Knowing the Mountain

The last time you were with me, what do you remember? Do you remember the shape of me? The tiny yet endless intricacies that make up my skin, my bones. What about the marks left behind by those who were here before you? Some temporary, some permanent. You’re frustrated that I rarely let you see my glory and beauty all at once, and sometimes not at all. Some days you talk about how inspiring I am. Other days, I frighten you.

You leave your impressions along my many spines and ridges. You swim in my lochs; you sleep in my corries and forests. You gasp and wonder at the rest of the world from my summits. But you miss the shades of the sky above you, the shape of the trees, the rocks. You don’t notice the smell of the soil, the feel of the rain as it drips down your face, how the fog caresses your skin. The sound of the wind calling you. The birds trilling and shrieking. Your feet pass by fungi peppering rotting wood, the mosses, and the lichens.

You don’t see me as I see myself.

The last time you were with me, the mountain, do you feel like you were really here?

There’s a buzz of nervous excitement running through our group. It’s raining, but we don’t notice. We have three team leaders: Hannah, Ruth, and Jen. Two filmmakers, Emily and Michelle, are working on a documentary about the micro-expedition. There’s Alice, a musician who will be making an album inspired by this place, featuring sounds from our environment. Then there’s Nicola, an avid hillwalker from Wales; Aisha, a coastal path lover from Pembrokeshire; and me, a South Londoner acting as photographer.

The nine of us are setting off on a journey into the Cairngorms inspired by pioneering 20th-century mountaineer Nan Shepherd, endeavouring to go against the grain and develop a deeper relationship with the mountains: connecting, not conquering; slowing down, not racing; and exploring the micro, not just the macro.

It’s day one and we’re walking through Rothiemurchus on the northwestern side of the Cairngorms National Park. We’ve met up with two Cairngorms rangers, Polly and Toni, who are with us as we head towards Braeriach, one of the highest mountains in the area. Hannah, leader and main navigator, recounts our plan to sleep at the foot of this mountain tonight, next to Loch Einich (‘Loch of the Boggy Area’). Tomorrow we’ll start our journey upwards to the plateau and the Wells of Dee, the source of the River Dee, treading the very same paths that Nan herself walked.

The rest of the day is full of laughter and the light banter of new bonds forming – most of us only met each other for the first time last night. We walk a flat trail through boggy marshes surrounded by hills, growing ever larger around us, and a threatening grey sky. We ford tiny puddles and wide expanses of knee-deep water. Everyone deals with the crossings differently; some nervous and needing a hand, some lightly hopping across, and some deciding to remove their shoes and walk through the ice-cold depths.

A few hours later, we arrive at Loch Einich and the dark afternoon gives way to an evening that’s the same velvety blue-black as the deepest parts of the ocean. We have a quick dinner together followed by a chat with biscuits, talking about our experience in the mountains and what led us here. ‘Sometimes I go up and when I come down, I feel like I was never really there at all,’ Jen says. Nicola shares: ‘I wanted to be out here but struggled because I didn’t think I had a place here… but it’s in the mountains I feel most alive.’ We’re all nodding. Each of us has come to find something new, something better for us.

I came across the call-out five months ago. Three women were recruiting for a journey into the Cairngorms to follow in the footsteps of 20th-century writer and mountaineer Nan Shepherd. I was intrigued. It seemed like fate because I’d read Nan’s book, The Living Mountain, and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I loved to hike, I loved the mountains, but I felt like I didn’t belong. ‘You haven’t done it properly if you don’t make it to the summit,’ a stranger had told me on a multi-day hike. I’m not interested in personal bests, in getting from A to B in the least time possible, and for a long time I simply thought I wasn’t cut out for adventure.

Nan, on the other hand, had no interest in getting to the top of anything. She sincerely loathed any kind of attempt to conquer nature. Her words resonated with me deeply. There’s no denying how special it is when you make it to a summit or achieve something amazing, but Nan believed we find something deeper by opening ourselves up to the whole mountain. Not only that, she was doing all this in the mid-1900s when it was almost blasphemous for women to be out alone in general, let alone having adventures.

Today, we’d perhaps call her approach ‘slow mountaineering’. She used her whole body when she was adventuring through the Cairngorms, indulging herself fully by using all of her senses to know the mountain as intimately as we might a lover, and through her words we gain a sense of the flavour of the mountain – the sounds, smells, feel, taste, and movement.

This was something I wanted for myself. It felt right. It felt more me. So I sent an email and, five months later, I was on the train to Scotland.

***

Day two begins dark, grey, and vibrates with anticipation.

By mid-afternoon, the anticipation is gone. The elements have been at war with us almost the entire way up and we’re already battered. The weather has been unexpectedly bad – we’re caught in the tail-end of a storm. What’s that saying? We make plans, and the mountain laughs. I’m not doing so well. A combination of a dodgy stomach and lack of energy has caused me to struggle since we stopped for lunch. I’m so lost in my own discomfort that I have no mental space to really engage with anything, notice anything.

Hours after we started, we reach the plateau after a slog through torrential rain and high winds and there’s only one way I can describe what I see: nothingness.

I no longer have a sense of place or time, and it is freeing. I usually feel the anxious hum of screen addiction lying low, never not there. Here, with my mind full of fog, rain, corrie, loch, ache, pain, breathe in, breathe out, left foot, right foot, moving, moving… I forget life outside of us even exists.

We don’t stay on the plateau as long as we had originally planned. We are too cold, too wet, and we must now navigate to an alternative place to set up camp. The terrain on the way down is as tough as the way up, but we begin to regain some life as we leave the freezing exposed flatland behind. And then: ‘Look!’ Hannah whisper-shouts to us, pointing ahead as we all come to an abrupt stop. There’s a small white shape moving quickly along the ground some distance ahead. We think it’s a ptarmigan, a bird that calls the Arctic-like Cairngorms home. We’re as still as the mountain for a moment, and all I can hear is the deep howl of the wind.

Some hours later – which include a hailstorm and the downpour to end all downpours – we have set up camp in Coire an Lochain, a hollow concealing a small loch.

‘I think my character is fully built now,’ Aisha quips as we bed down in the worsening storm. This night is as unforgiving as the day, and – for the second night in a row – our tent thrashes crazily with the gales and torrent of rain outside. Despite being tired to the bones and then some, I’m too cold to find rest. I spend the night in a weird insomnia, unable to stop hearing the thunderous sounds outside.

***

Day three is pure molten gold.

‘Oh!’ I exclaim in total wonder and surprise. I’m standing at the edge of the corrie where seconds ago I’d blearily been searching for a spot to wee. ‘You guys! You have to see this,’ I call to everyone behind me.

Today, the mountain lets us see her whole. In the nourishing sunshine, yellow and delicious like butter, we’re blessed with every little detail of the western Cairngorms, which stretch out before us while above us the sky shines the bright blue of sapphires. Looking out to these unmeasurable elements, I feel a pull from inside me, my bones, my blood – from the very atoms that make up me.

We begin to make our way down. My clothes dry as I walk and my body warms. I feel alive again. We talk, and talk, and talk. Most of us have only known each other for four days, but it feels as if we’ve experienced a lifetime in them. We talk without shame or embarrassment – intimately, collecting inside jokes, navigating our new mountain-forged bonds. We share our vulnerable moments of struggle from the day before, and we collectively wonder about Nan and how hardy she must have been. She experienced this tumultuous place in so much depth – sleeping out here alone in all kinds of weather, and doing it all without any of the technical equipment we have.

Nan’s words are in my head. ‘…Face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become!’ It’s something I’ve been wanting to try this whole time, so during one break I speak Nan’s words and as one, we bend at the waist and look out at the earth through the window formed by our legs.

Today, we’re given space and time to notice. The mountain invites us to really see her. Dew-dropped cobwebs glowing in the sunlight. The golden curve of the rolling mountain in front of us. We see a herd of deer running in a neat line; and, because we’ve hardly seen any wildlife so far, this feels like glimpsing the end of a rainbow. We forage and snack on cowberries and bilberries as we head towards Rothiemurchus Forest where we’ll spend our last night.

***

Our last morning begins fiery red. Sleepy eyes and snuffly noses take in the quiet dawn together, soaking in the red-orange-pink sky before us. The silhouettes of the pine trees sit still now. We take a quick, brisk wild dip in the loch we slept beside. A few hours later, we pack into cars and head back to the youth hostel where we left our things. It’s here we say goodbye and go our separate ways.

In The Living Mountain, Nan talks about visiting the mountain ‘as one visits a friend’. After my time on the mountain, I’m not sure this is right. For me, the mountain is a teacher, maybe even a parent.

The mountain bestows the most affirming and nourishing experiences on us, and equally we endure the most punishing experiences that stay with us forever. Sometimes the mountain embraces you. Sometimes she eats you alive.

I feel the same rawness I experienced as a child disciplined by a teacher. I am also encouraged and inspired. Along with my new mountain-sisters, we have walked where Nan herself walked and played in the same way she did. I’m stronger – mentally, spiritually, and physically – for the experience, more confident, more knowledgeable about the land around me. I am more connected to my own body as well as the body of the mountain.

And just for a moment, I have seen the mountain the way she sees herself.