Out There

by Chris Townsend

  Doesn’t that just make you want to be out in the wilds sitting there almost daydreaming?

  Fletcher’s best known book is The Complete Walker, which has gone through four editions (though the last one with a co-writer. I recommend one of the earlier editions for the full Fletcher approach and the pleasure of his delightful prose). Subtitled ‘the joys and techniques of hiking and backpacking’ this is the most detailed and the most readable guide imaginable. Fletcher covers everything entertainingly and, in places, with humour. It’s a very personal book, describing what he did and what he used, with the idea that others can learn from this. The detailed descriptions of equipment are now out of date but this doesn’t matter. They are only examples and it’s the overall approach to walking and camping that matters. This timelessness is also why The Thousand Mile Summer and The Man Who Walked Through Time are fresh and relevant many decades after they were written.

  Throughout his work there is a deep respect and love for nature and a strong desire for it to be protected. He’s not an out and out campaigner like that other great writer of the desert Southwest, Edward Abbey, though The Man Who Walked Through Time does contain a moving epilogue about the threats to dam the Grand Canyon in the 1960s. Fletcher warned that ‘unless we do something, you and I, we may soon find this book has become a requiem for Grand Canyon’. The depth of his feeling is shown when he writes ‘I suggest that we little men have no damned right even to consider such vandalism – for any reason at all’.

  The same feelings surface in The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher, a collection of essays on different walks. In the chapter entitled ‘Among The Redwoods’ in which he is horrified by the destruction of ancient redwood groves and writes of the logging of old growth forests that it ‘left you ashamed … of belonging to a species that for personal gain waged war on its own planet.’

  The four books I’ve referred to above are the key works for walkers interested in Colin Fletcher. Perhaps the most interesting of his other works is River, which tells the story of his trip, mostly by raft, down the length of the Colorado River at the age of 67 in 1989, another first, in which his journey also stands for his journey through life. The book contains one of my favourite Colin Fletcher quotations:

  ‘I knew, deep and safe, beyond mere intellect, that there is nothing like a wilderness journey for rekindling the fires of life’.

  His final two books, The Winds of Mara and The Man From The Cave, are both quite obscure and long out of print. Devotee that I am, I hunted them down in second-hand book shops on visits to the USA long before the Internet made finding such books easy. The Winds of Mara describes a return visit to Kenya on which he camped, with a vehicle, in the bush. He describes well the wildlife and the landscape and his interactions with people but it lacks some of the drive of his wilderness journey books. The Man From The Cave is a real oddity, a fascinating book that tells you more about its author than its subject. Fletcher discovers a cave in a remote part of the Nevada desert with some old possessions that showed someone had once lived there. The book is the story of his research into who the person was and why they were there.

  Colin Fletcher writes mainly about the Southwest USA. His heart lies with the Colorado River and the surrounding landscape, but don’t let this put you off reading him. His backpacking tales are about the experience as much or more than the place and thus of interest to all who love walking and camping in the wild, whether the Scottish Highlands or the Grand Canyon. Be warned though the books might just stir a desire in you to go and walk in Fletcher’s country, as they did in me.

  6

  PERCEPTIONS OF WILDNESS

  A wide belt of Corsican pines runs along the coast at Formby in Lancashire. These were the first large woods I ever saw as a child; mysterious and inviting and promising excitement and adventure. Beyond the pinewoods lay marshes and then sand dunes - the highest hills I knew for many years - and finally the sea. Wandering this landscape I discovered the joys of exploration, solitude and nature. To me it was wild and vast. As a child the concept of wilderness didn’t really exist. I just accepted what was there and assumed it was as it should be and always had been.

  As a teenager I discovered, via school trips, Snowdonia, the Lake District and the Peak District. These national parks were a real revelation. The mountains seemed huge, the wildness almost infinite. Although I read natural history books I didn’t grasp anything about ecology or natural systems. I wanted to identify what I saw but didn’t understand how little I knew about how it all related. It didn’t occur to me that these wild mountains could be anything other than natural and untouched. I saw sheep - plenty of sheep - but had no idea of the effect they had.

  Once I’d discovered the hills my outdoor desires changed from woodland exploration and bird watching to climbing to the summits and striding out along the ridges. I discovered wild camping and started carrying a tent into the hills, revelling in nights out in the silence and splendour of the mountains.

  My second revelation came with my first visit to the Scottish Highlands. I wandered up onto the Cairngorm Plateau and stood there amazed at the scale of the landscape. I can still remember the sense of shock. I didn’t know anywhere this big existed. All those hills to climb! All those wild places to camp! Suddenly the English and Welsh hills didn’t seem so big after all. I set out to climb all the Munros in what I again assumed was a pristine wilderness. I read Fraser Darling and Morton Boyd’s The Highlands and Islands to learn about the natural history of my new favourite place, but the words about deforestation and the degrading of much of the landscape didn’t sink in. I didn’t ‘see’ it when I was in the hills. The bare glens looked natural so I thought they were.

  A change in my thinking came not in the Scottish hills but in the High Sierra. Here, in John Muir’s heartland, I discovered real forests and real wilderness when hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Already impressed by the small transverse ranges and the deserts of Southern California I was now faced with hundreds of miles of roadless wilderness. The rugged alpine mountains were magnificent but it was the forests that really impressed themselves on my mind. Many of the individual trees were magnificent but it was the extent and naturalness of the forest as a whole that most affected me as the trail rose and fell, climbing high above timberline and then dipping down into dense forest.

  Timberline! There was a new and magic word. I fell in love with timberline, with that band between the bare mountains and the forest where the trees grew smaller and more widely spaced until they faded away completely. I noticed how timberline varied with the aspect of the hills - higher on the warm southern slopes, lower on the colder northern ones. No straight lines here.

  The forests continued all the way to Canada. I had never spent so much time in the woods. Back home after the walk I missed the trees and started to wonder why our forests were so small or else were block plantations that didn’t look or feel like the woods of the High Sierra and the Cascade mountains. The Pacific Crest Trail had changed me. I started to think about the tree stumps I saw sticking out of the peat in those bare Scottish glens. I started to wonder why in so many places the only trees were on steep slopes in ravines or on islands in lochs. I noticed the lack of a timberline like that in the High Sierra. Once I started to ask these questions the answers appeared quite quickly and I began to properly understand the concepts of deforestation and overgrazing. I didn’t though, think that anything could be done about it and my growing interest in protecting the hills was still solely about preservation. Restoration was a concept still to come.

  My second American long walk, down the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico on the Continental Divide Trail, reinforced my love of big forests and big wilderness. I was reading conservation writers now - John Muir, Edward Abbey, W. H. Murray - and thinking about their words. In the USA I read about restoration projects in wild areas. Back home developments in Scotland helped my thinking develop. The year I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail the Scottish Wild Land Group was found
ed, a year later the John Muir Trust came into being. I joined both. The year after I hiked the Continental Divide Trail the then Nature Conservancy Council bought the Creag Meagaidh estate and began the process of forest restoration by reducing grazing pressure. The forest could return.

  My eyes open I could no longer walk the bare Scottish glens without thinking of the forest that should and could be there. Sometimes I regret this. It was nice being innocent and thinking this an unspoilt wilderness. More often I look for any signs of recovery and relish them when I see them, whether it’s a single sapling poking through the heather or a fenced enclosure of planted native trees intended to create a natural forest. Overall I prefer not to have fences or planting but if they are the only option I don’t object. Eventually I moved to the Cairngorms, to the area where there is the largest extent of wild forest remaining, and one of my greatest joys is to see this forest regenerating and spreading.

  I still return to North America every so often to experience again the vast wilderness areas. Each time I see these glorious forests I think that with will, determination and effort Scotland’s wild areas could be so much more natural and wooded.

  Backpacking and wilderness

  For me backpacking and wilderness go together. Backpacking is all about venturing deep into wilderness and experiencing nature at its most pristine and perfect, but what exactly is wilderness and how do you know when you are there? The answers may seem obvious but legislators and conservationists who have tried to define wilderness have found this surprisingly hard.

  Generally the conclusion is that wilderness is land without human habitations and little sign of human activity.

  In the USA there are designated wilderness areas, deemed to fit the definition of the Wilderness Act: ‘An area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain’.

  As there is little land ‘‘untrammelled by man’’ (and what a lovely word untrammelled is) in the UK we prefer to talk about wild land rather than wilderness though the distinction is unclear.

  According to the John Muir Trust wild land is ‘uninhabited land containing minimal evidence of human activity’ while the National Trust for Scotland is rather more expansive, saying ‘Wild Land in Scotland is relatively remote and inaccessible, not noticeably affected by contemporary human activity, and offers high-quality opportunities to escape from the pressures of everyday living and to find physical and spiritual refreshment’.

  There is a problem with these definitions. They leave out large areas of Britain beloved by backpackers, including much of the Lake District, Snowdonia, Peak District and Yorkshire Dales, not to mention many coastal areas. Popular long distance paths like the Pennine Way, West Highland Way, Offa’s Dyke and Cleveland Way don’t run through much wild land by these criteria either. Yet surely they do. The land in these national parks and along these trails doesn’t feel tame, which it must be if not wild, but feelings don’t come into official designations. Camp high on Cross Fell on a night of storm and wind, with the clouds racing across the moon and heavy showers hammering on the tent, as I have, and tell me this is not a wild place.

  Many years ago I came up with my own explanation of wilderness: ‘If there is enough land to walk into, enough room to set up a camp and then walk on with that freedom that comes when you escape the constraints of modern living, then it is wilderness, in spirit if not by definition’.

  For backpackers I think this still holds. Trying to classify wilderness precisely doesn’t work, as it shouldn’t. The wild cannot be contained, defined and corralled into a neat box. If it could it wouldn’t be wild. As well as having a physical reality, wilderness is also an idea, a feeling, a set of concepts that come together to shout ‘this is wild’. This idea is especially important in Western Europe where we do not have the huge areas of pristine land found in the Americas. Yet we do have many pockets of wildness that fit my description, places where you can feel you are far from civilisation even if it lies only a few miles away.

  Camp deep in a wood with the only sounds those of wild life and the wind in the trees and you are in the wilds despite the nearby roads and villages. Climb into the Lakeland fells to camp by a high tarn and you are in a wild place though you could be back down in the pub in a few hours. The distance doesn’t matter; it’s the situation that says where you are. Strolling country lanes to camp on a crowded roadside campsite only touches the edge of the wild. Walk just a few miles on and camp in solitude beside a hill stream and you are part of it. In distance and time you are almost in the same place. In feeling and experience you are in a different world.

  I realised this when I camped in the Grand Canyon on the Arizona Trail. I was crossing the Canyon on the popular trails, which are spectacular but crowded and with strict regulations about where you can camp. I had planned on camping at the Bright Angel Campground at the bottom of the Canyon, a lovely but organised, safe and tame campground with picnic tables, neatly laid out tent sites, toilets and fees. However the site was full so I followed a ranger’s suggestion and walked a few miles away from the campground along the Clear Creek Trail to an area where I could camp wild.

  Leaving the somewhat tempting lights of the campground and nearby Phantom Ranch with its bar and restaurant I followed the narrow winding trail below great cliffs as darkness fell. The instant the lights of Phantom Ranch vanished I felt back in wild country. Camp was on a flat stony platform just off the trail, where I simply threw down my foam pad and sleeping bag. The walls of the canyon rose above me, a hard blackness darker than the soft black of the sky, in which a myriad stars sparkled. There were no lights, no sounds, no sign of people. Phantom Ranch and Bright Angel Campground were just a few hours away but no longer existed in my mind. For this night the Grand Canyon felt it belonged to me. At dawn I woke to the sun slowly lighting the colourful cliffs as the Canyon came back to life. I lay and watched the light and the glory return and felt incredibly grateful to be there rather than at Phantom Ranch. It was the finest camp of the whole walk.

  Similar feelings of excitement, wonder and wildness can be found all over Britain by walking that little bit further away from bright lights and warm indoor cosiness.

  Once wilderness is seen as a feeling and a concept, an ideal perhaps, then various factors can change how wild a place seems. The weather and the time of year are significant here. A storm adds wildness to any place, as I found on Cross Fell, while winter changes the nature of the land. Under snow tame domesticated land can become like the Arctic. One February, after exceptionally heavy snow, I set out from my front door and camped not far away on a rounded undistinguished hill, exploited for grouse shooting with heather burning and shooting butts. I could almost see my house from the summit, but all around spread a white wilderness, almost every sign of humanity hidden by the snow. It looked wild, it felt wild; it was wild. There are many such places that are transformed by storm or winter into wilder places that echo with what they once were. And many more that feel wild under blue skies and warm sun. Seeking them out is a large part of the joy of backpacking.

  Rewilding the hills

  How wild and natural should the hills be? Do you want them tame and docile so the walking is easy and secure? In an online comment one walker said they liked sheep in the hills because they make walking ‘very pleasant’. Now, sheep-cropped grassland certainly is easy to walk across but it’s also an artificial and biologically degraded landscape. Natural landscapes are wilder, more diverse and, for the walker, more challenging. Where the terrain is impossibly tough - dense forest, tangled bushes - the answer can be a path. I’d rather see a narrow trail through a wild and natural landscape than sheep-cropped terrain where it’s easy to walk anywhere. And if there’s no path then I’d rather find a way through the difficulties than have them tamed.

  A bigger question is how to achieve more natural and diverse wild lands. Just what does that involve anyway? Ideally I think it means leaving land alone, leav
ing it to be ‘self-willed’. However, whilst that’s fine for pristine and near-pristine places it may not be for more damaged ones. The question then becomes: ‘how much interference and management is acceptable?’ In turn this raises the question of how long you want to wait and whether the rewilding of a landscape can be speeded up. The answers vary depending on your outlook and aims. Aesthetically I think any management should be as unobtrusive and unnoticeable as possible. I also think such management also produces a more natural landscape in the long run. However I accept that in some places it just isn’t possible, at least at present.

  In Eskdale in the Lake District some extensive tree planting is being undertaken by the National Trust. Because this is sheep country the planted areas are fenced and the trees are caged. This looks highly unnatural. In time I guess the cages and fences will be removed and the forest will look more natural though it will still have straight lines dividing it from the bare land outside. Less obtrusive is the work being done by Trees for Life in Glen Affric. Again planting is involved but the trees are not caged. The new forests are simply fenced in to keep out deer. Again the line between the rich vegetation inside the fence and the sparse boggy vegetation outside is stark.

  Contrast these schemes, both of which I support, with that of the RSPB in Abernethy in the Cairngorms, a huge nature reserve that stretches from the forests around Loch Garten of ospreys fame to the summit of Ben Macdui. Having heard that the RSPB was to plant areas that as far as I knew were already regenerating and pretty natural anyway, I contacted the RSPB to find out what was going on and was invited on a field trip so I could see for myself (thanks to Regional Director George Campbell for organising this and also to Senior Site Manager Jeremy Roberts and Ecologist Andy Amphlett).