Keeping tags...

Carabus auronitens - a ground beetle.

Perhaps it’s an age thing, but most days I carry a series of lists in my head: jobs to do, people to call, articles to write... I juggle calendars too: appointments, holiday plans, who in the family is where and when… And because I live by the sea, awareness of the tides is a constant, not least for walking the whippet.

So, you’d think that when I’m away in the hills I might give up all this mental note taking. ‘Live in the moment,’ is what my wife Jane likes to advise me. She’s right of course, for one of the chief virtues of the outdoors is its ability to shift our focus from the stresses of the everyday.

But that doesn’t mean I stop making lists.

This summer, like many before, I’ve recorded all the wildlife I’ve encountered, from insects to birds and mammals. Unsurprisingly, the list gets longer the more time I spent in the Alps. In part, that’s because of the greater bio diversity here, but I sense it’s also something to do with a landscape that encourages us to look, and not just at the view.

It strikes me too, that my alpine lists are different from those I compile at home. And that’s because, at root, they are founded on place rather than a pressure to complete or comply. Indeed, the word I used in the paragraph above is their defining feature – they are a ‘record’ of lived experience rather than a tick list to be completed.

Looking at my logs for this year, I’ve a few firsts, many old favourites and number of uncertainties to check - largely beetles! Not that precise identification matters. For as I turn the pages of my journals I remember the moments of seeing, the flashes of colour, the shadows on the shifting grass…

Sometimes, with all our daily distractions, it’s easy to overlook what a magical world we live in.

The paths we take

Picos de Europa, Spain

I have a friend who insists that every holiday she takes must be to a new destination; there’s so much to see she says, that returning does not appeal. My late parents in law were similar, clocking over 100 countries in their retirement. But while they clearly enjoyed sightseeing, I always felt their travel was as much about the list than the location.

On the spectrum of a preference for local haunts versus new horizons I’m undoubtedly closer to the former. Years ago, I wrote an article about the most significant places in my life and how revisiting them – time and again – was one of my greatest pleasures. It still is, for the familiar need not be mundane, as anyone who has climbed the same mountain in different seasons will know.

In Wales, where I live, the phrase ‘Dyn y filltir sgwâr’ refers to a person who is deeply rooted in their sense of place and community. It translates as ‘man of his own square mile’, and whenever I meet someone who fits the description I’m invariably in awe – envious even. My elderly neighbour, surrounded by her family and the landscape she loves is a daily reminder of how travelling far afield is not everything.

And yet, for all my love of home, there are times when the shock of the new can be wonderful too. This month I passed through the Picos de Europa in Northern Spain. It’s a place I’ve long wanted to explore and boy, did it not disappoint. Though only fleeting, my time there is already hinting at possibilities, suggesting new adventures…

Often, I ponder how we balance our native roots with the understandable desire to explore and learn and share. Because for all that I’m no nomad, I see the value in both approaches. Indeed, only yesterday, in one of those quiet moments with a cup of tea, I found myself googling the cost of ferries to Santander...

But enough mental rambling from me... I hope your journeys are as joyful as mine were this month — be they to foreign fields or on familiar turf.

This post was originally published in the Austrian Alpine Club (UK) newsletter

The beauty of the earth - and of life

My mother passed away last week; the conclusion of a long and fretful journey that raised many questions about life and its value. If I had a pound for everyone who’s since said it was a blessing in the end, I’d have a healthy donation to the causes she cared for. But the arc of this piece is not to dwell on mortality - rather it’s to remember the joy of living and how we might grasp it.

I was in the Alps the days before she died, walking in the high spring meadows she would have so loved. Indeed, it was her who first took me to the mountains and though no climber, she could have named every flower and tree that we passed. Despite years of making long motorway journeys to see her, I think she would have been glad I was in the hills, rather than at her bedside.

For is there any better place to reaffirm the circle of life than an alpine pasture?

Walking with my son, we saw marmots and lizards emerging from winter slumber, gentians poking through the rocks (oh, how I wish they could make a wreath of those), swallowtails dodging the spray from snowmelt waterfalls… Everywhere, and in different ways, the unbounded energy of the sun.

But most of all, there was joy throughout, even from the ultra-runners that passed us on the descents! As our two-day trek came full circle, they still had miles to go – and though I didn’t envy them their challenge I thought of their drive to push the limits of what’s possible. That’s what my mother would have wanted – for us to live to the full, to be connected to nature and to follow our paths wherever they might lead.

Holding that thought, now and in the future, is the most important legacy she has left me.

Take joy in the beauty of the earth

How do you like your memories…

Unedited imperfection... but true...

The latest version of my iPhone software came with an upgrade to the camera. Evidently, I can now edit my pictures using an AI tool that removes all those imperfections spoiling the view. Never again need my snaps be sullied by unwanted road signs or errant clouds, let alone my fat thumb intruding on the lens.

It was fun to try this out, cleansing several images to create a reimagined perfection. And it’s scarily easy as well, taking mere seconds to achieve what would previously have required hours of skilled programming. Indeed, I’m old enough to have worked with design studios that used to physically airbrush photos!

Which should remind us that there’s always been an element of contrivance to photography. Just as photo journalists compose their shots to better tell a story, my phone is full of smiling portraits and carefully framed views from the hills and coasts where I roam. And as for seeking perfection, let’s be honest, who hasn’t said, ‘Oh delete that one, it makes me look old, silly, awful… (insert as appropriate)’

But the AI tool takes all this a stage further — enabling a quantum leap in artifice and self-deception. Which perhaps explains why, after the novelty wore off, I began to wonder if this is really how we want to remember our adventures? Surely, I reflected, the imperfections are part of our experience too, just as hiking is as much about sweating on the trail as the view from the summit.

Neuroscientists say the human brain is programmed to want to remember the good and the exceptional – but by polishing every flaw are we not also erasing an essential part of the truth?

None of which means we should scowl at the camera or care nothing for composition. The beauty of the landscape, the company of friends, our happening on an unforgettable vista – these are what make memories so vibrant. Which is why I prefer mine to be founded on fact not fantasy – for it seems to me, that a world in which everything was perfect, would actually be pretty dull.

Happy snapping, wherever you may wander.

Reflections on Zen and the Art…

There’s a passage, early in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that describes why riding a bike feels so different to making the same journey by car. When sitting behind the wheel, he writes, we experience the landscape as if viewing it on TV: cocooned from the elements, the driver is at a remove from all that passes them by.

In contrast, motorcycling is an immersive experience: you feel the wind and rain directly, the heat of the sun and chill of the shade. What’s more, your body is essential to control of the machine: leaning into bends, absorbing the bumps, reacting to the road with throttle, brake and gears. At its best, the intensity of engagement is akin to a state of ‘flow’, and for some (not least me), the key reason they ride.

Of course, there are other attractions to motorcycles, and touring the US these last two weeks has reinforced many in my mind. On the road, there’s a camaraderie between bikers; a shared passion that’s acknowledged with nods of our helmets, or a wave of the hand. And typically, on arrival, there’s a generosity to the welcome you receive, fuelled (supercharged even) by Americans’ probing curiosity.

All this adds an extra dimension to the quality of the journey, the memories we file and the stories we share. There’s something special too, about being ‘in’ the landscape while travelling through it at speed.  Pirsig’s TV analogy seems not to stretch to a motorcycle visor ( I suspect he rode with an open face helmet) and here on the desert roads, the immensity of the place and smallness of your presence is as tangible as it is intoxicating.

I’m conscious that little of this will be new or revelatory to a hill walker or cyclist. The fellowship of mountain huts is legendary, as is the love of bicycles in, say, France. I was once riding through the Alps on a tandem when a mountain train stopped for the passengers to cheer us on; some even disembarked to offer fresh croissants. Another time, on a mountain trek, I met a blind walker who humbled me with the interest he showed in the achievements of others. 

Indeed, the physical demands of most outdoor pursuits are greater than motorcycling, lacking, as they do, an engine to boost your momentum.  Cycling, in particular, can be so draining that you close in on yourself, leaving precious little energy for admiring the view. Rock climbing and whitewater kayaking - my other lifelong passions - are not dissimilar: the attraction being less an adrenaline rush than their immediacy and intensity of focus.

Perhaps then, my newfound love of motorcycling has something to do with age, coming as it has with a lessening of strength and slowing of the reflexes. I like to think my powers of concentration are undiminished; certainly Jane would tell you I’ve not lost the ability to selectively zone out! Jokes aside, there’s probably some truth in this, though it’s not the full picture.

Since taking up the pastime, I’ve been amazed that motorcycles are not more popular with the younger generation. The vast majority of riders are male, white and likely retired. Yet for less than the price of an average electric mountain bike, you can buy a machine that will capably take you around the world.  If I were twenty years old again, I know what I’d be doing with my summers.

Thankfully, my youngest son is just as happy to humour his old man. Indeed, riding with him has become one of my greatest joys. So while I’ve loved every mile of my two-week tour of the Southwest States, I’d trade them all in a heartbeat for a single one of the trips we’ve made together in Wales. 

Luckily, I don’t have to.

Which brings me back to Robert Pirsig, whose autobiographical journey can be read on several levels: as a travelogue, a philosophical conversation, and a coming of age in his role and relationship as a father. I doubt that he travelled the same roads as me this fortnight, but it’s surely no coincidence that ‘Zen and the Art’ has long been one of my favourite books. 

Size matters…

Travelling by motorcycle through the US this week, I’m struck by the tension between my sense of both its familiarity and difference, Unlike the twenty or so miles separating Dover from Calais there’s no language barrier here, the roads and infrastructure are not dissimilar to our own, and the food, for all its occasional oversize portions, would find a welcome home in most British pubs. I guess the climate is more extreme, but that’s increasingly so in the UK too - frankly, even Vegas felt like Blackpool on acid.

Indeed, so much of our culture is now shared that the differences between them are smaller and subtler than we perhaps like to admit. There’s a tangible lack of self-consciousness in America (even more so of deprecation or irony) that to us Brits can feel brash to the point of cringeworthy. So too with the overt displays of patriotism and religion; yesterday, on the road to Cortez, I counted over fifty US flags, several of them flying from Baptist chapels.

While that’s not something you’d see in the Cotswolds, a moment's reflection brings to mind the Union Jacks we dig out for the World Cup or Royal Weddings.  And as for Americans being arrogant,  consider the plummy accents of our upper classes and elitism engendered by public schools. Ultimately, for all our superficial contrasts, I can’t help but feel that deep down we’re more together than apart, not least in a common if incompatible faith that our respective homelands, and their associated values, music, sports… you name it… are a model for the rest of the world to follow. 

But riding through - and ‘in’ - the landscape here, I’m struck by one overwhelming difference, encapsulated in an adjective that repeats with every turn of the road. This place is vast!  And as I said today, tongue in cheek, to a delightfully welcoming gallery host I met in Durango - size matters!

We were viewing some over-scaled photo prints by David Yarrow, and thankfully, she laughed, confirming that we can share a sense of humour after all. It turned out that we also shared an interest in nature and art, and the capacity of both to inspire and connect us to something bigger than ourselves. 

Of course, all this is possible in a more intimate setting. My point is not that bigger is better. Rather, that it’s different, and at the risk of using an intentional pun, massively so!  

Scale is important - and especially in landscape and art - because, more than any other visual or spatial factor, it impacts directly on our intuitive responses. By this I mean those visceral feelings that come in the nanoseconds before thinking and categorising and verbal proxies such as beautiful, or awe-inspiring, or for that matter, vast! Taking a painterly example, it’s precisely why the abstracts of Rothko or the water lilies of Monet were rendered so large.

And following that vein, I wonder how riding here - and the physicality that involves - has shaped my first impressions after an absence of twenty years. So much of America is bigger, and yes, brasher and less apologetic, than the distances and polite understatement that sit more comfortably with our British reserve. But it’s also wonderful and immersive and - that word again - vast.  

On Tuesday this week, I rode across the Navajo First Nation territory, uninterrupted and almost entirely alone. ‘Follow the road for seventy-two miles,’ my sat-nav said, the arrow straight tarmac melting into the heat of a pale desert sunrise. As the miles clicked by, I kept thinking of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the violent, if ultimately redemptive, novels of Cormac McCarthy. 

That probably says more about me than it does about modern-day America. But then this is a landscape that it’s easy to get metaphorically lost in, and yet also, I sense, a good place to find yourself.  In both regards, there’s, thankfully, still much to discover. 

Chasing dreams….

It’s rare that I’d post something on this blog before its publication elsewhere, but after a three-month respite, it seems a good way to return and set up some more regular musings.  As will become clear, I’m writing this at the start of an American road trip; a long-dreamed-of adventure of sorts. The piece is my pending editorial for an alpine newsletter, but hopefully, it has wider resonance too.

I hope you enjoy it.

Chasing our dreams….

From the window of my hotel room (on the twenty-fourth floor of the putative Royal tower), I can see little more than mile after mile of low-rise development. The flat roofs of the industrial blocks below me are peppered with air conditioning units and parked SUVs.. Beyond them, the desert and the pale hint of adventure….

In a well-travelled life, few places have rendered me so intuitively uncomfortable as central Las Vegas. Seldom have I felt as out of place and conscious of mankind’s impact on the environment, let alone our propensity for frivolity and hubris. It would be easy, though rank hypocrisy on my part, to write a piece that tears a strip off its every conception.

For the truth is, I’m here out of choice, as a gateway to a landscape that’s been on my wish list since I first watched a cowboy movie. In many ways, the city is a symbol of the conflicts that fulfilling such a dream involves. I came here in a plane, was driven from the airport by a Somalian refugee, and other than avoiding Trump Tower, paid little interest to my hotel room beyond its location and price.

How we balance the urge for adventure with environmental and ethical concerns is one of the most complex and difficult choices of our times. Like many of us who love the outdoors, I try to make a difference, and indeed, to give something back when I can, but I struggle with the idea of imposing limitations. I don’t pretend to have an easy answer, and certainly won’t stand in judgement of others, least of all, on the basis that my regular visits to the Alps are somehow more worthy than the choices of those who might opt for, shall we say, less wholesome locations.  

Which is perhaps why, for all its kitsch and superficiality, transiting through Las Vegas has been such a prompt to reflection. Not least, as a powerful reminder of the immense privilege it is to explore and experience the world like no generation has before - be that for landscape, for leisure, or for that matter, playing the slots and tables in a fantasy-themed hotel… 

 P.S. Please leave comments as usual if you wish, but understand that for the next few weeks, my technology is limited and replying or counter comments may be difficult for me to achieve.