About mountains

I manage to spend about four weeks a year in the mountains, mainly in the Alps, two in the winter and spring for skiing and two in the summer for walking and climbing. Even without any physical activity to engage in, I just enjoy being in the mountains. I love the spectacular scenery, the peace and quiet, the clean air, the contact with nature. Just being there makes me feel good.
The mountains were for me a natural progression from the moors which were close to home in Ilkley and which I used to roam as a child and teenager. Real mountains were just bigger and better. When I was 18 and working at a school in the South West of France we went down to the Pyrenees on a couple of occasions and I started to discover the potential of mountains in a way I had not experienced merely riding up them in a funicular or cable-car as I had done once on a school trip to Switzerland.
What really hooked me was my first Alpine summit reached just on foot, the modest Morgon (2324m) above Lake Serre-Ponçon. It was 1981. I had been invited to the tiny romanesque Abbey of Boscodon by a friend, Didier Bonin, who I’d been working with on a youth camp that summer, to help out barrowing for an archeological dig. One morning before starting our chores we climbed the local mountain, Morgon, in time for sunrise. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Another day we got up early to help some shepherds move a large flock of sheep from the pastures on one side of a mountain over a pass to another. Aimé the local in his 60’s who had invited us to come along was going up and down much faster than us. At 11 o’clock he produced a bottle of red wine some bread and tough-looking raw ham to refresh us. As we could see maggots moving in the ham we settled for just the wine.

A few years later Jon Day and I began to organize our youth camps not far from there in the Queyras region in the Southern French Alps. Over the years we did seven camps round there, mainly at Brunissard, so I got to know the area quite well. The Queyras Alps are not very high, only occasionally reaching 3000m but they are blessed with many days of sunshine in a year. They are great for hiking that is technically not difficult but can be challenging and rewarding. I used to lead groups of teenagers over quite long routes sometimes camping wild at altitude by streams.
Jon Day and I also used to spend Christmas and New Year with other friends not far from here in two fairly primitive chalets near the Oisans, Clot Raffin (with the most fantastic view of la Meije) and les Rochas. One had no electricity, the other no running water, both were twenty minutes uphill from where we parked. Ostensibly there to do some skiing, we in fact spent most of our time just being in the mountains fending for ourselves. If there wasn’t much snow for skiing, walking was an equally welcome alternative. I remember going to fetch milk in the village of le Chazelet from the Mathonnet family who kept the key. to the chalet When you walked in the cows were immediately to the left of the entrance corridor, and to the right was the kitchen in which everything seemed to take place and where the grandfather had his bed. These are scenes from a previous age, sadly disappearing.


I also know the Queyras from ski de rando in springtime. I have described ski touring (as it can be called in English) in “About skiing”. Ski touring is a form of winter moutaineering. You climb the mountain without any infrastructure and you ski back down it without any “pistes”. In this way you are in full contact with the real mountain. The mountains actually are quite inhospitable in winter (and spring at altitude), but they can be stunningly beautiful covered in snow with crisp visibility and remarkable silence. It’s in the winter that you really appreciate the comfort of a hut. (Huts or refuges are a chapter in themselves, which I won’t write this time)..
For years I went in groups with guides organized by UCPA a French outdoor sports association. I have always had a great group experience when doing ski de rando. People of different ages, from different backgrounds and of different abilities, but sharing the same motivation and patience seem to gel effortlessly. That coming together through the shared activity, the relative safety in numbers when confronted with the vastness of nature, the grinning and bearing it together, the elation of achieving goals together, while at the same time feeling in a way humbled by the whole scale of it, all instill a very special and deeply human cameraderie - a quite non-intellectual intensity of being.
I also once did a basic mountaineering skills course with UCPA at Chamonix involving “schools” as the French put it of rock, snow and ice, learning about ropes, crampons and ice-axes. At the end of the week it was all then put into practice on l’Aiguille du Tour (3540m), which we climbed in crampons over the glacier and up the scrambly rock. It was in cloud. Fortunately for me I’d already been up it a year or two before on a blue sky day, having approached it on skis - a better option in my opinion, not least for getting back down to the valley. It was only much later that I returned to really high mountains in the summer with Alex who is rather partial to a glacier.


In the meantime, summer mountains were more a family holiday affair. Clara was keen that I should discover the Alps in Italy and suggested we go to the area where a friend of hers had once been a school-teacher: the Comelico around Santo Stefano di Cadore. So in 1999 we ended up staying in a hamlet called Gera in the house of Ave Sacco and have been going regularly ever since for a week or so in July. The Comelico is a holiday destination for Italian families from the North East (our case too) a couple of hours or so drive away from the often unbearble summer heat down on the plain. It has a nice, laid-back, uncommercial and very Italian feel to it. Gera itself is small and off the main road a few minutes up the valley from Santo Stefano. It is situated on a flat area at the confluence of two mountain rivers, the Padola and Digon, which are the noisiest things in this peaceful environment. It’s only at 1000m so it’s not at all harsh and pleasantly warm in the evenings. I’ve really come to love it as a spot and instantly feel relaxed on arriving.
Gera is well placed for everything from a gentle family stroll through picture postcard scenery to quite difficult high altitude hikes and ferrata routes, not to mention some good moutain-biking. On the west side of the valley rise the spectacular Sexten Dolomites and their forbidding tortuous rocky peaks, while on the east side towards the Austrian border there are gentler grassy summits that are easier to walk up .
It was great this summer after so many years to show the area to Jon Day and his family . Even better was then to go off for a day with Jon like old times, but also with Thomas, to do Punta Fiscalina (2675m) from Val Fiscalino (1450m) near the Tre Cime. After the summit we just made it to Locatelli hut as a colossal storm broke. We watched the lightning play and listened to the thunder roll for over an hour from the shelter of the terrace as we ate lunch and sat huddled close to keep warm. Once the storm had passed the clarity of the views, the beauty of the light, the freshness of the air, the relief it was over and we could start walking again, all combined into an almost ecstatic feeling, an intense joy at being alive and being where we were.
One of my all time favourite Alpine hikes is the tour of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. You cheat by driving up to over 2000m and then enjoy an unending spectacle during a moderate 4 hour walk.
As in many parts of the Italian Alps along the old border with Austria there are routes to explore round here made by soldiers in the Great War. Some of these are the original examples of the via ferrata where cables, metal rods and even ladders were placed to help soldiers over difficult passages to strategic positions and look-outs. The first ferrata route I ever did was with Thomas, as a side trip to the Tre Cime tour. It begins with a long staircase inside a tunnel (like something out of Lord of the Rings) emerging through a window in the rock onto a ledge from which departs a cable to clip onto for protection as you climb the rock towards the summit of Monte Paterno (2744m). We came back to do the summit on a second trip with proper equipment, the first time we continued a long a series of natural and man-made ledges below it back to the main walking route.




It was in 2000 flying back from the Nice summit that Alex noticed I was studying the Alps out of the window, looking for landmarks in the Queyras, and we got into conversation about mountains. Shortly after he asked me to go indoor climbing with him and so started a regular shared activity which led to our annual three to four day outings in the summer in the Alps, often on the border between Italy and Austria. We have climbed some pretty high summits but also we’ve done a fair bit of what Alex calls “pointless moutaineering” where we don’t actually get to the top of anything significant, as the initial project turns out to be too ambitious or the weather not good enough.
The spirit of these trips is epitomized by last year’s one to the Stubai Alps. As we were coming from Gera we walked up the Italian side; most people come up the shorter route from the Austrian side using a cable car. So starting at 1450m we had set ourselves a pointlessly long ascent which we split with a first night in a hut. By lunch on the second day we reached the Becherhütte at 3190m perched on top of a rocky outcrop surrounded by glaciers. It is nicknamed the Wolkenschloss or “cloud castle” and promptly lived up to its name as we disappeared into fog; it even started to hail. The best plan seemed to be to go to sleep which we did quite blissfully in our cozy little wooden bedroom. About 4pm we went back outside and saw that the nearby Wilder Freiger (3418m) was emerging from the cloud. It looked promising. Quickly we got ready and set off up the rocky ridge. As the sky steadily cleared we were rewarded with stunning views of the glaciers below and the peaks all around. It was a beautiful summit. No sooner had we got back to the hut after two hours out than the weather closed in again. The evening was enlivened by a group of young locals from the Südtirol who sang with great gusto and some humour.
The next day it was still cloudy so we decided to abandon our objective of Zuckerhüterl, which would have meant traversing a glacier in the fog, and set off back down. As we were in no particular hurry we made many pauses. It was fantastic to appreciate the gradually changing scenery as we descended over 1700m. Rocks snow and ice with vistas of glaciers and morraine lakes gradually started to give way to grass and roaring torrents. Later, as we dropped in stages into seemingly new valleys, there appeared the first cows and trees. Finally we were treated to a superb series of waterfalls in a wooded valley. At every hut and watering hole we met the jolly young crew from the previous evening who seemed to have adopted a similar leisurely pace to ourselves.
Alex and I share the same motivations and enjoy each other’s company. These little expeditions have really deepened our friendship.




This summer we went to Slovenia to do Triglav (2864m) the highest peak in the Julian Alps.
It’s only in the last few years that I have turned my attention to the Julians, which are a short drive from Monfalcone. The Julians lack the range of the high Alps and in parcticular the torrents as they are very dry. But being off the beaten track they have a satisfyingly wild appeal and boast some lovely corners such as the lakes at Fusini and the Grego hut. Since the valleys are low the ascents can be quite long.
The first summit I climbed there was Montasio (2750m). It took three attempts; The first time I was by myself and took the wrong route: having gone round a fairly exposed ledge I found myself at the bottom of a gulley requiring scrambling, and the top of which was in cloud. That seemed like a bad idea on my own and unequipped so I turned back, admiring a few ibex on the way back down. The second time I went with Thomas (still only 12 then) in late August but it had snowed in the night and as we got higher the snow got thicker and the terrain potentially slippier and our hands colder (we hadn’t taken gloves). So we gave up. The third time was late October but there was no snow and we finally made the summit. I mention this because it is important when climbing a mountain to know when to turn back if the conditions are not right, rather than to expose yourself and your companions to unnecessary risks. Mountains don’t go away, they will still be there on better days.
Thomas enjoys a challenging mountain climb and at sixteen he is now better than I am at many things in the moutains. This summer we climbed Canin (2568m) from the North using the ferrata Julia. There was a time that this would have required a crampon approach up a bit of glacier. Now the glacier has all but disappeared leaving a small snowfield to climb to the foot of the ferrata which has had to be extended by about 10m. below where it once started.
(Rapidly receeding glaciers in the Alps are a sure sign of global warming. My most striking experience of this was in the summer of 2005 on the Adamello glacier, one of the southernmost in the Alps. You could almost see and certainly hear the ice melting. Somewhere beneath our feet could be heard the worrying sound of gushing streams of melt-water.)
The Julians were first really explored and extolled by Julius Kugy, a German speaker living in Trieste at the end of the 19th century. In his book “From the life of a moutaineer” he wrote that you only really get to know a mountain when you sleep on it. That was really the case for me with the Julians when Alex and I spent three nights up there in three rather different huts two years ago. Watching the evening draw in, seeing the starry night, waking up to a new day at altitude really adds a new dimension. Another of Kugy’s great sayings is that the best part of any mountain walk are the pauses. It’s not that we dislike the physical effort of walking; it’s just that some times as we’ve been concentrating so much on where we put our feet, that we only start to take in where we are when we take a well earned break and admire with some satisfaction where we’ve managed to arrive by our own efforts.. The best break of course is the one on the summit.


It would be disingenuous to deny that to be truly satisfying a mountain outing takes in a summit. There’s an unbeatable feeling that comes from actually getting to the top of a mountain and being able to survey the 360° panorama. Near Brunissard I used to love climbing Cöte Belle (2844m) and just sitting there for as long as I could. Frequently there are imperative reasons to start on down, but if the conditions are good, it’s the right place for lunch. Getting to the top of a mountain in the cloud, is not such a high to me, as I realized with Alex on top of Triglav this summer. Ok, I’ve been there and I can put it on my list, but it won’t loom large in my memory.
Yes, I admit I do have a list of summits I have climbed and here are the highest five:
Dôme de neige des Ecrins (4015m) by ski, with Thomas
Gross Venediger (3674m) in the summer, with Alex
Similaun (3597m) by ski
Aiguille du Tour (3540m) by ski and also in the summer
Hochfeiler (3510m) in the summer, with Alex
Ticking off summits might give kudos, but it is not really what moutaineering is about. I have had plenty of great outings where no summit was reached but the experience was special because of the conditions, the views, the overcoming of adversity, the companionship.

There are of course many mountains outside the Alps and I try to seek them out when I can in other countries and on other continents. I once did a fabulous two week trek in the Himalayas in Nepal to the Annapurna Sanctuary and would love to go back there. The Himalayas actually make the Alps look small, but their real charm is in observing and meeting the people who live up there. In North America I have enjoyed hiking in the wonderful Sierra Nevada in Yosemite National Park. I have walked up Table Mountain (1060) in South Africa starting in the centre of Cape Town, and taking the cable car back down. That’s the way to do it ! I find coming down more tiring than going up these days as years of mountaineering, skiing and cycling have started to wear out my knees.
But in many ways the Alps beat all the other mountains. As they are younger and not yet worn down, their jaggedness makes them more spectacular. There is a huge variety in landscape and human settlement through the long arc of the Alps. I never tire of the Alps which is why I try to spend as much time as I can manage there.

Wherever they are mountains fascinate me and free me, whether it’s sitting quietly contemplating them from the valley or making the effort to scale them.