In the late 50s my father, an analytical chemist, went to work at the BACO plant in Kinlochleven. I once asked him what he did there but he claims not to remember. I bet you though, that he could still outline in great detail the days that he and his mates spent in those mountains, even if it was 55 years ago. I imagine in the heyday of the works, he and his contemporaries never dreamed that one day the smelter would stop smelting and that ultimately their place of work would become The Ice Factor, in fact, the very concept of climbing indoors remains totally alien to him.
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| My dad - judging by my rucksack, sometime in the early 2000s |
When I was young there was a pair of hobnail boots next to the 'end' loo. I presume these belonged to my father. Back in the day, so he once told me, your only option for mountaineering boots was to draw round your feet and send the templates to a man somewhere in London; at least by the time my mother was climbing in the early 1960s, Graham Tiso had opened his shop in Leith. One of her favourite stories involves sneaking a pair of boots in diabolical condition into the secondhand boot display and going past the shop every day to see if they had sold!
My parents have endless tales of mountain, climbing club and bothy antics and it transpires that they were acquainted with folk like Robin Smith and Dougie Haston, now firmly in the annals of Scottish mountaineering history. (Said of the former: "He used to down-climb things in his wellies that I could hardly climb up in my climbing shoes"). There was the guy known as 'Bogtrotter', who moved so fast that he failed to sink in the bogs that trapped the following group, and the tale of a Rag Week scaling of Castle Rock in Edinburgh, dressed as a baby, with ropes hidden from the police in a pram.
But the more I hear about what they did and the more I am able to equate their experiences with my own, the more impressed I become. Earlier in the year I told my mother about a winter trip to the Highlands, she consulted the encyclopedia that is my father and reported back that they too had done those routes. In the 1960s. With crap clothing, no harnesses, long axes and probably a hemp rope... She then digressed into a range of winter tales: inadvertently descending some (Grade II) gully in the dark, the time my dad dropped a small cornice on her head and the piece de resistance, when a girl fell past my father on a winter climb and he pulled off her trousers trying to arrest her fall.
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| State of the art gear found in the cupboard! |
Mountains brought my parents together too. The male mountaineering house claimed to have an additional housemate who was always 'in Switzerland, in Italy, in the Alps, in Norway', the female mountaineering house, increasingly sceptical of his very existence, began to devise reasons to visit at odd times of day... On one such foray they found a dark haired, blue eyed, tanned stranger in the front room, just returned from the Italian Alps...
My father went to the Lofoten Islands long before there were causeways between every island and my mother's comedy stories extend to Norway, the Alps and the Pyrenees, her favourite involving my father firing up his petrol stove in an Alpine hut, while a cowering Frenchman exclaimed "Il sera un grand explosion!"
More than anything, when I hear these stories and look at their, often black and white, photographs, I am envious of my parents and the adventures they have had, experiences I long for but never seem to have the opportunity to partake in. Rock climbing, scrambling, hill walking, winter climbing or Alpinism, they seemed to have done it all, almost in another life time. And I like the fact that they did these things together; mountains have played a pivotal role in their relationship and I am envious too, that their deep rooted love of these places is something that they have always shared.
I suppose it comes as no surprise to anyone that I love mountains too.
I suppose it comes as no surprise to anyone that I love mountains too.
