The joy of turning back
The summit we didn’t reach. The trail we turned back from. Walkers will always have ‘the one that got away’. But sometimes they become the ones we love most…
The greatest skill you can learn.
I’M SIX YEARS old. And the sky hates me. The wind is roaring. Freezing air rips through my St Michael windcheater. Icy rainwater is seeping into my shoulderblades. Visibility is almost zero. I am having my first ever encounter with hailstones.
Crouched amid the slimy slabs of a small wallshelter, I huddle tighter into Mum’s torso. Dad disappeared about ten minutes ago, ‘to see if the summit is just over there’. No sign since. Worst of all, we’ve eaten the last ginger nut. And then we see him. Twenty yards away, descending, away from us.
“DAAAAAAAAD!”
The angry wind grabs our voices and hurls them the wrong way. But we’ve done just enough. The dad-shaped figure stops, turns, and comes back. “I think we have to give this up,” he says.
The phrase ‘no sh*t, Sherlock’ didn’t have much currency in 1982. But Mum and I gladly utter whatever the equivalent was, and together we set off down the hill.
That was Ingleborough. Our first mountain. And today, my favourite. How did that happen?
‘UTTER MADNESS!’
At 45, I still remember that day in pin-sharp HD. It is a nuclear moment in my childhood. It’s also the definitive essay in how not to climb a mountain, and M&D both speak about it with dread to this day.
We weren’t total novices: the previous summer we had walked the South Downs Way. And as a Sheffield lad, Dad knew a fair bit about Yorkshire and its hills. But this was our first proper mountain, and we’d gone up in casual shoes, armed with a packet of ginger nuts and some lemon barley water. We’d gone the longest way, too: up from Clapham via Trow Gill, navigating with a leaflet from the village shop.
Lower down it had all felt exciting. The weather was fine, people were friendly, and Gaping Gill looked stunning. But as we headed up into the cloud, the weather turned, horribly. When it became impossible to move forward easily, we stopped at the shelter, and Dad decided to nip off and see if we were close to the summit. Splitting an inexperienced group in bad weather: it’s a concept that would make any Mountain Rescuer’s toes curl. The only thing that would uncurl them is the eventual decision to regroup and retreat. The smartest decision in the world.
Little wonder that the leaflet, still kept in Mum and Dad’s drawer to this day, is scrawled with the words MDN April 82 – utter madness!
The text advising ‘competent map and compass skills’ is circled in red pen.
And yet. Look what happened as a result. We learned. We skilled up and got the right kit. Mum and Dad became not just competent hillwalkers, but passionately immersed in mountain lore.
And of course, we went back. In May 1984, we sat happily on the top of Ingleborough under a clear blue sky. We even found the shelter we’d huddled in, and realised the summit was a full quarter of a mile further onward, rather than ‘just over there’. ▶
The three of us formed a lifelong love of hills that took us from Yorkshire to the Lakes to the Alps. But Ingleborough has always been The Special One. To me, to this day, it’s a place of terror and joy in the same breath. Although it’s only a middling height in the grand scheme of UK mountains, I think of it as Everest. That’s the sublime at work: the Romantic poets observed that any mountain whose summit was obscured by cloud was a thing of beautiful terror, for in the mind’s eye the top of the peak could be tens of thousands of feet up in the sky, instead of just above the cloudbase. That’s my Ingleborough.
A hill the size of the universe.
THE OBSESSION
Ingleborough also gave me a fascination with the hills that bite us.
What does it do to us when we turn back? It can break us, sure. It can feel like agony, weakness, failure, a waste of time and money; even shame, especially if it’s a famous hill that people bang on about everywhere you look: the Helvellyns, Snowdons and Ben Nevises of this world. Everyone else has done it, we might think. Why couldn’t I?
Ben Nevis was another of ours. In 1987 we got as far as the top of the zig-zags on the Pony Track. The summit plateau was within reach. But the weather was so appalling that turning round was far, far safer than pressing on.
We had indeed learned our lesson well. We came back and did it the following summer. And like Ingleborough, Ben Nevis became a Special One. So what is the nature of this strange bond between the walker and the hill that haunts them?
When I first read Moby Dick, I thought there was an element of Captain Ahab about that bond: the obsessed mariner, hunting the whale that wounded him, willing to sacrifice everything for vengeance.
But it’s healthier than that. I’m not someone who wants to ‘conquer’ mountains; that’s a ridiculous idea anyway. I don’t want revenge, or conquest, or even ‘closure’. I want the friendship of the hill. And if it didn’t quite offer it up the first time, then it becomes an Ingleborough. A teacher, a mentor. And, when it does finally work out, an even closer friend.
At my daughter’s primary school, the teacher says it’s important to FAIL, because it’s your First Attempt In Learning. On mountains, we do a lot of FAIL. We just have to hope the SAIL is better.
“Without the bitter, the sweet just ain’t sweet.” as CAMERON CROWE, VANILLA SKY
THE FELLOWSHIP
I’m not alone. When I ask about ‘the hills that got away’ on the #walk1000miles Facebook group, I meet scores of people who feel the same way. Most talk of the ‘gutting’ feeling of having to turn round, and the desire to go back and finish the story. Those who have gone back and succeeded speak of an enhanced sense of jubilation when they finally reached the top, or saw the famous view, or reached the end of the trail.
For Deniece Wanley, it was Blencathra.
“I was defeated twice by bad weather and thought I’d never do it,” she explains. “Every time we drove past it on the A66, I’d feel like it was taunting me.
“I became obsessed with Wainwright’s musings about Blencathra, and it just seemed to feature everywhere I turned!
“The third time, we did it on a moonlight walk as part of Keswick Mountain Festival. I was prepared for defeat, but it really was third time lucky. We laughed, we were cautious, we got wet, we totally stretched our comfort zone – and it was thrilling!
“To this day, Blencathra holds a special place in my heart. As my Mum always said: ‘Nothing gained easily is appreciated’.”
For Elaine Cosgrove, the important thing was to salvage something good from the disappointment.
“We got halfway up Yr Aran in Snowdonia but we couldn’t stand up for the gale that was blowing, so down we went,” she recalls.
“We decided to have a play in the Watkin Path waterfalls on the way down. Made our day.”
And for Dave ‘Jonah’ Jones, reaching the top of Tryfan was emotional on a whole different level.
“As a small boy, my Dad took me hostelling. We tried to climb Tryfan, but it was too foggy,” he explains. “Many years later I was on holiday in North Wales. My Dad was very ill at the time, ▶
so I decided to climb the mountain in his honour. I got to the top and had my photo taken, holding a Welsh flag. Minutes after I arrived back at the car, my sister phoned to say Dad had just passed away.
“I believe he saw me safely up and back, then knew his last job had been done.”
THE PSYCHOLOGY
So what’s the best way to manage all the raw emotions of having to turn back?
“It’s about valuing process over outcome,” says Dr Jamie Barker. “If we set out to enjoy the journey as much as the accomplishment, that’s a lot healthier for us, especially if we don’t get as high or as far as we hoped.”
Jamie has studied this field intensively. As Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology at Loughborough University, he works closely with athletes, footballers, Olympians, Paralympians and Armed Forces personnel – many of whom struggle to balance the desire to win with the need to stay calm and rational.
“It can be a hard sell to an athlete: they may have a mindset that winning is everything, and trying to tell them to balance that desire with rationality, and to see everything as a learning experience – that can be difficult,” he says.
“We tell them it’s a subtle shift, from ‘I MUST do this’ to ‘I really really want this, I will give it everything, but I will equip myself to handle it if it doesn’t happen’. If you can do that, you’re just as motivated, but you are being better to yourself. And you are more likely to succeed in the long run.”
Walkers, he says, are far more likely to buy into that positive mindset anyway. But we still hurt when we don’t get the experience we were craving. The best balm, says Jamie, should lie in the postmatch analysis.
“People can feel guilt or even shame if they turn back from something, especially if it’s something they know lots of others have achieved before like a famous summit,” he explains.
“But at the end of the day it’s about you and the situation: the weather, your fitness, your skills, your gear. Look back and think, could I have done anything differently? What did I have control
over? And if there was nothing you could have done to make the outcome different, then that is not a failure.”
Felix Baumgartner would agree with that. You may remember him: the Austrian daredevil who in 2012 set the record for the highest skydive in history when he jumped from a helium balloon some 24 miles above the surface of the Earth.
But what isn’t remembered quite as clearly is that he almost did it six days earlier. He had one foot out of the capsule when he decided the weather conditions weren’t right, and stepped back in.
That same year, I met Pete Mounsey, of the Cleveland Mountain Rescue Team. I asked him for his best advice for people encountering bad weather in the hills, and he said: “Think ‘Baumgartner’.
“All those millions spent, all that time and effort by so many people to get him to that point, foot out the door – and he gets back in. Wow!” said Pete.
“The pressure he felt to go for it must have been unimaginable, but he made the right decision based on the situation. To me, that’s as much an achievement as when he actually did it. I love anyone who does what he did. Anyone.”
So here’s to the turn-backers, the retreaters, the ones who say ‘I think we need to give this up’. We are wise, we are smart, we’re all the richer for the experience, and Mountain Rescue loves us.
And we will come back another day.
“Most
great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure. ” NAPOLEON HILL