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LIFE LESSONS
When You Get to the Top of a Mountain, Keep Climbing
The terror and exhilaration of climbing my first mountain changed my life
When I was twenty years old, I went backpacking in the Scottish Highlands for the first time and climbed my first mountain. It changed my life.
I’d been inspired to make the trip by a work colleague, who’d regaled me with tales of hiking through the highlands and staying each night in isolated stone bothies, surrounded by nothing but the awesome, deafening silence of the mountains.
That would have been the summer of ’91 and it was already shaping up to be a hot, dry one. Not hot and dry in the sense we talk about these days, where entire countries catch fire and burn, but hot and dry in the sense of glorious.
At the first opportunity, I booked two weeks off work and started shopping for camping gear — backpack, stove, pots and pans, hiking boots and Ordnance Survey maps.
There was no internet in those days, at least not in the way we know it today. We didn’t have mobile phones or satellite navigation, and maps were huge tablecloth-sized sheets of paper. Research for my trip consisted of spending hours poring minutely over the details of these Ordnance Survey maps, buying hiking magazines…
