"What do you mean they've moved the phone box ?"
You do expect some changes when you've been gone for twenty-three
years, but moving the phone box a couple of hundred yards down
the road really seemed like sacrilege. How many times had I walked
over from the campsite to phone home and let everyone know that
we were all still alive? How often had we crammed six people into
that small red box, to shelter from the pouring rain that always
started right after we put down the receiver? That phone box was
an icon. But I suppose it honestly does make more sense to put
the only phone beside the youth hostel, rather than beside the
farmhouse that always seemed totally deserted.
It has been more than twenty years since I camped in Glen Brittle
with St. Andrews University Mountaineering Club. That end of spring
term meet was an annual celebration after final exams. We had
celebrated my twenty-first birthday right there in the campground;
somehow I don't remember too many of the details. But, "where's
that bottle of.....'CRASH' " still brings back vivid memories
of someone falling flat over the club tent - and it didn't even
have guy lines to trap the unwary. We called it the "Nalley"
because it was shaped like an alley and held "n" people,
where n is the traditional large whole number, beloved of mathematicians.
Now I'm back for a quick reunion visit with my climbing partner
Andrew. He and his family have conveniently settled in Inverness,
albeit with several year long detours to Finland, Afghanistan
and Holland. I have lived in the northern California beach paradise
of Santa Cruz (earthquakes excluded), for the last twenty-three
years, so we've moved apart in some ways.
I have developed a fondness for the great Alaskan wilderness,
just a hop, skip and jump up the west coast from Santa Cruz (
or at most a short flight on the exquisite Alaska Airlines ).
This story was written as I sat on a curving mussel bar below
McBryde Glacier, in Glacier Bay National Park. The others in my
group were off watching for chunks of ice calving from the glacier
face into the lagoon. I had stayed behind to ferry the six double
kayaks up the channel on the incoming tide. Otherwise there was
a nasty choice between the quarter mile walk across (or rather
through...) the glacial silt, at low tide, or playing dodgem kayaks
with the icebergs barreling out of the channel from the lagoon.
Andrew and I thought a short reunion on the Skye ridge would be
fun - a reality check on the changes in the last few years. Some
things change in twenty-three years and some things don't. The
phone box has changed. The Glen Brittle road game has not, despite
a few largely cosmetic changes to the road itself: the rules of
play still seem to be approximately: 10 points if the other car
has to slow down, 50 points if they have to reverse and 500 points
if they go into the ditch. Of course, even in its original incarnation,
the game felt much safer than the more recent time that I was
driven down to Glen Brittle by an American friend who insisted
on trying to drive on the left side of the single track road.
So how about the campsite itself? The bathrooms have actually
improved - but then that wouldn't be hard. However, the wee footbridge
still threatens to slide the unwary reveler into the burn on a
dark and stormy night. The campsite is remarkably unchanged even
though the musical wake-up call of "Campsite fees, please"
has been replaced by a boring, pay in advance system. Most of
the tents have changed, but ours hasn't. The old Black's "Good
Companion" stands out like a sore orange thumb, and is somewhat
less than weather proof. But it does have character entirely missing
from the uniform advance of the nylon domes. On the other hand,
I certainly wouldn't want to take it with me to Alaska.
The journey to the west from Inverness had already shown some
interesting changes. The imminent opening of the bridge seemed
like a monumentally bad idea - at least from the folk song point
of view. "Take the boat over to Skye" and "If you've
never been kissed/pissed2 in that isle of
the mist" seems to lose all of its romance if you can just
drive over a bridge to get there. I suppose the National Trust
took that important idea into account in its deliberations on
the project!
The Sligachan Hotel had changed enormously for the better. The
bar was better, the beer was better, the food was better and the
staff actually appeared to be pleased to serve climbers. Perhaps
the large campsite is taking it a little too far though.
So how about the ridge itself? Has the climbing changed? A lot
of the answer to that has to lie in your perspective. The first
time I saw them as a teenager, the cliffs of Coire Lagan looked
so enormous, and the bogs on the Loch Coruisk path felt interminable.
But now I've climbed in Yosemite Valley with its three thousand
foot sweeps of unbroken granite and I've slogged over the tussocks
of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's north slope. And I've
spent a lot of time paddling beneath the tidewater glaciers of
Southeast Alaska - or just sitting writing stories beside them.
So things look different to me.
Andrew had put it another way one year when we were debating whether
I could live with a girlfriend in Scotland, the same way I had
in California. It would have been unthinkable when I left Scotland
in the sixties. " You could do it now - Scotland may not
have changed much, but you have", was Andrew's verdict. It's
all in your viewpoint.
So, back on the ridge, there do seem to be more people scurrying
along the rock than I remember. The advent of guided parties produces
some entertaining moments: there are, count them, the eight people
in identical blue crash hats lined up at the foot of the In Pin.
And there is that chance encounter with Andrew's neighbour from
Inverness, as we round a less well remembered pinnacle. We are
trying to decide which way to go when two tentative figures appear
from the opposite direction. When we ask them which way they have
come they respond "Oh, we don't know anything - you'll have
to ask our guide on the end of the rope" And then the neighbour
appears. It does make for a good conversation until the clients
start getting restless.
Strangely, route finding needs more effort than it used to - I'm
sure I never used to abseil going off Sgurr Alasdair in that direction!
And my GPS receiver insists that walking over the cliff is the
correct way to go, and offers to record how fast I'm moving on
the long way down. But the rays of evening light from Gars-bheinn
are as beautiful as ever. And the islands still float on a magical
mystery carpet. My knees, however, just aren't what they used
to be. After that descent to the Loch Coruisk path the boggy stretches
are quite a struggle in the gathering gloom. It's really hard
to negotiate all those tussocks without bending my left knee.
In fact, they really are comparable to those Alaskan North Slope
tussocks that only a caribou can cross with any semblance of elegance.
But at least it isn't as bad as that dreadful night when we carried
a stretcher across those same tussocks in the pouring rain, descending
from the ridge above Coir a' Grunndha. The bad news then was a
rock-fall on White Slab and a badly broken ankle. But the good
news is that, thanks to the skill of the surgeon at Raigmore,
the victim can still walk today, and lives happily in Oregon.
And of course, the final comparison is the weather. It has clearly
changed for the worse - perhaps we can blame it on global warming.
I remember the good old days of lying in the morning sun in the
campsite before wandering up to Coire Lagan for an afternoon of
climbing. The top of the Cioch had always seemed like it would
be a grand spot for a "bring your own rope" party. (And
there weren't any midges in those days either. If you believe
that statement, I have a bridge for sale in Arizona.....). This
year we spent four days in Skye and three days prior to that,
waiting for clear weather in Inverness. All told there has only
been one dry spell of twelve hours during my week's visit. So
we only did half the ridge. But it was still very satisfying.
To add final insult to injury though, everyone I met in Scotland a year later apologized for the bad weather that summer and reminisced about how wonderful the weather had been the previous summer.
It's amazing what just one year will do to the memory cells, let
alone twenty-three.... Were there really maids in Glen Brittle?
Lay me down in my pit in a bog-hole
Where the bivouac sites are few
Lay me down with a stone for my pillow
And an uninterrupted view 1
2 Delete as appropriate - or inappropriate
1 Tom Patey, The Last of the Grand Old Masters
Published in the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, 1997