Over the Hills and Far Away

by Rob Collister

  Our passage down the glacier was long, complicated, at times even technical, and rendered unpleasant by steady drizzle. The weather, which had been lowering for two days, had now broken and was to remain unsettled for the rest of our time in the mountains. Once off the ice, our troubles were far from over. The best part of an afternoon was wasted in a tempting flower-filled ablation valley which petered out into cliffs, leaving us to abseil back to the glacier. And once on to the Kukuay glacier the going became truly horrible. The glacier itself was a choppy sea of ice-cored, boulder covered waves, and the slight trough between it and a steep-sided moraine offered as alternatives only pools of slush, ice concealed by mud, and a fair chance of being hit by rocks sliding off the edge of the glacier. Eventually, having crossed a tributary, we thankfully left the glacier, scaled the moraine wall, fought through a jungle of willow and birch scrub, and suddenly found ourselves in Eden.

  In the ablation valley – really more a terrace than a valley – between the glacier and a mountainside of crag and scree, lay a rush-fringed lake of a delicate pale green. It was overlooked by aiguilles of rock and ice, and on its shores willow-herb and golden rod were growing gaily. Mallard took flight as we approached. Dragonflies hovered above the water. A pair of blue-throats flitted among the bushes. Happily, we pulled off boots and socks and paddled our sweating feet in the cool water. This was the place called Darrakush which Tilman had visited from Bar and which Dick and I had failed to reach. To our amazement, it was apparent that, despite the Kukuay glacier, the spot was regularly used by goatherds and their flocks. Droppings lay everywhere and the rickety roof of a crude brushwood shelter provided the only flat campsite we could find.

  Here we decided to split up. Although the distance from Taling to Darrakush can be no more than twenty miles, it had taken us six days – much longer than expected, and we were running short of food. Dave, who had been suffering from an uncomfortable pack frame, kept the tent and headed down the valley towards Bar on his own. Rob and I, with the stove, bivouac sack and six days food, set off up the glacier. As there is a vertical interval of 3,300 metres between Darrakush and the summit of either Kukuay peak, and a three day walk, at least, back to Bar, we had no time to spare.

  To our relief, the going on the glacier gradually became easier until finally the stones gave way to ice and we could make rapid progress. The eastern of the two peaks, that on the right of Tilman’s Col, is a daunting spire of rock tipped with snow, which would be a magnificent but difficult climb. The western peak is more amenable, with a long snow ridge sloping down to the col. However, the ridge seemed much too long and we decided to reach it more directly by climbing a broad couloir-cum-icefall on the flank facing us. We bivouacked at the foot of it.

  In the small hours of the morning it began to rain. When the clouds cleared at dawn, determined to be optimistic, we started up the snow – deep and unfrozen at first, becoming icy once clear of the lower icefall. We were fit and acclimatised and going well. I am confident that, barring an unforeseen and insuperable obstacle on the summit ridge, we would have reached the top that day. But it was not to be. We had climbed 400 metres and were perhaps a third of the way to the ridge, when the clouds rolled in again and it began to snow. We sat in the bivvy sack for an hour drinking tea and feeling our toes grow cold, and then began the descent. There was nothing to be done but follow Dave down the valley. We simply did not have the food to wait for the weather; and, in fact, it continued to rain, off and on, for the next week. We were disappointed, naturally. But though the Kukuay peaks had originally been our main objective, the journey to them had long since become less a means than an end in itself. Disappointment there was, but no feeling of failure, or even of anticlimax – the journey was not yet over.

  Having spent the night back at Darrakush, we crossed the Kukuay glacier (finding bear tracks in the sand at its edge) and picked up a path through birch woods in the ablation valley on its true left bank. Passing through two deserted goatherd settlements, one of which must be Toltar, we descended an unpleasant moraine wall, some 200 metres high, by a far from obvious path. We reached the valley bottom 100 metres above the spot where Dick and I had waited fruitlessly for our porters, thus confirming our suspicions, for they would have had to pass us to reach Toltar. After a damp night in a cave, we caught up Dave the next day, near the Baltar glacier. He was glad to see us but even more pleased to see the stove, for his efforts at fire lighting with sodden wood had met with scant success. The rain caused other problems. Streams which Dick and I had jumped across, now had to be waded, with a rope; nearer civilisation, paths and bridges had disappeared; and below Bar we found ourselves traversing a vertical wall of crumbling conglomerate, where once there had been a road, a few feet above swirling grey water. Nowhere, all summer, had I been so near to falling off; and nowhere, perhaps, would the consequences have been more serious.

  The fields of Bar were a rich gold and full of women reaping, despite the damp. The apples were ripe, and there were still some apricots on the trees. I had begun to revise my opinion of Bar when we were discovered by a mob of unmannerly children and pursued out of the village. At Chalt we relaxed in the chai-shop – only to learn that here, too, the road had suffered and we would have to walk a further fifteen miles. Finally, we found a jeep and, in company with fifteen other passengers, not to mention suitcases, rifles, umbrellas and baskets of grapes, bumped our way inconspicuously into Gilgit.

  That should have been the end of the story but it was not. Once again, seats on the aircraft were oversubscribed and many flights had been cancelled because of the weather. I had a rendezvous in Delhi a week hence and after one fruitless visit to the airport I decided it might well be quicker and would certainly be more interesting to walk than to wait. Buying a large bag of small, crisp apples and another of freshly baked biscuits in the bazaar, I hitched a lift up the Gilgit valley as far as a landslide near Gupis. Putting my best foot forward, I walked a hundred miles or so in the next three days over the Shandhur Pass and down into Chitral. Finally, I was picked up by a Polish engineer in a jeep and given a ride the rest of the way to Chitral town. The following day I shared the price of a jeep with a French couple I had met. Easily the most hair-raising moments of the entire trip were on the precipitous descent of the Lawowri Pass in a thunderstorm, in a vehicle with faulty windscreen wipers, and bald tyres that slithered about on the slick dirt surface of innumerable hairpins. The French couple shouted and screamed incessantly but the driver, high as a kite on hashish, merely laughed manically and steered one-handed as he turned round to gesticulate to his passengers with the other. Three days later I was in Delhi, to discover that somewhere along the way I had picked up headlice.

  – Part 7 –

  The Quality of the Experience

  – Chapter 22 –

  ONLY A HILL (1987)

  Only a hill: earth set a little higher

  Above the face of the earth: a larger view

  Of little fields and roads: a little higher

  To clouds and silence: what is that to you?

  Only a hill; but all of life to me ...

  Geoffrey Winthrop Young

  Behind my home in Eastern Snowdonia lies an unexceptional little hill. Only 600 metres high, it is not worthy of the serious hillwalker’s attention. To east and west drain glaciated valleys filled with unlovely conifers, one of them doomed to become a reservoir sooner or later. To the north is a rough region of heather and innumerable hillocks, dells, and little crags, all recently planted over by the Forestry Commission. To the south, a moor of mat and tussock grass and bog cotton stretches to the derelict quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog. There is a Bronze Age cairn on the summit, and several hut circles and long houses have disappeared beneath trees in the cwm below, but the area as a whole has been described by Pete Crew as ‘an archaeological desert’. The rocks are acid, so there are no unusual arctic-alpines to be found on the small crags beneath the summit: and although peregrines and black grouse breed
not far away, and crossbills and red squirrels are to be found in the forest, it is not renowned for its wildlife. As I said, it is an unexceptional hill.

  Yet for me it is special. From its summit can be seen virtually every mountain group in Snowdonia; there is a great spaciousness up there; and, above all, it is quiet, with the quietness of a place rarely visited. Once, years ago, I met Iorwerth Lewis out on the moor, checking his sheep on horseback as he used to in Patagonia. I have gone up there with Nedw Pritchard to mend fences. But in all the dozens, maybe hundreds of times I have walked or run over that piece of Wales, I have never met another walker. True, the sheep-path that used to veer to one side of the summit has grown a little more defined and now runs straight to it. Once or twice recently I have found pop cans and sandwich packets stuffed between the stones of the cairn. There is no doubt that others, besides myself, know this place. But it is not much frequented. More than anywhere else in the world I have valued that empty mountain top, for if to the Welsh culture of the valley I will always be an outsider, up there I am at home, there I can go at any time, at any season, and be received unconditionally, as by a parent.

  Landscape can never be static. Change is implicit in the processes of growth and decay, evolution and erosion. The swiftest changes, however, if one excepts the occasional catastrophe, are usually man-made and for the worse, even in national parks. Eight years ago an agricultural road was built from Dolwyddelan to the top edge of the forest, at the 400-metre contour on the northern slopes of the mountain. Two years ago the JCB was at work again, extending the road further up the hillside. Then, for over a year, nothing happened. All one winter, the JCB lay abandoned on the hill, visible from afar like some prehistoric roosting bird, seemingly impotent. The new ‘road’ was an impassable quagmire and it seemed as though the withdrawal of EEC grants had called a halt to proceedings. Alas, it was not to be. This August, I heard rumours that the roadhead was snaking its way still further up the hill. Running home from Capel Curig one day, I decided to investigate. The road was now well packed and drained and obviously in use, and as it rose higher and higher up the hillside my consternation grew. As if to rub salt in the wound, I heard an engine behind me. On ground where I had never met a soul before, I was passed by a car containing four passengers, with a hang-glider on the roof. On and on, inexorably, unbelievably, wound the road to end finally on the very crest of the ridge, only 300 yards from the summit, in a turning circle where the car was parked.

  I could have wept. Inwardly, I did. For that hilltop will never be quite the same again, at least, not in our lifetime. The mere existence of that track, crudely hacked out of the hillside, has destroyed the feel of the place. The views will be the same, but the experience of seeing those views will have insensibly altered, for beauty is an experience in people, not a quality in things. As Ansel Adams wrote of telegraph wires visible from footpaths in the Yosemite National Park: ‘They are little things it is true, but they signify a very important thing. They break the vital thread of perfection; they destroy the mood which, after all, is the most precious factor in the relation of man to nature’.

  Moreover, that summit will no longer be unfrequented. The road will be seen as a boon by the organisers of Arduous Training, Duke of Edinburgh expeditions and Unaccompanied Walks from centres. ‘Elitist!’ goes up the familiar howl. But is it not sufficient that the highest and finest mountain in England and Wales can be reached by train; that Glaslyn can be reached by vehicle track; that the Devil’s Kitchen can be reached by not one but two paths of motorway proportions; that the Carneddau can be penetrated by tarmac road to Ffynnon Llugwy in the south or by Landrover track to the summit of Drum in the north; and that countless forestry roads had already made access shorter and easier to most of the smaller hills of Snowdonia, even before the latest wave of agricultural ‘improvement’.

  I cannot blame Mr Williams for building that road. If offered something for nothing: which of us would refuse? An EEC grant of eighty per cent paid on a fixed cost basis, has meant that many farmers have built themselves roads for nothing at all, and not a few have made a fat profit. It is another example of the inappropriate application of the CAP, the wasteful use of public funds, and the helplessness of a national park authority which until last November had literally no control over what farmers did on or with their land. It is all very well to subsidise sheep farming to maintain a traditional way of life, but to destroy the landscape of a national park in order to alter and mechanise that way of life is an absurd irony. Admittedly, things have changed. EEC grants for roads have been cut to thirty per cent and farm buildings and roads are now subject to planning constraints – albeit eligible for compensation if permission is refused. But for many parts of upland Britain, it is too late. All over Snowdonia, mile upon mile of ugly bulldozed tracks, of derisory agricultural benefit, traverse what were the most genuinely wild parts of the park.

  I am not sure why I am writing this. It cannot unmake that road. I am crying over spilled milk. It does not even make me feel better. My initial rage has given way to a sort of despair at the eczema creeping over the face of the land. What were symbols of freedom for body and spirit are now ever-shrinking pockets of land enclosed by wire, roads and signposts. The landscape’s vitality has been diminished, what we can feel and experience there cheapened. I am reminded of the passage in Jacquetta Hawkes’ marvellous book A Land, where she describes what has happened to Stonehenge:

  ‘If its incorporation in a great work of art – book, poem or painting – can immensely heighten the quality and significance of some natural or artificial feature so also it can be debased by man. Cafes and chewing gum, car parks and conducted excursions, a sense of the hackneyed induced by postcards, calendars and cheap guidebooks has done more to damage Stonehenge than the plundering of some of its stones. It will never again be possible to see it as Constable did when he made his studies, a place of mystery against a background of storms and flying showers; it is doubtful if it could ever again have the deep impact on any man that it once had on Wordsworth; it seems no longer a setting fit for one of Hardy’s gigantic, stereoscopic scenes. Men made it and men have destroyed it, the whole action taking place in the realm of the imagination.’

  Men did not make my hill, but they have as surely destroyed its spirit and mood as they have the spirit and mystery our ancestors celebrated at Stonehenge. Where does the process lead, and where does it end?

  Postscript: Since writing this the JCB has returned. Despite, or even because of a remonstrance to the National Park Authority, a toothless tiger if ever there was one, the road has now been gouged to the very summit, an act of deliberate vandalism, I suspect.

  – Chapter 23 –

  ADVENTURE VERSUS THE MOUNTAIN (1984)

  As an outdoor pursuits instructor, first at Ogwen Cottage, latterly at Plas y Brenin, I have, for some years, vehemently defended myself against the charge that I, and others like me, are filling our tiny but precious mountains with youngsters who do not want to be there, and gain nothing by being there. Now I am beginning to have my doubts. It is a rare teenager who really enjoys the river as well as the rapid, the mountain as well as the climb. It is action, thrills, adventure that matter most, rightly so at that age; and these, we are being shown, can be provided as effectively in the city as in the hills; initially, at any rate.

  A taste for landscape, for natural beauty, for wildness (as opposed to wilderness, which we do not have) is not innate in human beings, it seems; it is an educated response. It is a truism that mountains were usually feared and disliked, occasionally venerated, but certainly not enjoyed until the eighteenth century. The writings first of Rousseau, then of the Lakeland poets, of Ruskin, Thoreau and Jefferies, changed all that, but it is no coincidence that the early climbers were from the educated middle class, often academics. It was not just a question of leisure and cash, it was the way they had learnt to look at mountains in an age of proliferating man-made ugliness. Today, the Romantic view of mountains
permeates the pages of Climber and Mountain, but it is an educated attitude nonetheless, one that has been acquired through experience, talking and reading. The silence, the space, the solitude so valued by many, though admittedly not all, adult mountaineers, may be actually threatening to a youngster impelled into it from the heart of a city. He reacts by yelling raucously into an empty cwm, shattering with stones the mirror of an upland lake, and throwing aside his crisp packet and empty pop can. Not only is there none of that ‘sense of wonder, that most precious of gifts, the birthright of every child’ that Shipton believed in, but for any other who had entered that cwm, like R.S. Thomas, ‘on soft foot, breath held like a cap in the hand’, the moment is destroyed and the place sullied.

  Why a sense of wonder is so noticeably absent in inner-city groups, I do not know. It could be a total lack of familiarity with fields and woods, let alone mountains; or excessive exposure to the vicarious experience of television; or a protective shell grown against the innumerable hurts and failures of school. Maybe, as teenagers, they are just too grown-up and worldly-wise. I do not know. But repeated disappointment at the reaction of groups to the mountain ambience has led me to revise my attitude towards outdoor education. It is not so much a conviction that our approach has been wrong all along, as that it has become inappropriate. Things have changed since the outdoor pursuits boom of twenty years ago. On the one hand, government agencies like the CEGB, the Welsh Water Authority and the Forestry Commission, for all their glib assurances, have continued inexorably to build, plant and disfigure the landscape, and with their persistent demand for service roads to whittle away the remoteness and effective scale of our mountains; while the jets and helicopters of the armed forces all too often render the ‘peace of the hills’ a hollow myth. On the other hand, the numbers of climbers, walkers and canoeists enjoying the mountains has multiplied staggeringly. This can only be a good thing, vindicating the existence of our national parks. But these pressures combined create a situation in which we can no longer afford to bring youngsters into the mountains unless they actively want to be there. Otherwise we will destroy completely the qualities for which we value mountains. We will kill the goose that lays the golden egg.