High spirits
I SPECIFICALLY REMEMBER the first time I was ever moved by a view of mountains.
I was perhaps 10 or 11, and walking along the spine of High Street with my family.
From that wide, whalebacked ridge, you can see the entire Lake District: a sea of fells, interlocking ridges rising and receding across the whole western skyline. Although I couldn’t name them at the time, I would have seen from the Coniston Fells in the south to Blencathra in the north, and everything in between – the hulking profile of the Scafells, the imposing dome of Great Gable, the ridges of Helvellyn – all cast in the soft light of an early evening in May.
As a child, you tend to be more interested in the minutiae of things; but this ridge walk was the first time I became aware of how powerful it could be to look over a mountain landscape from a lofty vantage point: to see all that tectonic upheaval and geological drama, to get an oddly liberating sense of our smallness in the world and in time, to see a representation of natural forces that exist outside our ability to order and control things. And – as I suspect you’ll know if you’re reading this magazine – once you get hooked on high places, it stays with you for a lifetime. That’s the essential appeal of this issue’s main theme – the sky-scraping delights of ridge walks. Dougie Cunningham’s attempt at a post-lockdown walk of the Mamores traverse (p26) might not have been entirely successful when it came to ticking off hills, but he came away from it with some spectacular photography and the more important achievement of “reconnecting with the mountains”. David Lintern’s backpacking journey over the Ben Alder massif (p44) contains its share of ridges, as does Emily Woodhouse’s sun-scorched, record-breaking walk in Spain’s
Sierra Nevada (p52). Oh, and I also manage a wild camp on top of Helvellyn, with a couple of famous rocky arêtes thrown in (p36).
Elsewhere in this issue, I think Lucy Thraves’ reflection on walking alone as a woman (p24) is one of the most powerful pieces of writing we’ve carried in recent times. Also, don’t miss the wonderful accounts of this year’s TGO Challenge from participants (‘challengers’, to give them their proper title) on p61.
There’s much more to enjoy, of course – but I’ll leave the exploring to you!