SAVED MY LIFE
Awesome Andy beats depression.. by climbing up Britain’s highest mountain every day for a month
challenge last month, Andy loved it and the encouragement he got from people he met and online supporters.
He said: “There were hard days but also some really enjoyable ones, meeting people and speaking to them on the walk.
“I would wake up every day knowing that I was going to speak to somebody new and that might be one more person I could reach out to with my story and my battle with depression and that keeps you going.
“Sometimes I’d look out the window and it was howling it down, then I’d turn on the laptop and have all these messages of encouragement, so up you go.”
He added: “I’d encourage people with depression to speak to people about it and to just get outside. It has saved my life, the outdoors. Without the outdoors I would not be here today.”
Andy charted his month on Facebook A DEDICATED hillwalker has completed all of Scotland’s Munros – for the 10th time.
Bill Steele, 70, began bagging the mountains while he was a 20-year-old apprentice and has recorded every time he has got page The Lone Walker, attracting hundreds of followers.
He normally took five-and-a-half hours to climb the 4411ft peak. His fastest time was four hours and 15 minutes.
Andy, from Blackpool, said the first two days he felt a bit stiff after the climb but then his body got used to it. ●ANDY has raised more than £1600 for Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team through his JustGiving page www.justgiving.com/fundraising/andy-coley1 to the top of each of our 282 peaks over 3000ft.
The retired electrical engineer climbed the last on his list, Ben More on Mull, last week to become one of a few people to complete the feat 10 times.
Bill, who lives in Stirling with wife Alison, said: “I didn’t approach the Munros with a view to bagging them 10 times. It was fairly haphazard, but I recorded every time I got to the top of a Munro. “By last year I’d
calculated I had done them all nine times and, at that stage, thought I may as well aim for doing them 10 times. That’s when I made a conscious effort to go for the 10. I thought I might as well round it off.”
Bill has also been walking and climbing in Ireland, England and Wales and in the Alps – including the Matterhorn and Gran Paradiso without guides.
He said: “I’m not going to stop hillwalking. I expect I’ll pay some Munros a return visit, but I’m not intending to do them all over again. But you never know, I may do them again by accident.”
Bill climbed his first Munros in the 60s while staying at the former Outward Bound Moray Sea School in Burghead as an apprentice with South of Scotland Electricity
Board.