Mountain Interlude: Thinking of Winter...

Winter's my favourite part of the British year, for many reasons. There's the uncharacteristically brave wildlife...

 

And there’s the perfect, haze-free, visibility that makes distant mountains seem close enough to jump to…

Then there are atmospheric/cosmic phenomena, from the northern lights to meteor showers, that take on proportions unimaginable in summer. 

There’s the added joy of crunching crampons into untouched snow (there are only wildcat footprints in the first pic, centre)…

...and the seclusion & bleakness that can make even short journeys into adventures: here are two evenings, at opposite ends of Assynt...

…and three dawns, from Lochan Fada, Beinn Dearg & Beinn Eighe…

Although kayaking plays only a supporting role in winter, some of my favourite sea journeys have been on northerly Nov/Dec days that barely got going before they were done...

...with the remnants of migration passing...

...and sea creatures as incautious as those on the frozen land. Here's a Great Northern Diver in winter plumage & an otter showing the inquisitiveness that winter brings:

Mountain/coast escapes are also about making time for evocative reading, and winter has a glorious literature. I've been hoarding books for the season, from prose such as Adam Gopnik’s Winter to poetry like Gillian Clarke’s Ice, Pippa Little’s Overwintering & Peter Riley’s The Glacial Staircase. Past favourites (e.g. Will Stone's Glaciation & Mark Goodwin's Steps) will get another outdoors read, as (inevitably) will W.S. Graham's Malcolm Mooney's Land, Norman MacCaig's Poems for Angus & Iain Crichton Smith's Deer on the High Hills, despite the latter's warning that

Sometimes in a savage winter they'll come down
and beg like fallen nobles for their bread.
They'd rather live in poverty than be dead.

Nevertheless there's something dangerous
in a deer's head. He might suddenly open your belly
with his bitter antlers to the barren sky.

(if anyone has any suggestions for winter mountain/sea reading, please do add a comment or, even better, tweet to @david_gange)

But all this pleasure has its costs. Winter is hard work, whether for those who have to face the biting wind for weeks on end...

...or those making brief forays into the season's hardships. Winter demands extra fitness & careful - practiced - decision-making. A long night in snow saps energy. Covering distances requires walking by torchlight, often on ice. Making sure you’re warm & safe means carrying lots of weight. That spells trouble for me, because the eleven weeks from late Sep to early Dec are the busiest part of my working year: I teach university students every weekday & spend weekends reading their writing & preparing classes. That makes these some of my favourite months  - getting down to work with new students, and seeing the summer’s teaching plans come to fruition, is always glorious - but it’s also the one season when I’ve usually time for neither research nor leisure. I therefore reach December as a couch - or perhaps desk - potato.

This year will be different: by snatching days & nights outdoors, I’m determined to prepare myself for Scottish winter. This means stepping up my usual ambitions. For 3 years I’ve tried to spend a night outside every month; this autumn I’m aiming for a mountain night each week. Since I can’t avoid work at weekends, I need to get up early on Saturdays, work till midday, then drive 2-3 hrs to Snowdonia for a wander. If I break camp soon after dawn, I can be back at the desk by mid-afternoon on Sunday, ready to prepare Monday’s classes. In fact, I’ve sometimes used time in the mountains to reread books I’ve set students: here’s Tim Blanning’s The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture fitting the colour scheme of late-afternoon gloom on Aran Fawddwy:

This isn’t just about being less sedentary, but also honing my outdoor practices so I'll sleep comfortably in the Scottish winter & won’t find myself experimenting with gear in hostile conditions. There are certain things I particularly want to practice, such as night-walking (how thick would fog have to be for my headtorch to be useless? And then, in a few weeks time, how easy is it to identify ice by headtorch?). 

But the thing it'd be most beneficial to perfect is sleep. I now spend most mountain nights just in a sleeping bag (my favourite bit of gear I own: a waterproof Mammut Shield). But until this summer, if weather’s been mixed I’d always carried a bivi or tent as back-up. I want to have the confidence to dispense with this. Abandoning the tent/bivi bag has several advantages: less weight to carry, vision always open to the sky, and (most mundane, but actually most significant) none of the rustling gore-tex that's kept me awake on many windblown outdoor nights. I want these autumnal trips to teach me to modify my sleeping-bag use for winter weather. Would I be comfortable using my summer sleeping bag as a liner? (It’s a super-light affair that weighs a fraction of some of the books I carry). If I take a thermarest neoair xlite mat, will I succeed in staying on it, or repeatedly roll onto cold/wet ground?

So, for the first three weekends of term I’ve packed my rucksack with poetry, prose, bread, cheese & chocolate & tested myself & my gear on Snowdonia peaks. First, I wandered up through the rowan & blackthorn of Afon yr Hengwm (filled with wrens & redwings)…

…and learned, on Aran Fawddwy, that sleeping on a rock, without a mat, does lead to sore hips & ribs. It was a beautiful night despite an early-autumn haze that made photography challenging. My feet were wonderfully cosy in my new Montane mountain slippers...

The following weekend, in wintrier conditions, I headed onto the Carnedd Plateau, to sleep in a comfy spot, but in thick, cold fog. Mountain views through gaps in cloud were wonderful, whether from the Ogwen Valley…

..or from the ridge I stopped on, to read Alexandra Harris' excellent Weatherland as the sun went down...

…but this night was when I resolved to use a second sleeping bag.

Then, this last weekend – with eastern Snowdonia veiled in fog, and cold winds blowing multilayered cloud across the western peaks - I headed for a night of light & shade on Cnicht:

As I approached the peak, increasingly dark cloud blew in from the E, occasionally split by shafts of sunlight: here's the ridge I'd just walked up...

This is a place full of winter memories. Last time I slept nearby was in the days I used a tent. My first night began perfectly...

But conditions turned viscious overnight: reduced visibility, brutal wind (which ripped the tent) & heavy snow made this one of my most challenging trips. So I moved lower for the next night, still in blizzard conditions...

...camped amidst abandoned mine buildings...

...and spending more time exploring tunnels than peaks:

The winter before that (2008) it was here (on a Boxing Day jaunt down a different mine) that Llinos broke her two front teeth when falling onto a protruding lump of slate. Now, I could see that mine (on the left) from where I slept:

The beautiful conditions on the peak today were ideal for testing the new regime of two sleeping bags with mat. After falling asleep reading Rebecca Solnit, as the last red disappeared from the sky…

…even a cold, damp, breezy night couldn’t interfere with a warm deep sleep. At about 6am I was woken by squawking & found myself - surreally - in the midst of a flock of fieldfare. For a while I watched without moving but once I began to reach towards the carefully-packed camera, they took to the air, half a dozen at a time. Inside a cloud, it was only when I began to descend that the dramas of the morning sky began to echo those of the previous night:

Just two weeks to go until I’ll be back in Torridon for a few days, finishing my next book proposal from Tilda’s House. Is a bit of snow too much to hope for? (like on the third-to-last time I was round that way?)