Levels it’s not a book I return to often or would place on a level with the other Abbey or Fletcher or Muir (who Jim dislikes intensely).

At the end of his piece Jim touches on Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, though he doesn’t mention it by name, saying that I praised it for its “comforting notion that we can always find wild places in the most surprising places”. Jim says he finds that argument a little complacent and asks if our children will be able to find such places given the pace of destruction of the wild going on. Here I think Jim has misunderstood what I and Robert Macfarlane are saying. The “comforting notion” is not about finding the wild in surprising places. It’s about the fact that the wild will return, that, to quote Macfarlane, “the ivy will snake back and unrig our flats and terraces”. The difference in views is a matter of scale. Jim is thinking on a short, human scale, the next year, decade, generation. Robert Macfarlane is thinking much longer, into the distant future, and in the knowledge that the damage we do now is only a tiny blip in the story of the planet. Not that that’s a reason for doing nothing, for accepting destruction. We live in Jim Perrin’s timescale. Protecting the wilds we have left is for our own sakes as well as our children’s. Jim finishes by saying that “the task of the outdoor writer isn’t just to celebrate wild land but to “protect it passionately, and make us aware of every threat”. I agree and that is something I have always tried to do since I began writing, perhaps not forcefully enough – but then it is all too easy to become preachy and off-putting, shouting loudly but not being heard. Of course writing in defence of wild land isn’t a new task for outdoor writers – it is a main thrust of the work of Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey and, above all, John Muir, the most effective writer in defence of wild land ever.

The image shows my battered copy of Colin Fletcher’s The Man Who Walked Through Time. It has an honoured place on my book shelves.

Wild Camping Petition

Camping in wild country, amongst mountains, woods and moors, is one of the great experiences of outdoor life, an experience that brings you closer to nature, closer to the earth. I’ve camped wild on many thousands of nights in many countries, in all seasons and in all types of weather. Without those camps, even the stormy ones, the uncomfortable ones, the insect plagued ones, I would have missed much and my life would be the poorer. When I began camping wild as a teenager I didn’t give much thought to whether it was legal or not. I was aware that camping in a farmer’s crops might not be popular but I didn’t want to camp in places like that anyway. As I grew older I became aware that wild camping wasn’t a right but was accepted in some, mostly upland, areas but not in many others. I ignored the statements in outdoor books saying you must ask permission before camping as this clearly wasn’t practical and clearly wasn’t what the authors actually did. I learnt to be discreet and the advantages of early starts, late pitches and a green tent. By doing so I managed to avoid any trouble with landowners, even when I walked from Land’s End to John O’Groats and often camped in rather too developed lowland areas. Many others do the same. This isn’t an ideal situation though and hardly encourages people to try wild camping so I was very pleased when the Scottish parliament included a legal right to wild camping in the 2003 Land Reform Act. It hasn’t changed my wild camping habits in the slightest but it may well encourage others and it does mean that if anyone did object I now have the law on my side. In England and Wales wild camping still isn’t legal however, though there are areas like the high fells of the Lake District where it’s accepted.

Now wild camper Darren Christie, who blogs as whitespider1066, has started a petition to the UK government to legalise wild camping in England and Wales, for which he is to be congratulated. You can sign the petition here. How effective such petitions are I have no idea but I would think that the more people who sign the more likely a petition is to be noticed.

The picture shows legal wild camping in the Moidart hills in Scotland. Photo info: Canon EOS 300D, Tamron 11-18mm lens at 18mm, f5.6@1/100, ISO 400, raw file converted to JPEG in DxO Optics Pro.