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Reading List Icy places
THE END OF ICE: BEARING WITNESS AND FINDING MEANING IN THE PATH OF CLIMATE DISRUPTION BY DAHR JAMAIL (THE NEW PRESS)
“The fall lasts long enough to watch the blue ice race upward, aeons of time compressed into glacial ice, flashing by in fractions of seconds.” Thus climber and former war-correspondent, Dahr Jamail, describes his tumble whilst on an Alaskan glacier climb in the introduction to this meditation on climate-change loss. The metaphor is potent. We are in climate freefall. In a tiny fraction of time those glacial-aeons are melting. “Seven years of climbing in Alaska,” he writes, “had provided me with a front-row seat where I could witness the human-caused climate destruction.” The End Of Ice charts other climate-related losses too, but it is at its most brilliant when it talks about this melting, the ice as it vanishes, glacier by glacier.
NORTH TO THE RIME-RINGED SUN BY ISOBEL WYLIE HUTCHISON (BLACKIE)
The 1937 travel memoir by one of Scotland’s most significant female explorers describes how, while travelling as a lone woman across the top of Alaska, she found herself marooned for seven weeks, in 1934, on a sandspit with a fur trader. “My situation would certainly have been unconventional in any region of the Arctic,” she wrote. “I was a prisoner on a snow-covered strip of shingle about a mile long, and scarcely in any part more than a hundred yards wide, washed on all sides by the sea.” Wylie Hutchison was also a poet and she writes great lyrical prose, long overdue a revival. North To The Rime-Ringed Sun is only available second hand as it is out of print – but far more easily buyable is Gwyneth Hoyle’s Flowers In The Snow: The Life Of Isobel Wylie Hutchison.
ALONE IN ANTARCTICA: THE CLASSIC TRUE STORY OF ONE WOMAN’S SOLO JOURNEY ACROSS ANTARCTICA BY FELICITY ASTON (SUMMERSDALE)
dramatically improved too. Great streaks of blue sky appeared through the high cloud and the sun broke through – the first I’d seen in weeks. Away ahead of me I could see other climbers on the sharply defined east ridge of Gairich and beyond lay the jumbled hills of Knoydart.
As the ridge widens out onto the Bac nam Foid it usually becomes increasingly boggy and cut up by peat hags, but a couple of inches of fresh snow lay on top of old névé, hard snow that has frozen and thawed several times, and it was delight to walk on it. Soon I was climbing up through rocky outcrops and crags, avoiding the icy sections as much as possible.
Various tracks cross the south-east slopes of this hill and it’s easy to follow them too far west, but by keeping on a rising traverse as close to the crest as possible I managed to pick a line through the difficulties to the surprisingly broad summit ridge and cairn.
The cold was intense but the views were magnificent, the white crests of the hills rising from russet flanks. I could see
the Cuillin of Skye, I could see Ben Nevis crouching over its acolytes but best of all were the Knoydart hills, wild Scotland in all her winter glory.
ROUTE Map:
Distance: Approx Start/Finish:
Due to current restrictions, we are running our favourite previously published walks. Please follow the Scottish Government’s latest coronavirus restrictions, see https://www.gov. scot/coronaviruscovid-19
Route: From S end of dam a path leads to an old stalkers’ path that runs S over boggy moors to the edge of a forestry plantation. Here, another path runs due W up the Druim na Geid Salaich. Once the broad ridge crest is reached the path peters out but the going is easy and the broad ridge should be followed W to the final steep pull to Gairich. At the foot of this final rise a path reappears, but after a while it runs out on to the S face. Don’t be tempted by it but continue climbing on the ridge crest to the spacious summit and large cairn. Return the same way.