Unplugged #4: An early winter season missed, off the map, and adventure with purpose

Negative space is a handy concept in many things, even in adventure. More isn't always better...

November and December can be a tricky time of year here in Scotland, with short daylight hours and the likelihood of some pretty horrible weather. But for people who like heading up into the mountains there's a silver lining: the chance of spellbinding winter conditions. The fact that such conditions are fickle only adds to the allure.

Last year I managed to get in several excellent winter trips before New Year. This year I have not managed a single one. Despite some pretty excellent early season conditions – better, by all accounts, than last year. The problem is that the good conditions only seemed to appear at inconvenient times for me (how thoughtless of the mountain gods!)

Right now, turbothaw is washing away those excellent conditions, and bad weather looks set to continue into the Christmas season. My last window for heading into the big mountains before the Christmas break has now been and gone (it was last weekend). Why didn't I take advantage of that window? I couldn't quite justify taking Friday away from my desk, and I really need a three-day slot in order to make the most of a trip like this. Public transport is slow, in our household only my wife Hannah drives, and although Hannah and I drive to the hills together for day trips quite often, she is not yet a winter mountaineer; my winter trips are solo.

I did manage to head up West Lomond on Saturday while Hannah was working in Falkland, and I enjoyed this walk. But I could see the snow-covered Southern Cairngorms in the distance and wished I was over there instead.

I'm feeling a bit grumpy about this right now, because winters are unsteady these days, and who knows what conditions will be like in the New Year? Who knows how long Scottish winter mountaineering will even be a thing for? We all know that climate change is going to radically change it sooner or later.

However, every time I catch myself feeling grumpy about this, I try to remember that the negative space surrounding adventure can be as valuable as adventure itself. If not more so. Let me explain.

For most of my life I've lived way down south in the flatlands of England. I have missed countless early seasons. I even missed the 2013/14 season altogether, something I moaned about on this very blog at the time. Reading that blog post now, more than a decade later, it makes me smile that I considered myself an 'old hand' back then. I was still in my twenties, and it shows. But, except for one word, this still rings more or less true:

I find that this altered perspective fuels my writing, too. It’s my curse that I am never able to effectively write about mountains while I live amongst them: I need time and distance to see them in their proper proportions.

Would I call this a curse? Ten years older and hopefully wiser, I'd call it a blessing. Being able to head into the mountains all the time feels great when I'm doing it, but I'm rarely able to comprehend the meaning of these experiences until I've had time to reflect on them. The experience, for me, is like the latent image in a swirl of chemicals on an undeveloped negative. Time, thought, reflection, writing and photography are how I develop that latent image into meaning.

A year ago in 'The Second Chance', I used another metaphor: alpenglow.

Over years, this distance forged perspective in me, and I believe that I've been able to write effectively about mountains since leaving Glen Coe precisely because I no longer have them on my doorstep. It isn't as simple as distance making the heart grow fonder. It's like the alpenglow of a distant sunset lighting up the crags for a moment before dusk – illumination, in other words.

How can alpenglow ever be a curse? It's the very definition of a blessing; a benediction of light, bringing fleeting clarity to something that was dark a moment before and will soon be dark again. Unrepeatable beauty. In other words, spending every spare moment in the mountains actually harms my ability to gain meaning from these experiences.

In The Farthest Shore, I wrote:

As I neared the summit of Sgurr nan Coireachan, hidden in the cloud one moment and revealed the next, I looked down and beheld the fractal whorls of sastrugi in the snow at my feet carved by the wind. Fine powder blasted across the ridge, binding and blinding me for a moment; when I looked up, the patterns in the snow had changed again, their previous formations gone forever. A time might come, I realised then, when a person could no longer stand near a Scottish summit and marvel at the fleeting beauty of sastrugi in a wind that decorated every stone with feathers of rime ice.

It's never about quantity for me. The meaning of Scottish winter in my own life only becomes apparent when presented within negative space. Time away from these wonders – the yearning, the fear of losing them – is an integral part of that experience.

So, yes, I'll keep making the effort to carve out time for the mountains... and next year I'm putting plans in place to keep Fridays as a buffer zone for this purpose. But when I find myself getting grumpy and succumbing to #scotwinterFOMO I'll keep having a word with myself. There's more to life than chasing the stoke. Sometimes it's nice to miss things too.

Recently published

Beat the blues: 5 winter motivation tips for hikers – I think this was first published in TGO about a year ago, but it's popped up on the website. Just a wee listicle, but it does contain some useful tips (and I'm not always great at following them myself).

The Maira Valley – Not written by me, but over at Sidetracked we've just published this piece by Lena Stoffel about a very special place in the Italian Alps. The Maira Valley was one of the highlights of my big 2022 Alpine traverse – I remember superb polenta in Chiappera! Check out Lena's incredible analogue images in this piece, too. More and more Sidetracked contributors are sending in film scans, and it's great to see.

What I've been reading

Books

Off the Map by Alastair Bonnett, a fascinating dive into placefulness and placelessness. Standout quotes so far:

When the world has been fully codified and collated, when ambivalences and ambiguities have been so sponged away that we know exactly and objectively where everything is and what it is called, a sense of loss arises.

In a fully discovered world exploration does not stop; it just has to be reinvented.

Although we live with the expectation that the world is fully visible and exhaustively known, we also want and need places that allow our thoughts to roam unimpeded.

Online stuff

My theory: stories impact every business – From my colleague Simon Freeman at Like the Wind magazine: 'The thread that remains unchanged is that people respond to stories. The medium might change. But the impact of a tale carries on.' I had a very interesting conversation with Simon this week about the enduring power of analogue media when it comes to in-depth storytelling.

Artificial Creativity – This thoughtful essay on the role of AI in creativity is worth a read, and made me immediately think of this post by Oliver Reichenstein, which contains a piercing idea I've often pondered since reading it: 'In resisting the emptiness of the generated response, I uncover what I previously could not articulate.' The very existence of AI can help us to recraft our own humanity.

Brocken Dreams – Connecting in with the above in a roundabout way, Ronald Turnbull writes on Brocken spectres and all that jazz. In a very real sense, these miraculous optical phenomena only exist because we are human beings who feel deep emotions when faced with the wonders of nature. Or, as Ronald puts it, 'Do the beauties of the Universe lose it when you explain the science-y stuff? Or does the physics make it all even wonderfuller?' It's the old Enlightenment vs. Romanticism debate – a debate that is ripe for reframing as the 2020s lumber on.

The fear and wonder of the Alps – Ross and family have been out and about in the Alps, their new home mountain range. 'Other days, when the sky lies blackened and bruised above, I look south to see the belly of the cloud engulfed in a white flame. On these days, I imagine the Alps burning the feet of the sky in an attempt to free themselves of its clutches.'

The Digital Natives Will Revolt—and That's Good for Everybody – Analogue counterculture is coming. Count upon it, because younger generations like to rebel against their elders. 'So, in 2025, I believe the next step will be for Gen Z to embrace the simplicity of techless human exchange—events without the mediation of the ever-corrupting screen. It’s the shock of the new, a novelty as elemental as film in its infancy. It’s scary, sure—unpredictable—a real change in the digital life they/we are so dominated by. But it’s human and dimensional and full of stuff we can’t get online.'

Adventure + Purpose – Alastair Humphreys has launched a new email newsletter about finding purpose in adventure. From the introductory post you receive after signing up: 'What we can do so that every person on social media who was awestruck and delighted by the wildness of the Northern Lights last night can be connected to nature and all its wonders much more often, and therefore become engaged to ensure we don't screw it up?'

In other news

This will be my last newsletter of the year, although I will publish the odd standalone piece during the Christmas break (including my annual year in review blog post). Have a good Christmas, and see you on the other side.

That's all, folks

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