Just Another Mountain Read online

  Written in loving memory of my mother and grandparents, and for my two sons, Marcus and Leon

  Contents

  Foreword by Sir Chris Bonington

  Prologue

  Phase One: Following Footsteps

  ONE:

  The Hills Are Calling

  Meall a’ Bhuachaille – The Shepherd’s Hill, April 2008

  TWO:

  Coincidence or Fate

  Back to Bhuachaille, May 2008/Bynack More – The Big Cap, May 2008

  THREE:

  Doomed Champagne and Mountain Magic

  Beinn Eighe – The File Hill, June 2008

  FOUR:

  Cheating Myself

  Ben Wyvis – The Hill of Terror, July 2008

  FIVE:

  Becoming a Woman with a Plan

  Beinn Alligin – The Jewelled Hill, August 2008

  SIX:

  Divergent Paths

  Meall Fuar-mhonaidh – The Cold Rounded Hill, February 2010

  Phase Two: Troubled Tracks

  SEVEN:

  Keep Them Close

  Nakara, Tanzania, June 2010

  EIGHT:

  Where the Wind Blows

  Naro Moru Gate to Simba Camp, 2,650 metre/Simba Camp to Kikelewa, 3,678 metres, June 2010

  NINE:

  Where There’s a Will There’s a Way

  Kikelewa to Mawenzi Tarn, 4,295 metres/Mawenzi to Kibo, 4,700 metres, June 2010

  TEN:

  Hell on Earth

  Kibo to Uhuru Peak, 5,895 metres, June 2010

  ELEVEN:

  Dead Loss

  Horombo Huts, 3,720 metres, June 2010

  TWELVE:

  Peaks and Troughs

  The North Glen Shiel Ridge, June 2011

  THIRTEEN:

  A Hatch and Despatch

  Bidein a’ Choire Sheasgaich and Lurg Mhor, October 2011

  FOURTEEN:

  Slippery Slopes

  Near Fersit, January 2012

  Phase Three: Steps in the Sunshine

  FIFTEEN:

  One Thing Leads to Something Else

  SIXTEEN:

  Protecting Next of Kin

  SEVENTEEN:

  History Repeats Itself

  Fisherfield, July 2013

  EIGHTEEN:

  Dark Horse

  The Inaccessible Pinnacle, September 2013

  NINETEEN:

  Walking on Air

  Aonach Mor and Aonach Beag – the Big Ridge and the Little Ridge, April 2014

  TWENTY:

  Early Illness

  Kathmandu, Lukla and on to Monjo, 2–4 May 2014

  TWENTY-ONE:

  Onwards and Upwards

  To Namche, Thyangboche, Dingboche, 5–7 May 2014

  TWENTY-TWO:

  Deliverance

  Chukhung, 9–10 May 2014

  EPILOGUE:

  Homeward Bound

  Ben Nevis – The Venomous Mountain, July 2015

  Postscript

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Foreword

  My own love of mountains started in the summer of 1951, at the age of sixteen, when I climbed a hill in Blackrock, a suburb of Dublin. It was certainly no mountain but it sparked a passion that led me to devote my life to climbing all over the world. I have faced the most forbidding mountains on earth and have always relished the challenge, even climbing the Old Man of Hoy, the tallest sea stack in the British Isles, to mark my eightieth birthday.

  It is an experience that remains exhilarating no matter where we are in the world, or what stage of life we are in: the physical challenges of endurance; the thrill of the risks taken; the elation of reaching the summit; the joy of immersion in the rugged scenery, all of your senses in tune with the landscape you’re walking through.

  The mountains are also a place to seek solace. There have been many times in my life when I have found peace in such solitary and unforgiving surrounds. In times of trouble and grief, walking has seen me through.

  It is for these reasons that I have so enjoyed reading of Sarah Jane Douglas’s experiences, which have inspired her to find strength in the face of life’s challenges. There is something universal at the heart of this book – something we can all understand, not just those of us who have grown to love the mountains. That immersing ourselves in wild landscapes can heal, motivate and inspire us is something that is beyond doubt.

  Sarah’s story shows that this is open to everyone; anyone can decide to go out and just start walking. To pit oneself against a summit – even a small one, in a suburb of Dublin – can be the beginning of a lifetime of adventure and discovery. I hope that this book will inspire others to do the same.

  Sir Chris Bonington

  2019

  Prologue

  Loads of people get horrible diagnoses all the time, so really it isn’t anything special or extraordinary that I found myself with membership to the cancer club. To be honest I’d been expecting it, but the news still came as a swift kick to the balls. The hardest thing to get my head around was the fact that twenty years earlier I’d held my own mum’s hand when breast cancer stole her life from mine. It had taken me most of my adulthood to recover from her loss.

  I was twenty-four when my mum died, and it felt far too young. I wasn’t ready for it – in my mind I was still a child, her child, and I needed her. But she was gone for ever. Lost without her, I spent years lurching from one distraction to the next: drinking too much, dabbling with drugs, loveless sex with too many men, motherhood. I got into trouble with the police. I wound up in a volatile marriage. Without her support, and with the subsequent deaths of my grandparents, it seemed there was no one who cared. I had my two sons, but sometimes it felt like a struggle just to keep breathing: I was at odds with the world and everything in it.

  But I’d made a promise to Mum that I wouldn’t give up, and the hope within, which at times seemed to have died, somehow kept flickering.

  I remembered – and turned to – a world I’d once loved, a world right on my doorstep: mountains.

  I’d grown up in the Scottish Highlands, so mountains had always been a big part of my life. Mum and I would often walk together, and many of my favourite memories of her are from those times. After her death, I continued to go on my own for long walks on the beach and along the river – it helped me to feel closer to her. But it was when my life started to spiral out of control that I really started to discover a passion for the outdoors. At first I started setting out for places wilder and further afield, but I soon realised I needed more of an outlet, time to escape, and eventually I sought out high tops. Proximity to nature was soothing; I felt at peace and perfectly secure in the rugged environment. The more I ventured out, the more I wanted to do and the higher I wanted to go.

  I didn’t know it at first, but hillwalking would be the key to turning things around. As soon as I find myself on top of a mountain I am filled with the joy of life, even more so if the summit has been hard won through tricky terrain or challenging weather. Climbing all of Scotland’s highest peaks, pitting myself against nature, forced me to face up to my troubles. It reconnected me to my mum and, in getting to the marrow of my experiences, it helped me move past grief. And eventually it would help me deal with cancer. Faced with my diagnosis, there was only one thing I could do, the thing I’d come to rely on so much these last few years. I had to put one foot in front of the other and just keep walking.

  PHASE ONE

  FOLLOWING FOOTSTEPS

  ‘We are no other than a moving row

  Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go

  Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held

  In Midnight by the Master of the Show’

  Th
e Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LXVIII

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Hills Are Calling

  Meall a’ Bhuachaille — The Shepherd’s Hill, April 2008

  Snowflakes floated down from a heavy alabaster sky; beyond their dot-to-dot spaces Scots pines blurred in my vision. Delicate frozen patterns. I tried to catch flakes on my tongue, each unique in design and without permanency. A temporary structure, like us humans, I thought.

  I’d only been walking for ten minutes but my cheeks already felt flushed in the cold air. ‘I can’t believe there’s so much snow!’ I said out loud, looking down at my feet. They felt warm inside the brown Brashers: they had been Mum’s boots but they belonged to me now. Mum had always said it wasn’t good to wear other people’s shoes, something about feet moulding into the insoles and the leather. If they’d been anybody else’s I wouldn’t be wearing them, but they were hers. I guess I wanted to be close to her in whatever way I could.

  Mum had felt that walking was like a cure for duress. ‘Let’s get out and clear our heads,’ she’d say. But equally, when life was good it had given her pleasure. Over the years we shared many walks, along cliffs and coasts, far from anyone else, but she had also liked to go out alone.

  In her youth, during the 1960s, she had loved to walk barefoot whenever possible, often strolling the long, curving arm of the shingle beach near our home. Mum had been quite the hippy then, with long, dark hair that was always in a centre parting, and wearing the minimum of make-up. She made her own clothes: floaty ankle-length skirts, dresses with flower prints and blue-denim bell-bottoms teamed with vest tops. She was super-cool.

  Mum hitchhiked a lot in those days too – she once went all the way from the Highlands to Roslin, near Edinburgh, 276 kilometres away. Turning up at a friend’s house, she was promptly given a pair of socks and shoes. I wished I could have known her then.

  Out front of my childhood home, just over the road and beyond the football pitch, was a gorse-covered raised beach – a small but steep hill known as Cromal Mount. It was Mum who first led me to its top. Each time we scaled ‘Crumble Hill’, as I called it, was an adventure; I would dart off ahead to find a suitable hiding place to jump out on Mum, brushing up through prickly gorse on threads of sandy trail, and both of us would arrive at the top panting from the effort. Just me and her and the world at our feet; I loved that feeling of being separated from everything below. We were up high and free like the birds in the sky.

  In later years, when we’d moved to nearby Nairn, Mum and I would share walks along the town’s sandy white beaches, or pass by farmers’ freshly cut fields next to the river path. We would be as startled by the heron as it was by us; we’d disturbed its search for rodents and off it would fly. More often we saw the large wader standing in its one-legged pose on a rock in the river, its grey, black and white feathered body half hidden by the overhanging branches and leaves of trees. The heron was always on its own, never in a pair. And the moment it saw us – even if we were some distance away – with one beat of its slender, long wings it would take flight, so gracefully. It seemed a reclusive creature, wanting to be left alone; there had been times when Mum was like that. Out along the riverbank, grey wagtails and dippers would fly between rocks poking out of the water, and chaffinches fluttered from tree to tree. My mum loved to identify what birds she could as we went, but mostly I enjoyed our walks because they lent us quiet uninterrupted time together. I was always looking to find a way in, to be closer to her. I often wished she could talk to me in the same way I could talk to her. Sometimes it felt that while I told her everything, she was holding back. But in spite of that, to me she was more than just a mum. She was my very best friend, the person I knew I could always turn to.

  Now, just as she had done, I would go out walking whatever my mood – and those moods were sinking ever lower. While I was still grieving for my mother, my marriage of two years had already started to run into difficulties, causing all the other smaller problems in life to take on horrendous proportions. As my troubles piled up, I found myself being pulled in the direction of the outdoors more and more. But it no longer seemed enough – I needed something more challenging than the low-level walking I’d been used to. I needed to take off to the mountains.

  I’d always thought of hillwalking and climbing as predominantly male activities. It seemed to me that men tended to resort to strenuous physical exercise like this to work out their problems, while it was seen as more natural for women to turn to a close relative or friend for support. But I had neither. Instead, I found myself yearning to be out in the elements and wilderness. Taking refuge in solitude. Gaining perspective. So here I was in April 2008, on a steep, snowy but accessible mountain near Aviemore in the Cairngorms – running to the hills, and away from the troubles of my life.

  As I contoured underneath Meall a’ Bhuachaille and carried on along the valley over snow-covered boardwalks, I stopped to admire Lochan Uaine. The surface water of the small lake had frozen into iridescent, concentric rings ranging from white to deep hues of pewter where the ice was thinnest – it was like a scene from a wintry fairy tale. Thin shoots growing out thickly from the severed trunk of a tree made dark criss-cross outlines, as though the tree was finding its way back to the spring of its life.

  I was an accident, born in 1972 in the Highland capital, Inverness. For the first ten years of my life home was with my mum and grandparents in the small former fishing village of Ardersier on the Moray Firth, eleven miles east of the city. We lived in a grand Edwardian red-sandstone house called Inchrye which was surrounded by mountains, and it was almost like living in a bowl: all around us we had panoramic hill views, with the great bulk of Ben Wyvis rising up above coastal cliffs on the Black Isle, the low-lying Clava Hills obscuring the great Cairngorm mountain range behind, the Great Glen headed by Meall Fuar-mhonaidh, a prominent dome-shaped hill and – the one I was most intrigued by – the wintry views across the water to the cluster of shapely Strathfarrar peaks in Ross-shire.

  Grandad had been furious with Mum for falling pregnant, and if Gran had got her way I wouldn’t have been born at all. But my mum kept her baby, and when I arrived into the world, kicking and screaming, my grandparents couldn’t have been more supportive or loving towards her, and me. My natural father was already married to someone else, and so my mother brought me up with the help of her parents. We all lived in the family home along with my mother’s teenage brother and sister, David and Penny. As both my grandad and my mum went out to work, my early memories are of Gran looking after me. She was warm and caring, and naturally I developed a strong attachment to her.

  It was in 1974 that the lure of adventure stirred an inherent inquisitive impulse in me at the tender age of two. Inchrye was split over three levels, and when Gran was tied up with household chores I loved snooping around its many rooms, hiding among the fur coats in her wardrobe, sneaking up on my young aunty and getting up to unintentional mischief. But, left largely to my own devices, I would often play in the attic, where metal cases and trunks, covered in layers of dust, piqued my curiosity. Inside were all manner of curios: musty-smelling old clothes, random jigsaw pieces, Dinky cars and strange, rubbery chess moulds. Sixteen-year-old Uncle David didn’t know I was there, but I heard him clattering up the spiral staircase. I spied on him as he rearranged some furniture and clambered over it. I heard the window open and watched as his body, legs and feet disappeared. I was fascinated. It wasn’t long before he then reappeared through the small opening, closed the window by its long metal latch, jumped down over the furniture and clattered back down the stairs. Uncle David had been out on the roof. I didn’t know what it had all been about, but he had inspired me to give it a go myself a few days later.

  Poor Gran. She was outside, hanging washing on the line, when the coal-man drew up in his lorry and parked in the lane alongside the tall, pebbled garden wall. As he stood on the back of his lorry, almost ready to heave the sack of coal onto his back, he spotted me.

&
nbsp; ‘There’s a bairn on the roof!’

  ‘What’s that you’re saying?’

  ‘There’s a bairn on the roof!’ repeated the coal-man, pointing.

  ‘Yes, it’s a lovely day.’

  ‘No! There’s a bairn on the roof!’ said the coal-man, stabbing his finger skywards in my direction.

  My gran, born in Liverpool, hadn’t understood either the Scottish slang or the broad accent, but she soon caught his drift when she followed his pointed digit. Dropping everything, she rushed in to get my grandad. He grabbed extending ladders from the shed, propped them against the wall of the kitchen extension, climbed onto its roof and then onto the pitched roof of the building. Sitting on warm slates in the winter sunshine I was quite content, captivated by the distant snow-topped mountains beyond the waters of the inner Moray Firth. Quiet as a mouse and unperturbed – but definitely stuck – I waited to be carried down, pinned against my grandad’s chest by the firm clutch of his strong arm. And all I could think was how much I wanted to go to those snowy mountains.

  I was certainly finding out all about snowy mountains now. Blizzards and whiteout conditions engulfed me as I shouldered my way towards the top of Meall a’ Bhuachaille. All the footprints I’d been following were quickly obliterated by fresh snow, but I wasn’t concerned; there was only one way to go and that was up. Holy fuck it’s wild, but it’s great! I thought, as I grinned and gave out a howl – there wasn’t a soul in sight, and even if there had been it was impossible to be heard over the bellowing wind.