48

I Keep the Dreams

AFTER 30 YEARS of adventure in the Scottish Highlands, a ­peculiar thing happened to me. Something I would never have believed possible. I suddenly lost the desire to climb in the Highlands altogether. The mountains had become so familiar to me that they held few surprises any more. Yes, I know they’re always different. I couldn’t understand it either, but somehow I was climbed-out. It had reached the point where I needed an Alp or a Rocky Mountain to get the juices flowing again.

I don’t know how long that gap in my résumé would have lasted because after a year or so I met Allan. He was a late starter, just discovering the hills, and his keenness immediately rekindled my own. Before long we had become best friends, off as well as on the hill. Our social lives became intertwined. With his girlfriend Sandi, we formed a regular threesome around town.

And so it came to pass that, in my ’50s, I found myself tackling some of the longest and hardest hill walks of my life. Routes I had never before considered within my capabilities would have Allan salivating with anticipation. He was 15 years younger than me and typically made no allowance for it, which was both a compliment and a pain. Any show of reticence on my part would only broaden his grin.

I had climbed Ben Cleuch in the Ochils Range, between ­Stirling and Perth, many times for exercise. With Allan’s infectious, try-anything sense of adventure pushing me to greater ambition, we now walked the entire length of the range from west to east. The greatest number of Munros I had ever climbed in a single day was seven, on the South Glen Shiel Ridge in Wester Ross. Now we repeated the traverse and crossed the deep passes at its end to add a Corbett and two more Munros. A ten-bagger. Even Allan found that tough.

Rain, snow, darkness… we carried on regardless, bolstered by a shared disposition to humour. On a day when the wind was measured at over 80mph on Cairn Gorm, we struggled to the summit of Creag Meagaidh, sheltered behind the cairn and couldn’t make it back out again. After several attempts, we managed to crawl out along the frozen ground and slide down into the nearest corrie.

Sometimes we attempted too much. On the Isle of Arran, Allan’s insistence on scrambling over every rocky nubbin on the Glen Rosa skyline, while I took the bypass path, resulted in us having to race back along Brodick seafront so as not to miss the ferry back to the mainland.

In the Cairngorms, we lingered too long on the Braeriach plateau and found ourselves disoriented in darkness without torches (don’t ask) in the labyrinth of Rothiemurchus Forest. I have known others, in similar circumstances, succumb to rage, panic or mutual recrimination. Instead, our attempts to extricate ourselves by aiming for the location of a barking dog, which we assumed signified habitation, seemed so ridiculous that we merely succumbed to giggles. And yes, in case you’re wondering, we did eventually surface at a roadside.

Then one Sunday morning in 2005, Sandi turned up on my doorstep to tell me Allan had been killed.

Although well-equipped, he had slipped while tackling a shortcut up a snow gully onto the summit ridge of Binnein Mor in the Mamores Range. He had hit a rock and punctured his skull.

I felt numb. Sandi felt numb. Later, as is the way of things, we cursed him for his foolhardiness, for his abandonment of us, for the senselessness of it all.

There was also guilt. I had been due to accompany him that weekend, before other commitments took precedence. Not for the first time, I might have been able to dissuade him from taking that shortcut. It was a thought on which I couldn’t allow myself to dwell.

After the accident, conditions had become so dangerous that the Mountain Rescue team had been unable to reach him before darkness. Sandi was horrified that he’d had to remain up there overnight, in weather as atrocious as only the Scottish Highlands can muster. No, I said, seeking words of comfort for both of us. He’ll love it. His last night, with the mountains all to himself. He won’t even feel the cold.

Later, as is also sometimes the way of things, his girlfriend and best friend were drawn closer together in grief. Sandi and I became partners. I like to think Allan would approve. Sometimes on the hill, especially when the storm rages or my step falters, I hear him still, chuckling to himself at my discomfort, urging me ever onwards and upwards.

At his funeral service, they played his favourite song: ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones. It summed up his endless quest for adventure and experience. Too upset to speak at the service myself, I asked the Humanist Celebrant to read out Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s classic poem ‘I Hold The Heights’. It ends:

I may not grudge the little left undone,
I hold the heights, I keep the dreams I won.

Never had those evocative lines seemed so apt. Allan left us prematurely, but he had accomplished so much. There are worse epitaphs a man can have when the time comes.