Towards the end of last year I was surprised to find that I only had 14 Munros left to do. Clearly this discovery meant that I would have to have a bit of a get-together with friends and accomplices for the last one, and so I've hired a house in Scotland for next Easter, by which time I hope I only have one left.
I started nearly forty five years ago with my Dad on Bidein a'Ghlas Thuill, one of An Teallach's two tops, so it seemed fitting when I was planning all this to finish with the other one, Sgurr Fiona. This is quite a daunting mountain to climb in what may well be winter conditions, It's quite high, climbed from sea level, and, if done properly, involves some heady scrambling over the pinnacles and up to Lord Berkeley's seat. My wife wants to stay behind and make a good dinner for us all. I am trying to insist that she come with us. The children may be even less biddable.
Almost all of the Munros can be climbed without use of the hands, so it is not on the whole a technical challenge. You can of course make it harder by opting to do some of the great mountaineering routes along the way - I've been lucky enough to do Tower Ridge on the Ben, Agag's Groove on the Buchaille and the remote Mitre Ridge on Beinn a'Bhuird amongst others - and by doing a fair proportion of them in winter. I have often had to crawl on the exposed summits when the westerly gales made standing up impossible, most memorably one November day on Schiehallion, when my eyelashes were blown back into my eyes.
The Munros in winter are never easy and sometimes downright dangerous, particularly if you go on your own. But the main challenge is that there are so many of them - 277 when I started, a figure which rose to 284 and then fell again marginally last year to 283 when Beinn a'Chlaideimh was remeasured and found to be below the 3000 foot mark. Beinn a'Chlaideimh is the easiest one I've ever ticked off, because I hadn't yet climbed it, and its demotion by the Scottish Mountaineering Club brought my outstanding number down to 13. I now have 10 left.
As well as being numerous, a lot of Munros are an awful long way away from London (where I was living from number 2 - the Carn Dearg near Corrour railway station - onwards) and Manchester (where I've lived since climbing Stuchd an Lochan, no. 149). That helps explain why all but two of my remaining Munros are north of the Great Glen. But even if you live in Glasgow, say, some of them take some getting to, and when you get there are a long, long way from the road. I have met people in the Fisherfield Forest who had walked in for the day to climb A'Mhaigdean, and they looked dead on their feet with 15 miles still to go. Doing the Munros is hard, but not quite hard enough to prevent about 5,000 people from having done it. The task requires a quality which just so happens to be one of the only ones I possess in world-beating quantities, namely persistence, and that explains why I have nearly finished them.
It is of course possible to criticise the undertaking as a mere box-ticking exercise, and certainly I've met some people who gave every appearance of regarding it in that way. But its great merit is that the pursuit takes you to places you would never otherwise have gone, often in weather that the less obsessive would regard as more suitable for experiencing from within licensed premises.
And it repays. I saw the afterglow from the top of Beinn a'Ghlo one winter dusk, and came down the mountain in darkness; I climbed Tower Ridge on a perfect day overlooking a temperature inversion, all the peaks standing out like islands; I have stood on Sgurr Mhic Coinnich looking westwards over a shining sea, and in the silence of the Cuillin heard the blood roaring in my ears. I've seen eagles galore, foxes, badgers, otters, once a wild cat (perhaps), and had as much fun with friends as in any other part of my life. It has been well worth it.
Moreover, I have kept a diary of all my ascents since the very early years, and I now have a series of snapshots of my life going back to the late 1980s, in which I quickly found that the interesting things to record were the most apparently trivial. So I can tell you what two girls did when I was approaching the summit of Carn a'Chlamain, or what I overheard a passerby say as we were unroping on top of the Ben.*
I'm quite glad I've nearly finished though. Not because I desperately want to complete (or compleat, as Munroists apparently spell it); the nearer I've got to the end the less I mind whether I finish or not. It was the doing that was the pleasure, and as Sir Leslie Stephen, philosopher and Alpine pioneer, once wrote, "We go climbing to remind ourselves what it's like". But I have climbed an awful lot of Scottish mountains now, and I know pretty well what they are like. It would be quite nice not to have to do it any more. Moreover, although I'm not physically decrepit I am starting to see what decrepitude will be like. I am fending it off by spending time at the gym, but it would be mildly annoying to find that it had overtaken me on the last lap.
What will I do if and when I have compleated? Please don't say climb them all again. It makes me tired just thinking about it.
*The girls were looking at my legs; at the time I thought their glances were admiring, but I now realise it was just my unfashionable tweed breeches that caught their eye. The passer-by on the Ben said, "I goes, 'What did you call me?', and he goes 'I called you a c*** Dad. Get over it'". I thought that could not possibly happen with my kids. Little did I know.
