Become a Mountain Leader
If you didn’t want to before, you will after reading this!
Making money doing the thing you love most in the world is a universal dream, and for mountain devotees not only is it achievable but there’s also a clear pathway there. The same cannot be said for the kind of petering-out sheep trods, vanishing into a copse of bracken, you find on remote mountains, but to become a Mountain Leader, you must be able to follow both.
But the potential to make money from your dreams is not the only reason to become an ML. This award is for every hill lover. Your navigation will be honed to a point as fine as a compass needle. You will discover things you never knew about ravens, moss, lichen. You will be able to look at a landscape and understand the groaning geology that shaped it, without Google. You’ll have the first aid skills to help anyone who might need it and be handy enough with a rope to give confidence to the nerviest walker. And as well as the skills, there’s the joy. The hope-soaked, occasionally tense, elation of something longed for, and done. This is the story of how I did it.
I started my ML journey living less than a mile down the road from seven Munros and finished it in the flattest part of England, 100 miles from the nearest single hill and 200 miles from the closest mountain range. If we count the starting point as the moment I first heard the words come out of someone’s mouth, which was simultaneously the moment I decided, I want that, then it took six years. Four from training to assessment, ie from total mountain ignoramous (and I mean, really) to qualified, confident Mountain Leader.
With the glow of my first Munro still in my legs, I overheard a conversation with a friend planning to do the training that summer. Still wearing my ragged pac-a-mac, I asked if I could join in. “It might be better if you get more experience,” I was advised. “You could learn to use a compass first.”
This is important, not just for obvious reasons, but because most ML trainers expect you to arrive competent. They want to put a shine on existing tools, not forge new ones. This benefits you and your fellow trainees, as the less time you spend faffing around on basics, the more time you can spend getting really good and enjoying it.
Handing over the cash for my first Silva Expedition 4 compass was a small but important moment – I was committed. I was also lucky enough to be surrounded by mountain lovers generous with kit, skills and knowledge. I asked one to recommend a wild camping spot for my first night out. He returned my map with a smile and a grid reference. I was elated – a treasure hunt! – and set off with a heavy bag and bouncingly light heart to find my perfect spot. I spent that night looking up at the stars and listening to the swish of tent fabric, until the chill of the earth crept through my clothing and I crawled into my tent…
…where I lay, muscles stiff as boulders, replaying every horror movie I had ever seen in my mind’s eye. Now, I get some of my deepest, most restorative sleep, glittering with magical dreams, on a bed of heather.
I spent days out with friends, shadowed walk leaders and signed up for a navigation course. That autumn I set out on my first four-day solo expedition, during which I got awe-struck, learned that next to a path is a bad camping spot, stayed in my first bothy, sat down in a tearful fury, trotted along in a state of joy and ended it exhausted,
happy, eating oatcakes and honey as I made my way home in the red-gold shade of Scots pines. I was ready for my training. This lasts for six days, including a two-day expedition and wild camp, and I still count it as one of the most enjoyable weeks of my life. Each night I fell into bed exhausted and each morning woke exalting. I learned my slapdash approach would not pass and that however precise I thought my nav was, I better look again. I arrived feeling confident and left knowing I had a long way to go. The only thing to do was practice.
And then I moved south. Here was a problem that many of us contend with: loving mountains, but being far from them. There was no shortcut. Long journeys, nights attempting to sleep amid caterwauling snorers. Organisation. Commitment. It also meant introducing friends to the joy of mountains. Unforgettable days with them on Tryfan, Snowdon and bivvying in the Glyders.
Three years passed before I signed up to my assessment. An essential part of this and the training is basic ropework, enough to keep people safe on steep ground. This is rarely a problem for those accustomed to handling rope and tying knots, but I got myself in a perpetual tangle. After three years, any knowledge I’d gained had entirely left my brain.
I signed up for a refresher weekend in Snowdonia where I repeated the ropework until I could do it without thought and where I learned, yet again, that I needed to be even more precise. Not everyone had this feedback. Some were naturally more detail oriented and needed to work on their people management or environmental knowledge. Like any collection of normal humans, we all had areas of strength and weakness. We all left knowing which was which.
More practice. More days on the hill. I set myself challenges, pacing and timing my way to a chosen point. When cloud came down and cold rain came in, I firmly zipped up my waterproofs and stomped on. By this point,
I was working for Trail, so when I wasn’t walking in the hills, I was writing and learning about them. Veteran hill man and photographer Tom spent hours testing my navigation, stopping at random intervals halfway up a misty slope and expecting an accurate grid reference. A month or so before the assessment, I spent a week on Skye, wanting to go into it feeling entirely confident.
Of course, I didn’t. I felt nervous the week before and on the train as it zoomed north. I’ll do my best, I told myself. I’ll learn and if I fail, I’ll know where I need to focus. If only I could believe it. I so wanted to pass.
I hope to never forget those five days. I had moments of confidence and triumph, knowing exactly where I was and being able to give instant, accurate responses. I also had moments of despair, when I went quite far wrong and knew it. Those moments hounded me. There were times when I had to stop walking, laughing so much I couldn’t climb the slope I was halfway up. And times huddled with my tentmate on the expedition where we practiced and hoped together and worried furiously about the outcome, simultaneously exulting in every moment.
Our ropework was tested off a huge block halfway up a steep, rocky slope and, despite the additional safety rope around my waist, my breath caught high in my chest as I lowered myself towards the broken boulders several vertical metres below. The final, and most gruelling, part was the night navigation, which we undertook tired and hungry over nearfeatureless, boggy moorland. Afterwards, exhaustedly setting up camp in the warm light of a rising sun, our assessor announced that it was over. There was nothing more we could do.
I had no idea whether I’d passed or failed. We’d have to return to base where our assessors would confer, referring to us anonymously, and decide whether candidates one, two, three and four had done enough... We had. We all passed.