The Mountains are Calling E-Book

Jonny Muir

• Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2018Jonny Muir was a nine-year-old boy when the silhouette of a runner in the glow of sunset on the Malvern Hills caught his eye. A fascination for running in high places was born – a fascination that would direct him to Scotland. Running and racing, Jonny became the mountainside silhouette that first inspired him.His exploits inevitably led to Scotland's supreme test of hill running: Ramsay's Round, a daunting 60-mile circuit of twenty-four mountains, climbing the equivalent height of Mount Everest and culminating on Ben Nevis, to be completed within twenty-four hours.

Leseprobe

By the same author

Heights of Madness

The UK’s County Tops

Isles at the Edge of the Sea

First published in Great Britain by

Sandstone Press Ltd

Dochcarty Road

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9UG

Scotland

www.sandstonepress.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © Jonny Muir 2018

Copyright Maps © Ross Christie 2018

Editor: Robert Davidson

The moral right of Jonny Muir to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

ISBN: 978-1-912240-10-4

ISBNe: 978-1-912240-11-1

Cover and plate sections design by Raspberry Creative Type, Edinburgh

Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore

For Fi, Arielle and Aphra

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Foreword by Alex Staniforth

1. Running Through Time

2. Epiphany

3. The Monarch of the Glen

4. Imagination

5. A Long-distance Love Affair

6. An English Distraction

7. The Road to Swanston

8. Running Forever

9. The Invincibles

10. Mountain Masochism

11. Anatomy of the Ramsayist

12. Pizza, Prosecco and Ice Cream

13. A Way of Death

14. A Way of Life

15. Finding My Way

16. Ambushed by Chno Dearg

17. Answering the Call

18. Climb Every Mountain

19. The Greatest

20. Glory

21. Beautiful Madness

22. Admiring the View

Acknowledgements & Bibliography

List of Illustrations

1. Charlie Ramsay, Pete Fettes (a support runner) and Bobby Shields in the minutes before leaving Glen Nevis youth hostel to run the first Ramsay’s Round (Alex Gillespie)

2. Alec Keith racing on Ben Nevis (Alec Keith Collection)

3. Adrian Belton, flanked by Helene Diamantides, Andrew Addis and Mark Rigby, second, third and fourth from the left, at Loch Treig following his 28-Munro run (Charlie Ramsay)

4. Snow-capped Ben Wyvis rises imperiously above runners at Cioch Mhòr (Phil Hindell)

5. Purple heather in full bloom at Knockfarrel (Phil Hindell)

6. Graham Bee and Tim Gomersall racing at Meall a’Bhuachaille (Phil Hindell)

7. Finlay Wild descending Ben Nevis (Dave Haggett)

8. Murray Strain leads runners up Salisbury Crags in the Hunters Bog Trot (Matthew Curry)

9. A line of runners climb into a snowstorm at the Carnethy 5 (Matthew Curry)

10. Runners descending in whiteout conditions at the Carnethy 5 (Matthew Curry)

11. Teams setting out on the OMM in the Tweedsmuir Hills (OMM)

12. Jez Bragg and his team pose outside the Glen Nevis youth hostel after his Ramsay’s Round (Gemma Bragg)Back row (left to right): Chris Busby, Cameron Burt, Olly Stephenson, Anna Hayes, Gemma Bragg Front row: Murdo McEwan, Pete Duggan, Jez Bragg, Jon Gay, Graham Nash

13. Alan Smith at the Pentland Skyline (Harry Gilmore)

14. Bill Gauld on Caerketton Hill (Allan Gebbie)

15. Stewart Whitlie descending Capelaw Hill in the Pentland Skyline (Harry Gilmore)

16. Jasmin Paris and Konrad Rawlik climbing Beinn na Lap on Jasmin’s Ramsay’s Round (Jim Mann)

17. Alex Brett on Foinaven (Ross Bannerman)

18. A ‘line of recumbent bodies’ rest on Craig Varr (Jonny Muir)

19. Davy Duncan finishes another Craig Varr race (Jonny Muir)

20. Racers search for the best line at Devil’s Beeftub (Allan Gebbie)

21. A runner in the Isle of Jura Fell Race (Iain Gilmore)

22. The only way is up at Stùc a’ Chroin (Matthew Curry)

23. Runners approach Sgùrr Choinnich Mòr on a Ramsay’s Round reconnaissance (Anthony Hemmings)

24. Tom Phillips crossing the Abhainn Rath in his winter Ramsay’s Round (John Carr)

25. John Hammond climbing Easter Craiglockhart Hill in the Seven Hills of Edinburgh (Jonny Muir)

26. Stephen Pyke on the South Cluanie ridge on day 26 of his 39-day Munro round (Chris Upson)

27. Rob Woodall on the summit of Stac an Armin, with Stac Lee in the background (Pete Ellis)

28. Angela Mudge in battle dress at the Carnethy 5 (Anne Nimmo)

29. The author and David Gallie, and Stob Bàn, reflected in the lochan of Coire Rath (Mark Hartree)

30. The author and David Gallie on the ascent of Stob Choire Claurigh on Ramsay’s Round (Mark Hartree)

31. Runners in the Skyline Scotland series (Oriol Batista)

LIST OF MAPS

Hill Races of Scotland

Edinburgh and Pentlands

Isle of Skye

Ramsay’s Round

Foreword

My first calling to Scotland was fairly unextraordinary. An impressionable child from Cheshire, I craned my neck at mountains like nothing I had seen before. From Loch Lomond to Fort William I pointed at these rocky shoulders with wide-eyed enthusiasm; asking whether they could be Ben Nevis, the mountain that had captured my imagination. Not much later, the nature of Scotland became etched in my memory after being almost snowed in as we crossed Rannoch Moor. This was not even in midwinter, but in March. A decade later, Scotland would call me back as the training camp for my Himalayan expeditions. As the old expression goes: ‘Everest is great training for the Scottish winter!’

Anyone reading this book will have their own Everest – their ultimate goal – in life. Mine would be climbing the mountain itself, which I have attempted twice.

I can relate to the occasion in Glen Coe, when Jonny Muir lost his romantic view of running mountains. Similarly, I lost my calling to climb. Although I grew to hate the expression, it’s true that the ‘mountain will always be there’. For a while, Everest would remain an unanswered voicemail.

This realisation prompted me to seek a challenge closer to home, and it was while planning to link the highest points of all the United Kingdom counties, by cycling, running, walking and kayaking, that I discovered this amazing athlete and writer. My 5,000 mile journey, titled Climb The UK, was completed in July 2017, and he was the only person to have made an attempt before me.

In a world with so little uncharted and records set so high, it’s thrilling to devise unique ideas that don’t involve a chicken costume, and somehow reassuring to discover it has already been done by such a remarkable individual. Without a precedent it would be too easy to dismiss the idea as absurd and probably unachievable. Standing, exhausted, on Moel Famau, my final county top, I felt I had done well, but proof came when I was invited by my exemplar to write the foreword for the exceptional piece of writing that follows: The Mountains are Calling.

On four expeditions to the Himalayas, I have experienced altitude sickness, sleepless nights under the steam of breath, and –20 temperatures that left icicles in the stubble of my older colleagues, but it is still not an environment as unpredictable, character–building and enchanting as that of Scotland, whose bipolar tendencies can hit before the clouds roll off the hills. In contrast, the monsoon jetstream that knocks each Everest season on the head is forecast almost to the day. Predictable or otherwise, and be it Everest or Scotland’s revered Chno Dearg, these mountains crush dreams without apology and can strike fear into the most robust of hearts.

On Ben More Assynt, to catch up on time, I was obliged to hop over boulders and run towards Conival, sliding down scree before reaching Inchnadamph. Like Jonny I received disapproving looks from hillwalkers who champion the slower approach, but I had sixty miles still to cycle and would have to be in the saddle before they reached the summit. At other times, running became a means of self–preservation; to generate heat, or simply to get me off the mountain before wind and rain could finish me off. I discovered how, in the space of a week, Scotland could add the danger of heatstroke to that of hypothermia; happily running through snow on Ben Macdui, sunburning in the Arrochar Alps.

Shivering in a phonebox at Braemore, south of Ullapool, I took comfort in knowing that someone special had been here before me, when a ninety–mile day turned into an infuriating battle against headwinds, and the glens and blotted moorland, the chilly swathes of pine forest, had merged into one.

Arduous days of Himalayan climbing can start early in alpenglow, piercing blue skies. You can travel slowly, and finish early when the climbing day is short, with Sherpa hospitality and a mug of hot tea waiting. There was no hot tea in Glen Affric when I was benighted and deprived of a warm bed at the youth hostel, instead making an impromptu wild camp, scooping up dry protein powder with a toothbrush for dinner.

The tipping point came on Càrn Eighe the next day, when isolation drove me to converse with the sheep, and rain penetrated every seam of my clothing. False summits and lost paths all got too much and, in a weak moment, I crumbled into childish sobbing. The weight of the mountain seemed to sit on my shoulders, laughing in a booming cackle of wind. There was no option but to get back up and push on, though I had run out of ways to say: ‘that was the worst day of my life’.

Whereas, a midge assault gave me good reason to run up Merrick with a fierce breeze tickling the hairs on my neck, and the sunset across Galloway cracking the sky into purple fire. Racing the daylight towards Durness, the otherworldly shadows of Assynt fell like dominoes behind me; the salty silence on the summit of Goatfell broken by the blast of ferry horns below; and the turquoise coasts of the Orkney Isles. In these moments the answer to the question ‘why’ was easy: being in places I had never known existed; free to do my own thing and step above the clouds. To think hill running was banned in Scotland in 1850! Can you imagine the lynch mob of X–Talons and hip belts if that happened today?

With the same passion and dedication he applies to his own training, Jonny Muir has gone the extra mile to gather a staggering wealth of insight. Reading about Finlay Wild in the Cuillin particularly fed my awe of the gnarly runners that Scotland has bred, whilst also sending shivers to my feet. It reminded me of a multi–day hike of the Skye Trail two years earlier in penetrating coastal rain. Sopping wet and squelching into Portree, we were apprehended by burly Highland workmen: ‘Aye, lads, did you forget to take yer tablets this morning?’

These experiences raise our thresholds and make us more resilient to everyday life. It’s hardly surprising that hill runners are so hard to break. We have a lot to thank these athletes for: superhuman feats that reset the bar and inspire apprentice runners. It’s our white–haired heroes that dare us to dream that, yes, we really could join their exclusive company. We are hungry to learn their art.

When voices of reason tell us to turn back, we are reminded by what others have achieved; we groan, dig deep and push on because we want to be like them. Why are we drawn back, time and time again, hungry gluttons for punishment? This ‘type–2’ enjoyment that we find in the mountains is difficult to describe or explain. Outdoor writers have tried, and many can say what runners do, but these pages tell of the journey of understanding. In The Mountains are Calling, Jonny sums up these feelings to a tee. It’s only by losing ourselves in these high places that we truly find ourselves.

After watching the sunset from 7,000 metres altitude, humbled by the grandeur of the Himalayas, I know nothing rubs away a longing for the familiar mountains on our doorstep that we know inside out, and love. The benefits of being outside for our physical and mental wellbeing cannot be overestimated.

At first, I wondered where I might fit into such a fascinating collection of perspectives; between the hill running wonders, the international champions, and satisfied Sunday plodders. From their banana bunches to Prosecco and playground hill reps, there seems to be no common factors beyond modesty and the simple desire to be out in the hills. This is what unifies us.

Runners are often asked: ‘have you ever run a marathon?’ as mountaineers are somehow expected to have climbed Everest, but only a runner would ask: ‘Have you completed Ramsay’s Round?’ Only a runner would understand. Maybe we don’t need to be understood. Hopefully this community will remain mysterious for decades to come.

Reading Jonny Muir’s book makes it apparent that animalistic capability and talent alone do not command the meaning we take from the mountains. Maybe it’s not the battle of seconds and minutes, but the euphoria of owning a summit by the power of feet, grit and glycogen; the realisation of ‘I’ve done it’ is something we all relate to. Nothing else comes close. In its simplest form, running equates to survival: from prehistoric man chasing his dinner to city workers swapping briefcases for bothies and conference calls for checkpoints.

As recounted in the chapter Ambushed by Chno Dearg, some have risked the worst to run at their best, and drawn the short straw. Their legends still run today, if only through these pages and the hills they reigned over, but the biggest risk is in not doing what makes us feel so alive. Those who stay inside, warm and dry, can only be pitied – that’s as alive as they’re going to feel all day. We cannot run forever, though someone will probably try. The grasp of ‘real life’ pulls us back to terra firma, but soon enough the mountains will call us again. This is our way of life.

From the county tops to the Munros and the roof of the world, we all have our calling – and I’m certain these pages will inspire you to go outside and answer yours. Until then, I wish you as Jonny wished me – ‘go well’.

Alex Staniforth

Endurance Adventurer, Motivational Speaker,Ambassador and Fundraiser

Nepal 2017

1

Running Through Time

Hearts bursting against ribs, two specks on a green-brown canvas reach for the sky. Plunging through the heather of a Scottish mountainside, the runners climb relentlessly, the gap between them and an exhausted chasing group widening with every ragged breath, nothing mattering but this and now.

Another runner, moving with the nonchalance of a mountain stag, is in pursuit, having started later than the rest.

‘Let me run, let me run,’ the kilted Highlander had begged.

‘Go if you wish,’ he was told, ‘but you are too late.’

The crowd watched him clear the plain, then begin the ascent, clambering on hands and toes, grasping tresses of heather. He reached the end of the line of runners, now diminished to tiny, hunched figures, and began to pass them. He lifted his eyes to the mountaintop, lingering on the two distant bodies ahead, overcome by desire – desire to be the first to touch the sky.

‘Look how he ascends!’ exclaimed one of the onlookers. ‘He will beat them all.’

The leaders, McGregor siblings, are approaching the brow of the final steep pull. Sensing a following presence, they look back in astonishment. The runner is their younger brother. McGregor leads McGregor from McGregor. ‘Halves, brothers, and I’ll stop,’ the fledgling urges.

‘No, never,’ came the response.

An omniscient commentator seems to see them with the eye of a curious buzzard wheeling above: ‘They felt their heads dizzy, their eyes dim and painful – the breath rolled quick through their nostrils like fire – their hearts beat louder than the sound of their footsteps – every muscle and sinew was tightened to breaking – the foam in their mouths seemed dried into sand – their bleeding lips, when closed, glued themselves together – the sweat pearled on their skin in cold drops – and their feet rose and fell mechanically more than otherwise.’

The finish line is in sight, the suffering nearly over. The brothers have never felt so alive, never felt so close to death. The junior McGregor, sensing he is strongest, surges ahead of his seniors. Fierce instinct rules their minds, overriding family obligation. Desperately, the oldest claws at his sibling, clutches his kilt, seizes hold and refuses to let go. With the middle brother gaining and the other clinging to a garment that is not his own, the impulse of the youngest emerges: he loosens the belt of his kilt and resigns it to his brother. ‘I have yielded everything to you,’ he declares, ‘and I will that also.’

Dennisbell McGregor of Ballochbuie – the original mountain runner – runs on to victory.

It is the first Saturday in September. As 500 runners are gathering at the foot of Ben Nevis for the annual race up and down Britain’s highest mountain, some seventy-five are back where a sport began: Braemar, the Aberdeenshire village that intrudes on the vast arctic wilderness of the Cairngorms.

We congregate on the turf of the games field, awaiting the crack of a gun. When it comes, as if a single entity, we launch ourselves forward. An elbow drives into my chest; my knees knock together. We are soon striding freely, parading around a track, then along the home straight, past the Royal Pavilion, and up and out of the stadium. At the end of a car park, we strike across a booby-trapped swathe of rough heather, disguising loose rocks and foot-sized holes.

I notice the silence first. There is sound – the rising of my own breath and the gurgle of feet on wet grass – but no noise. The suffering comes next: a trickle, then a seep, then a torrent. I do not fight it. It is why we are here. I am climbing steeply, through a clutch of birch, then on the open heath of the mountain. I think of the McGregor siblings – their heads faint, their sinews contracting, their gaping mouths dry. A millennium lies between us and them. Everything has changed; nothing has changed. We are running up a hill, a column of bodies compelled to go higher, feeling the way three brothers once felt. We are the same, for we long to touch the sky.

Running up hills has always been hard. With hill racing part of a re-established Highland Gathering in Braemar in 1832, McGregor’s peak of Creag Choinnich, a hill that marks the western conclusion of the Lochnagar massif, was the stage. When Queen Victoria first came to the games in 1848, she followed the progress of runners through Prince Albert’s telescope, while steadying herself on the shoulder of a general. She was delighted when one of the Balmoral ghillies, Charles Duncan – an ‘active, good-looking young man’ – won the race in 1850. ‘Eighteen or nineteen started,’ Victoria observed, ‘and it looked very pretty to see them run off in their different coloured kilts.’

Spectating from the grounds of Braemar Castle, she watched them scramble through woods of larch and pine, then climb over heather and across boulders to the summit cairn, with Duncan ‘far before the others the whole way’. His victory came at a price. ‘He, like many others,’ Victoria wrote, ‘spit blood after running the race up that steep hill in this short space of time, and he has never been so strong since.’ Victoria put two and two together – in this case, upwards motion and its perceived impact on a man’s health – and decided, however ‘pretty’ the sport might be, mountain running should be abolished. ‘The running up hill has in consequence been discontinued,’ she noted matter-of-factly in her diary.

It took another female monarch – and a gap of 129 years – to overturn the prohibition. The permission of Elizabeth II, Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, was gained to reintroduce a games race in 1979, with a midweek trial event justifying its potential as a visual spectacle that even Victoria with her spyglass would have appreciated. By the 1970s, the Gathering had switched to a permanent base to the south of Braemar, and rising above the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park was 859-metre Morrone. The new race had a new mountain, the mountain on which – to the naked eye of those below – I appear as a slow-moving red and yellow dot.

While the ethos of the Gathering – a spirit of toughness and tenacity – continues to be inspired by that first hill race, it is not easy to live up to such expectations. Right now, therefore, it is best to be glimpsed from afar. I stoop, hands on thighs, walking when the gradient steepens, willing my legs to run when it eases, even if the effort feels like I am pushing back an ocean. The games – now adrift beneath our feet – continue without us: the heats for the 220 yards race, the throwing of the 22-pound hammer, the local competition for the sword dance. Banchory Pipe Band provides the musical background that comes to us in whispers on the wind. The Cairngorms are spread on a painting of brown and green and grey, a realm of forest and mountain. I am clinging to a wave in a storm, with Morrone at the centre of a titanic sea. The sky, overweight with cloud, is hardened by a blue-black hue, as if rain could fall at any moment. This land is so familiar, yet it seems as if I am seeing mountains for the first time. As Nan Shepherd wrote of the Cairngorms in The Living Mountain: ‘However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.’

Time pauses again. The race over, the McGregors would have buried their faces in moist heather, panting furiously, light-headed from breathless exhilaration. Looking up, they would have seen what we saw, what Victoria observed on Ben Macdui, the crown of the Cairngorm plateau: a land possessed by a ‘sublime and solemn effect, so wild, so solitary’.

We emerge suddenly into the consciousness of the crowd. A flare erupts, heralding the arrival of the first runner at the highest point. To those who glance up, I am still a red and yellow smear, only smaller, and doggedly sweating through heather. In time, I get there: a place where the gradient is momentarily gentler and the ground rockier. A line of cairn cones straddling the 730-metre contour marks our zenith. We go no further, for if we do, continuing perhaps to the summit of Morrone, we vanish from the view of the games field. The McGregors stopped at the top of a hill in 1064; in Europe, they still stop here; in Scotland today, we come up – and then we go down.

If there is something primeval about mountain running, then to run downhill is simply to answer instinct. For early man, running equated to survival – running to escape, running to eat, running to live and not die. We are destined to run – and perhaps it is running downhill that allies us most closely to our distant ancestors. After the suffocation of moving uphill, my legs – now descending more hurriedly than feels sensible – are stung into action. I dash across low heather, as if taking a direct bearing to Creag Choinnich, some two miles away, before swerving left to rejoin the path. I leave it almost immediately, following others who veer left again, as if we are a clutch of frightened deer, this time down a steep, slippery bank, ending a long way below at a fence. I lose height rapidly, first in a succession of leaps, lunges and slides, then in a seemingly uncontrollable set of bounds, arms flailing above my head, embroiled in euphoric terror. It is the closest a human can come to flight, and, as it was for the McGregors, life in these moments becomes only this. Runners are scattered below: a flash of yellow emerges from behind a knoll; a blue-green streak scales the deer fence like a ladder; a dash of white juxtaposes the green and brown of the moor. We are free; we go where we want. The summit is the only stipulation. How we get there – and back – is our concern.

As I cross the fence, I am disorientated for an instant. Everyone has gone. I skirt a hummock and climb a mound, pausing momentarily to glance about – then, like the skipping flicker of a lone doe, I glimpse a blue burst behind the bushes. I instinctively follow, finding the path and a familiar outcrop of rock. I retrace my steps, tiptoes on the way up, gallops now: back among the birches, across the field of tripwire, through the car park, down an angled slope of grass into the arena, accelerating towards the empty Royal Pavilion and the finish line. Elizabeth is not there; she would arrive in a blaze of pomp and pipes soon after. It was enough that she lets us be – and we all have our reasons for being.

McGregor was racing for the medieval equivalent of stardom. In the wild and uncertain world of eleventh century Scotland, his race was the decree of King Malcolm III to recruit the fastest runners to operate a post system across the clan lands. When one runner was exhausted, he would pass the literal baton, the fiery cross or crann-tara, on to the next. Made of two pieces of wood fashioned into a cross, one end alight, the other daubed in blood, the crann-tara would rouse the clans in a call that could not be ignored. ‘Woe to the wretch who fails to rear / At this dread sign the ready spear!’ wrote Sir Walter Scott centuries later. Every relay team needs its fabled last leg runner, its Usain Bolt – that was McGregor, a monarch among messengers.

Kris Jones, a Dundee-based Great Britain orienteer, was McGregor’s twenty-first century equivalent. He would collect a purse of £300 for winning the race. Only the champion of the caber toss would take home more.

What about me? I finished a penniless nineteenth, seven minutes back from Jones. Why am I here?

The question implies a choice, like I could be somewhere else. As the environmental philosopher John Muir wrote in a letter to his sister in 1873: ‘The mountains are calling and I must go.’

2

Epiphany

Frankie Miller is off. ‘I don’t know if you can see . . .’ The setting is a crammed commuter train of indifferent Londoners. A caption offers exposition: ‘London Underground, 8.15am.’ The camera pauses on a tight-lipped, pensive hero, a suited man in his late-twenties. The train stutters into a station and freed passengers flood towards the exit. The protagonist emerges from this hellish cellar to its ground floor: street level in Central London. A cyclist ominously stretches a mask over his face; a moment later, an argument erupts between a lorry driver and a cabbie. We follow the man to his place of work: through the revolving door of a glass building and into a lift holding a dozen others. An identity badge hangs from his dark jacket. The camera craves another close-up: a rueful expression, a concealed sigh.

Miller, meanwhile, is getting ready for the chorus. As he cries the immortal words, ‘Let me tell you that I love you, that I think about you all the time,’ a lightning bolt of realisation flares. Suddenly, everything seems so simple.

Epiphany.

He steps out of the lift, tosses his badge to security guards and hurls his briefcase into the jaws of a bin lorry. There is a final sneer from a Londoner, then an instant after, a silhouetted Edinburgh Castle appears. Striding across Princes Street, tie discarded, pausing to buy The Big Issue, our hero has arrived. Next stop: the pub. The man, two mates, three pints of Tennent’s. The utopian image becomes fixed, morphing into a photograph seen through the eyes of a woman travelling on the London Underground. Join me, it intimates.

Tennent’s 1991 advertisement for its lager, complemented by the musical backdrop of Caledonia, celebrates epiphany in its simplest form: I am unhappy with my life; therefore, I am going to change my life.

There is a reason why epiphanies are the preserve of fiction: in reality, they rarely occur.

I had no need of Miller’s romanticism as I climbed Geal-charn, the white peak, in the fading light of a late October evening. I had parked a car with my life packed in it by the rush of the A9 as it crests the Pass of Drumochter, crossed the train lines that link the central belt of Scotland to the Highlands, and passed deeper into a cooling valley. The sun was busy elsewhere, leaving the glen in shadow. A stony track succumbed to moor, and the way rose steadily up an innocuous spur. Rising to a peak of 917 metres above sea level with a starting point from the pass of 400 metres, Geal-charn is as straightforward as mountain-climbing gets. I trailed a jumper from my right hand. Presuming I would be back at the car in two hours, I took nothing else.

I was walking up, but also away – away from dissatisfaction. I had left an uninspiring job as a newspaper reporter in Cambridgeshire, assuming I would find better prospects in London. I sent out a flurry of hopeful emails and letters. Like scaling a mountain, it was not as easy as anticipated: false summit after false summit. After six weeks of rejection and diminishing hope, I temporarily abandoned the capital for the Alps, circumnavigating Europe’s highest mountain on the Tour du Mont Blanc long-distance footpath as the first of the autumn snow swept across the cols. The night I arrived back in London, my girlfriend, Fi, ended our five-year relationship. I did not see the need, therefore, to begin what would also have been a difficult conversation: I had that week received two offers of interview at newspapers. One was in Ilford in East London; the other was in Aberdeen. Hundreds of miles apart, they were scheduled for the same day. I chose the high road – and got the job: a reporter’s post covering the Highlands of Scotland, working from a base in Inverness. I tossed my figurative briefcase into the back of the bin lorry.

That is why I had driven up the A9, parked in a layby on the Pass of Drumochter, and was walking up Geal-charn.

But that was not the epiphany.

I struggled to formulate words on the swathe of mountainside known as Geal-charn. The hill is not even unique in name, with another three mountains of similar height bearing the same moniker. I reached for adjectives, but they did not inspire: lonely, barren, forgettable. It seems cruel to describe a Scottish mountain in such a way. Yet it is possible to find the extraordinary in the ordinary; it is there the extraordinary is more likely to reside. As I passed the snow line on a stony plateau, a bashful sun returned with a dazzling flash. The snow was feeble at first, a scattering of frozen flakes decorating the cake of the plateau. Gradually, as I gained altitude, it was an inch thick, then thicker still, concealing the grey and black beneath. I stopped to look back at my tracks – graffiti in a sea of shimmering white. The road lay beyond, reduced to a voiceless thread. The silence was vast, the stillness startling. A shudder – a simultaneous tremble of trepidation, exultation and relief – began in my shoulders, rolled down my body, swayed through my limbs, touched my toes, mottled my skin with goosebumps. Mountains would make me shudder like this again: when immersed in the frigid waters of the Fairy Pools on Skye, tracing the ferocious outline of the Black Cuillin; when placing virgin footsteps on Moruisg on a flawless winter morning of deep snow; when glimpsing the Paps of Jura from the motionless Minch. And more. So much more.

I was finally on the summit, sitting cross-legged on snow, watching the sun melt over an unending dream of mountains.

That was the epiphany.

Tuesday was club night at Inverness Harriers. I still think of them now, weekly at 7pm, shuffling away from the glaring floodlights of an athletics track, edging along the Caledonian Canal and heading up Craig Dunain, a bobbing procession of head torches in the winter. For that hour or so, they leap into another world. Craig Dunain is a dot in the geography of the Highlands, a 288-metre lump at the end of a rolling ridge that garlands the western bank of Loch Ness. Yet I was captivated by that hill. Tuesday night was a given, but in the 18 months I would spend in Inverness I ran up and down and around Craig Dunain again and again. While those numerous expeditions inevitably blur into indistinguishable confusion, some recollections stand out as sharply as if I had run up Craig Dunain this morning.

There was the time David, Dougie and I set out on a freezing night in January, steaming breath illuminated by the glare of our lights as we passed quietly by the inky water of the canal. We turned up a ramp of gravel that became a muddy path under a canopy of tangled branches, smothering the stars. Once over the A82, the main road to Fort William, it seemed every pine had taken a step forward: we were enfolded in the ominous embrace of the forest. Out there, in the darkness, there was life: a pair of eyes, a rustling, a scuttling. As we climbed higher, a mist so clotted it seemed to bathe us swamped the hillside. I shuddered a Geal-charn shudder.

There was the time a pack of us on a spring evening ventured further south than usual, traversing a flank of Craig Dunain until we could see the brown water of a great loch below.

‘What’s that?’ Gordie asked.

‘Lock Ness,’ I said triumphantly.

‘It’s loch, soft lad,’ David roared, exaggerating the ‘och’.

There was the time I ran alone on a benighted Craig Dunain. I climbed the hill on open grassland, knowing that entering the forest at some point was certain. What was benign by day was terrifying by night. As I hurried along pine avenues, never had I been so conscious of that I most take for granted: my beating heart. I stared into the abyss of the woods. There were no eyes tonight; nothing stirred and nothing sounded. As I looked up, the moon was a smear behind a bank of high cloud. The anticipation for something, anything, to happen was crushing. ‘The stillness,’ as John Muir once noted, was ‘at once awful and sublime’.

I was a hill running Colin Smith, the reform school protagonist of Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: ‘the first and last man on the world, both at once.’ Smith’s words offer the clearest rationalisation of running – any sort of running – I have found: ‘So there I am, standing in the doorway in shimmy and shorts, not even a dry crust in my guts, looking out at frosty flowers on the ground. I suppose you think this is enough to make me cry? Not likely. Just because I feel like the first bloke in the world wouldn’t make me bawl. It makes me feel fifty times better than when I’m cooped up in that dormitory with three hundred others.’

I touched the wire mesh that surrounds the telecommunications masts atop Craig Dunain and fled downhill, out of the forest, paradoxically back to the very thing I – and Smith – sought to escape.

The hill racing season in the Highlands commenced on Craig Dunain in March, with a short dash from canal to summit and back again. Wearing the mustard and maroon of Inverness Harriers for the first time in the hills, the experience extended to an alarmingly painful 37 minutes. ‘Going up, I felt simply awful,’ I wrote in a diary that evening – an evening of hobbling, walking sideways downstairs and intermittent groaning. I was terribly naive. Having raced a half-marathon on the roads of Inverness a fortnight earlier, I considered myself ‘fit’. I had yet to learn that the ‘simply awful’ feeling was entirely normal, and that notions of ‘fit’ and fit-to-run-up-and-down-hills were radically different.

I thank my younger self for keeping journals, as the memories of the races I toiled through in that season of hill running baptism have congealed into a tussock of knotted scar tissue. Knockfarrel, on a course above the spa village of Strathpeffer, with a greater cumulative ascent than Craig Dunain, came next. I was ninth, I had noted, but my legs had been ‘swimming in lactic’. Later that month was Cioch Mhòr, a nine-mile out-and-back race in the foothills of Ben Wyvis over far more committing terrain. ‘Heavy underfoot and tired,’ I recorded after labouring in heather and long grass, climbing through melting bands of snow, and twice wading a river.

Then there was Slioch: a daunting assignment on the Wester Ross Munro, seemingly on the cusp of toppling into Loch Maree at any moment, that made Cioch Mhòr resemble an amble down High Street in Inverness. There were fifty of us, none of whom seemed to do anything resembling a warm-up for a race of 12 miles with an overall ascent of almost 1,200 metres, on a day as hot and sunny as I can ever recall in Scotland. The route skirted the loch and its midges, before runners were catapulted into a wall of heather and loose rock on a towering protuberance known as Sgùrr Dubh. I had thought this might be ‘it’ – the summit of Slioch. It was not, of course. Really, I always knew the truth of the matter, but fervent hoping in hill running, I was learning, served the purpose of self-preservation.

When the weather is unfavourable on Slioch, the race organiser abandons the checkpoint on Sgùrr an Tuill Bhàin, the mountain’s second summit; runners instead swoop immediately downhill to the glen. I could not imagine there ever being mist – or rain, or wind, or snow – such was the delicate exquisiteness of the minutes spent here. As I descended to the lower top, the giants of Torridon, the peaks of Fisherfield and rows of Fannichs, lining up from west to east, were grinning and waving.

‘Head for the gully,’ I was told by a marshal. I could not see a gully. I tumbled down a colossal mountainside riddled with tussocks, hoping to catch a glimpse of human life ahead, or to the right or left, or anywhere to at least give some confirmation that I was approximately in the correct place. I saw no-one, but eventually arrived at a gully – maybe the gully? – where a rough track descended sharply to the glen. I drank the water from a burn with despotic resolve. The remaining four miles of stumbling, dizzying effort, back along the loch, back into the midges, were akin to struggling home after a long, late night of alcohol and pub brawling, ending with a series of drunken-like declarations of love as I passed runners in similarly wretched conditions.

Living in the Highlands, hill running felt like the natural thing to do – but that did not make it an easy thing to do. The road had been the home of my running for a decade. There is safety on asphalt; the next step mimics the last. After the initial shock of racing up a hilI, I soon learnt I could drag my body skyward on the steepest of inclines; I could move over rough and uneven ground with relative adroitness; running downhill with grace and pace, I could not. Fear held me back, slowed me down, convincing me that a twist, a trip, a fall, would come in the next step. Rather than a dread or an I-cannot-do-this terror, the fear was a niggle, an irritation, an ever-present voice in my head whispering ‘no’ to the embrace of gravity. Instinct insisted that rapid downwards movement was not only wrong, it was tantamount to lunacy.

Years later, David Gallie – the runner who chastised my pronunciation on Craig Dunain – could not wait to tell me about what he had witnessed at Ben Nevis. His was a spectator’s perspective, for David had at that point kept his promise to his mother never to race Ben Nevis again. In his last race on the Ben he had no memory of falling on the descent, but for a man with a fear of flying, he vividly recalled the moment he dismissed the potential of being airlifted to hospital. ‘There was no way I was getting in a helicopter,’ he said. ‘I walked down.’ The right side of his body bore the brunt of the fall: eight stitches to the head, missing skin off hip and shoulder. ‘I’ve still got a piece of grit in my shoulder,’ he announced happily, pulling on a sleeve to reveal the shrapnel. ‘I was lucky. The doctor said she had been treating someone earlier who had broken his neck mountain biking.’

Luck: a subject David knew too much about. Iain Gallie, David’s younger brother, sustained a life-changing brain injury in a car accident. ‘I don’t want two sons with head injuries,’ David was instructed by his mother. He did as he was told.

David was waiting at the point where runners cross the tourist track after descending close to 700 vertical metres from the summit to reach a spate of scree above Red Burn. Rob Jebb, a British hill running champion and a four-time winner on the Ben, was predictably leading the race and dashed by the small crowd clustered on the path. David’s eyes followed the line of Jebb’s descent – down a steep grassy bank, angling towards a stream – then looked up the mountain again. ‘Far above, as far as I could see, there was another runner,’ he said. ‘I glanced down to Rob Jebb for a few seconds, then back to the other runner. He was nearly at us. He flew past. He was flying – absolutely flying. I have never seen anyone descend like that. He was moving in a different gear to anyone else in the race, anyone I had ever seen on a hill.’

‘He’ was Finlay Wild. Five minutes adrift of Jebb at the top of the Ben, Wild – moving in a manner that seemed to belong to a mountain animal, not a human – won the race by 13 seconds.

To be Finlay Wild. To have grace and pace, and to be fearless. To be able to fly.

While I was reliant on diaries to piece together memories of racing, the recollections of simply being among mountains are fixed in my consciousness. The inevitable difficulties have been scratched away. The memories have been framed in perpetual perfection.

For years, I used roads to run and mountains to walk. I had only the haziest knowledge of hill or fell running being an offshoot of the more conventional foot-borne exercise. But very soon running and mountains were indivisible; there could not be one without the other. Running is prose. But hill running? This is poetry. Some years later, as I descended to the Nan Bield Pass in the Far Eastern Fells of the Lake District, a walker going up remarked: ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ Encumbered by boots and bag, I wondered the same: How do you do it?

The early, innocent days are the most precious – and such were my wanderings through the Highlands. Late shifts in the newsroom permitted mornings for the hills. I went where the weather seemed best: to the wild reaches of the Monadhliath; to the Cairngorms; to the rough moors of Nairnshire where Inverness-bound planes rumbled overhead; to the Ben Wyvis massif; to the heath above Culloden. Early shifts in the spring and summer afforded similar opportunities at the other end of the day. It was after 10pm when Graham Bee, an Inverness clubmate, and I found ourselves descending the mossy ramp of Toll Creagach. We had climbed its neighbour, Tom a’ Choinich, by a rocky ridge in the gloom of clag, but as we plunged off our second mountain, the mist was gone and the sun was boiling in the western sky, throwing flames across Glen Affric.

Not every mountain day was like that. Venturing west from Inverness to the Fannichs, Graham and I had no desire to vindicate the forecast. High winds and poor visibility was the expectation, while the Met Office had warned of heavy rain. Graham should have known better; at that time, I certainly did not. After slopping along sodden paths for an hour, we began climbing an incline to gain a bealach. We had been deceived by the mist-smothered mountains – we stood on the wrong pass. In a wild wind, we stubbornly pressed on, bent double on summits, committed to finishing what we had started.

As we left the final peak, Graham slipped awkwardly, skidding first, then landing hard on his back. With an apparent effortlessness in his stride, Graham was the runner I wanted to be. He was winning Craig Dunain in a course record when I still had a mile of the five-mile race to run. Seeing him fall was like watching a motor racing driver collide with a wall. There is a moment of shock, of agonised uncertainty, before you see a hand wave from the car. Graham was recumbent long enough for me to catch him up. He tentatively got back on his feet, muttered something about his shoes, and continued downhill with marginally less reckless abandon.

I was drawn to the Fannichs again a month later. Following a hydro-board track that weaves up a glen, I was running alone this time, my load lightened by a compass that remained in Inverness. I found Sgùrr Mòr, the highest of the range, easily enough, despite the presence of an inert clag. I blundered on, aiming for Beinn Liath Mhòr Fannaich. Where I went, I do not know. With visibility trimmed to about twenty metres, everything looked identical: a dismal world of boulders, grass and snippets of path that appeared and vanished. Beinn Liath Mhòr Fannaich, I decided, must be an elaborate ruse. It did not exist. At that point, two hours after departing Sgùrr Mòr, I was convinced that this mountain had also since vanished, as I could not find my way back there either. I seemed to have the hills exclusively when voices drifted through the murk and a party of six men emerged. Map in hand and scantily clad in shorts and a rapidly leaking waterproof, I calmly asked for clarification on where I was. ‘Scotland,’ came the reply.

In my year of hill running initiation, one of the dominant racing figures in the Highlands was Alec Keith. Consistency was his byword: a winner at Cioch Mhòr; runner-up at the brutal Isle of Jura fell race and at the Glenshee 9 – that is nine mountains, not nine miles; third at Glamaig on Skye and also at Knockfarrel. All this was despite Alec cutting an apparently harmless, even comical, figure on start lines; an unwashed, mud-spattered Inverness or brown Hunters Bog Trotters vest would invariably be worn inside out and adorned with a skewwhiff number. A fellow runner, Damon Rodwell, recalled meeting the ‘illustrious’ Alec crossing the bridge at Creaguaineach Lodge at the southern end of Loch Treig some years earlier. ‘Alec is renowned for his holey, ragged running gear, and I noticed and commented that he was dressed in uncharacteristically natty attire. He admitted that the trousers were a present, the jacket a prize and the hat he had stolen. If I’d had my camera handy, you would have the pleasure of seeing Alec crossing the slippery, slime-covered wooden bridge in a 40-knot side wind on all fours.’

Now in his fifties, Alec will not get faster. His personal best of 35 minutes and 38 seconds for 10 kilometres on the road will undoubtedly prove a lifetime record. That mark, set in 2007 at a race in the Easter Ross village of Tain, did not even rank him among the top-250 men aged over 40 in the UK that year. But give him a mountain track, a peat hag, a maze of tussocks, a fence to cross, a river to ford, a summit to crest, scree to hurtle down – then you will see the real Alec Keith. He finished a little over a minute ahead of me in the Inverness half-marathon; at Cioch Mhòr six weeks later and four miles shorter, I was nine minutes back. His unerring ability in the Scottish mountains is not the outcome of overflowing natural ability. It is the product of decades of running thousands of miles over terrain most runners would baulk at, but it is also the product of love.

Alec was a seven-year-old schoolboy in north London when the mountains called. Opening a book on British geology, he was transfixed by a black and white image of a misty mountain in the Cairngorms, more than 500 miles north of where he sat, rising above a loch. ‘It fascinated me then and still does,’ Alec said. ‘I’d never seen a real hill before but somehow this was for me.’

I called Alec from my then London home on the evening of the hottest July day on record. The temperature had reached 37 Celsius at Heathrow. The thermostat in my first-floor flat was telling its own horror story: 31 Celsius. Alec’s wife answered: ‘He’s a bit mucky at the moment. He’ll call you back.’ When we finally spoke, Alec cheerfully announced he had been gutting drains, and I pictured him grinning.

I remembered Alec as an elusive figure. He rarely trained with Inverness and when he appeared at races, he was soon striding away into the distance, showing us only his back. As such, he became an athlete we mythologised. Alec was the runner whose idea of fun was to spend six hours wandering around the Cairngorms in vile weather. Alec was the runner who carried bunches of rapidly-mushed bananas to sustain himself on a day-long run in the mountains of Lochaber. Alec was the runner who ran England’s Bob Graham Round on a family holiday having never encountered a step of the 66-mile route. An ascent route on Craig Dunain was named after Alec too. In a clearing of woodland dissected by electricity wires, a track zig-zags steeply up, hairpin upon hairpin; steeper still is a switchback-splitting path that goes straight through the middle of every bend. That was the Alec Keith route: the toughest way of all.

I was anxious when my phone rang – not because it was Alec, but because I wanted fable to be fact. I wanted to believe that fairy tales might be true.

Having served his mountain apprenticeship in the Cairngorms, by 1989 Alec felt ready to challenge Mel Edwards’ decade-old fastest time of 4 hours and 34 minutes for the round of the quartet of the range’s mountains – Braeriach, Cairn Toul, Ben Macdui and Cairn Gorm – that exceed 4,000 feet (1,219 metres). The ‘fast hillwalker’, by his own admission, set out from Glenmore Lodge in ‘strange footwear, somewhere between boot, baffie and brothel-creeper’, and returned 5 hours and 22 minutes later. ‘The evidence of my human snowplough imitation descending Cairn Gorm remains etched into my right thigh and elbow,’ he remarked.

The chasm between ambition and the record brought Alec his own epiphany: ‘Having previously failed to see the point of hill running, I succumbed to the temptation it offered as a way of bypassing the duller bits of hillwalking and getting to the good bits. Running up hills is a relative concept: it’s about getting up the ups as fast as you can.’

A new decade, the 1990s, arrived. The Soviet Union collapsed. The internet was unleashed. The Stone of Destiny returned to Scotland. Alec Keith ‘just wanted to be in the hills’ and by the end of the century would hold the record for the so-called Big Six – a longer round in the Cairngorms that includes the 4,000s, plus Beinn a’ Bhuird and Ben Avon. Such feats do not occur by accident; they quite literally require trial and error. He gave the 4,000s another go in 1992, this time with more appropriate footwear, but again finished outside Mel Edwards’ mark. It was later that same year that Alec discovered the Big Six – ‘another thing to obsess over’ – and persevered after failing to eclipse the record on a wind and rain-hampered first attempt.

Due some luck, Alec turned his gaze to the fabulous array of Lochaber mountains that square up on opposing sides of Glen Nevis. Here the roof-clipping brows and cascading slopes were imprinted with the sternest tales of endurance. Alec knew the magnitude of what he sought: to follow in the stud marks of a legend.

As the minutes ticked down to midday on 9 July, 1978, Charlie Ramsay tore down the lower slopes of Ben Nevis. He crossed a footbridge over the River Nevis and halted by the glen’s youth hostel. The clock stopped. In the previous 23 hours and 58 minutes, Ramsay had passed over the summits of 23 Munros – Scottish mountains of at least 3,000 feet (914 metres) – in an immense loop, starting where he had finished. No-one had climbed so many Munros in a day; nor would anyone do so again for nine years. Scotland’s classic 24-hour round – encompassing 60 miles of rough and wild mountain running, and an Everest-amount of ascending and descending – was born.

When Alec parked his car at Polldubh, deep in Glen Nevis, some 16 years later, only eleven others had demonstrated the endurance and mental stamina to match the deeds of Charlie Ramsay, with only a solitary success in the previous four years. Alec had every reason to doubt whether he could make it round within 24 hours. His preparation had been characteristically unconventional: he had not run for five days following a smash-and-grab ascent of the Jungfrau in Switzerland the previous weekend.

But Alec Keith is not a man to shirk a task: ‘I was fit enough and strong enough, and I thought, when I get there, I will just get on with it. And I did.’

From Polldubh, he ran along the glen road he had driven minutes before. He passed the hostel, bridged the river, and began to climb Ben Nevis. It was not Alec’s style to mimic the steps of another; he would run the circuit the other way around.

Up he went, alone and unsupported. Alec’s method was that of the purist: ‘I didn’t want to say, “I need fifteen of you to help me to do this thing.” I didn’t want anyone to carry my rucksack. That’s why I attempted unsupported. This would be my achievement, rather than the achievement of the people supporting me. That was my ethos. Everyone is entitled to do things as they want.’ Alec’s inimitable way of doing things extended to nutrition: 22 bananas, enough sachets of powder to make 26 pints of juice mixed with burn water, a packet of chocolate digestives and a small fruit cake. The bananas had been stuffed into a plastic box. ‘I didn’t think about dumping a bag of food,’ he said. ‘I could have left half of the bananas there. In this period, people were doing things in their own way – and doing extraordinary things. I was doing it my way.’

Mist enclosed the summit of Ben Nevis and the loose rock on the descent and ridge ahead forced caution, but the sky would lift. Under a grey roof, at least Alec could see where he was going: mountain after mountain after mountain. Eight hours had elapsed with ten peaks despatched when he descended to Loch Treig, a narrowing body of water that resembles a witch’s digit, ran across the reservoir dam at its fingertip, and continued into the night.

By the first light of pre-dawn, with three further mountains climbed in darkness, he had begun the lengthy trudge back west, following the line of a river in a deserted glen. He was suffering: a cocktail of exhaustion and sleep deprivation. The mighty, bucking ridge of the Mamores, comprising another ten summits, plus the distance of 21 miles, still lay between the solo runner and Glen Nevis. ‘The sun was blinding,’ Alec remembered, ‘and I thought, crikey, my head is aching. I should be happy, but I just feel awful.’

The undertaking could have then seemed insurmountable, but feeling ‘awful’ is not a reason to stop. Not for Alec Keith, anyway. He just got on with it. What else was there to do? He arrived on Mullach nan Coirean, the last top, after 23 hours had elapsed, knowing nonetheless that he was going to beat 24, and ‘cruised along’, finishing – in comparison to Charlie Ramsay – with a luxurious buffer of ten minutes to spare. He would become a statistic in a list of immortals: number 12.

Alec got in his car and started to drive home to Edinburgh. ‘By the time I got to Tyndrum, I thought I must have something to eat. I opened the door and fell out sideways. My legs had seized up. I crawled to the Little Chef to put some food into myself.’

I could not sleep that night. It was not the heat. The same defiant words ran through my mind: ‘When I get there, I will just get on with it. And I did.’

And, I thought, so will I.

3

The Monarch of the Glen

Finlay Wild stood on the summit of Sgùrr nan Gillean, the northern culmination of the Black Cuillin of Skye. The scree fountain of Glamaig across the deep trough of Glen Sligachan gleamed in dazzling sunlight; islands punctuated the glittering glass of the Inner Sound; away in the east, Ben Nevis stared impassively. The transcendent world of the so-called Isle of Mist was at harmony. The runner was not. He looked back along the ridge he had just negotiated – an eight-mile scythe of alpine pinnacles and splintered crags, flanked by plunging gullies. There is no greater examination in British mountaineering; it is, as Sir Walter Scott noted, unrivalled in its ‘desolate sublimity’. Finlay – a twenty-nine-year-old GP from Fort William, unknown outside the clique of hill running – had beaten the ‘unbeatable’, becoming the fastest to traverse the ridge, but something did not feel right. Doubt crowded his mind.

Starting from where it had all begun on Gars-bheinn, he traced the twisting blade of the ridge, silently counting mountains. His eyes lingered on Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich, the fourth of the eleven Munro summits. A surge of uncertainty. Finlay pulled out a flip book of summit diagrams, leafing through the pages until he located Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich. He looked hard at the drawing, then raised his eyes to gaze again at the mountain. A very simple question burst from his subconscious: had he touched the pile of stones on the 948-metre highest point? He had certainly climbed the peak; the spine of the central ridge made that unavoidable. The cairn though? Had he put his hand on it?