book review hell of a journey

Sun, Jul 21, 2013

I’ve just been reading Hell of a Journey Kindle edition by Mike Cawthorne, a book I had not really shown much interest in when it came out in 2000 but I it’s been published anew and age has matured it like a fine wine.

It’s about Mike’s continuous, solo backpacking walk over all the Scottish thousand metre peaks in the winter of 1997. From Sutherland, across to the Cairngorms, south to Loch Lomond and back up to finish on Bidean nam Bian in Glencoe. When it was originally published I was at the height of my mountaineering ‘career’ and wasn’t much interested in books about long walks but in the intervening years it’s become a wee gem.

It’s refreshingly light on gear. Many walking books these days talk about not much else but there’s a page or two at the end that manages to squeeze in what gear he used and what food he ate. Two pages! Well done that man. Of course, even if it was twenty pages long it would be long out of date.

The book is from an era when ultra-lightweight hadn’t been invented and when long distance walkers relied on motivation, fitness and morale to get them through. I loved when he reaches a village shop, no food left and buys 2kg of fresh fruit which he hauls over the hills. Potatoes, onions, tomatoes, tins of fish, bottles of olive oil, tins of condensed milk, biscuits. What a marvellous way to travel! The 25 food caches he made previous to the walk were key to this well stocked larder, essential for a winter trip like this.

Although there is much to be said for eating well on a long walk, he manages to do this by mainly carrying the full pack through the glens, setting up a base camp for a few days and climbing the surrounding peaks with day rations. Once an area’s 1000m summits are won, he moves on, carrying the load to the next food cache or village. Occasionnaly he carries the full pack over the tops but it weighs a ton and in very deep snow is an impractical tactic. But it does let him range far and wide through very remote country, often with a long walk back to the tent, mostly in the dark and usually in a wild storm. Real adventuring.

The lighweight ‘revolution’ in both gear and food allows today’s backpackers to carry everything over the tops, albeit mostly in spring and summer. Backpacking over the summits in winter is probably one of the best adventures you can have in Scotland but you will sacrifice lots. Mike’s tactic strikes a happy balance between enjoyment of the adventure and pushing himself to the limits of endurance.

The book is light on actual detail and fairly skips across the landscape but its real beauty now is in its ‘fin de siecle’ feel. There were no national parks when Mike did his walk and he worries about their effect on the landscape should they be set up.

I well remember the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park being created. ‘Parks’ are unnatural. They’re human creations. They have manicured lawns, wide engineered paths and ‘keep off the grass’ signs. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when the park was first created. On a drive up Loch Lomond, a month or two after the park’s creation I was dismayed and angry as I passed the narrow section where cars are forced to wait at lights as the road inches along a narrow shelf above some of the deepest water of the loch. An army of bulldozers, diggers and high viz workmen were busy ripping up the trees around Pulpit Rock and pulping them, leaving mounds of powdered birch round the ancient rock. Presumably to allow tourists to see this old site of worship from their cars as they queued at the lights. Environmental vandalism.

Across the loch there’s a remote cottage where the landowner decided one day, before it was a natinal park, to plough a road across the hills to his holiday home from the east. There was an outcry, he was fined. He paid the fine and nothing more was said. He got to keep his road to his holiday home. The park was set up to limit this sort of destruction and yet there was no outcry when the first thing the authority did was destroy trees in the name of tourism.

There are lots of nice vignettes in Mike’s book that reminded me of days spent in wild winter storms. I remember those years for their mildness though. The long queues on popular ice climbs leaving huge steps up what should be steep walls of snow and ice. Eventually it got so bad it wasn’t worth going near the big routes on the more popular hills and you get a sense of that climate when spring makes a surprise comeback halfway through the walk. Since then, global ‘warming’ has returned us to ‘real’ winters.

I smiled as I recognised things I’d done too and yelped with joy when ‘Windswept’ walked into Loch Ossian Youth Hostel for his breakfast. I well remember ‘Windswept’ and ‘Fettercairn’, the two stags the warden used to feed. I have a picture of me with them and their winter guardian. Happy days!

Every good long distance walking book should finish with something for the reader to contemplate and Mike’s does just that. He states:

‘I would hate my own Hell of a Journey to become a testimony to what we in Scotland are losing’.

Unfortunately this book is just that. It’s getting so bad the Scottish Government has decreed that no wind farms should be sited in the national parks. The parks have suddenly become our Alamos as regiments of turbines march relentlessly across the landscape, while irresponsible landowners gouge hill tracks with impunity. While hydro dams drown beautiful remote glens.

This book is from the days before mobile phones on the hills, before GPS, before social media and the internet. It’s from the days when watching your compass disappear down a snow slope as darkness gathers means getting back is up to you and you alone.

I fear this country has no route back to its roots. Its environmental compass lost long ago. Or was it wrenched from us?