Climbing Scotland's Munros

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Outside Magazine, April 2005

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Scotland
The High Hills of Freedom
Footloose Scots will tell you there's no such thing as trespassing in the Highlands. And no one is more passionate about possessing these craggy, heather-painted mountains than the "compleaters" who summit the Munros—all 284 of them.

By Rob Buchanan


	BONNY SCOTLAND: 3,773-foot Bidean nam Bian poking up above the valley of Glen Coe (William Huber)

To bag, or not to bag: That is the question.

Alan Douglas and I are sitting in the otherwise empty car park at Rowardennan, on the shores of Loch Lomond, in western Scotland, glumly watching raindrops splatter across his windshield. Up above

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us, shrouded in a not-so-wee bit of mist, is a giant haystack called Ben Lomond. As the southernmost of the so-called Munros—the 284 Scottish peaks higher than 3,000 feet—Ben Lomond endures the plodding boot steps of more than 30,000 hill walkers a year. But on this wet May day, there may be just two of us heading up—or no one at all.

Douglas, who's invited me to climb the peak with him, leans forward to squint at the sky. "I don't know," he says. "On a normal day, I might not start if it was like this."

Is my host serious? Or is he just offering me, a newcomer to the sport of Munro bagging, an easy out? I'll never

This is perfect walking country: hillsides carpeted with yellow gorse, crunchy patches of bracken scattered here and there, springy soil underfoot.

know, because suddenly, without any warning at all, the rain stops. Before it can change its mind, we hop out of the car, pull on our daypacks, and set off—not on the main path up Ben Lomond's gentle southern shoulder but on a narrower one that approaches the peak via its less visited western flanks. "Twenty years ago there wasn't any path here at all," Douglas says as I pant along behind him. Then he laughs. "Actually, I suppose I'm partly to blame for it."

A hawk-nosed 60-year-old from the nearby village of Killearn, Douglas first started climbing Ben Lomond as a teenager, back in the sixties. But it wasn't until the mid-nineties that his career as "the Arch Lomondeer," as a fellow hill walker once dubbed him, really began. In 1987, his employer, the Clydesdale Bank, was gobbled up by a larger bank, and Douglas, a computer-services manager, was slowly phased out.



	Alan Douglas, a.k.a. "the Arch Lomondeer" (William Huber)

What Douglas mostly does these days, it seems, is climb Ben Lomond—three or four times a week, sometimes even twice a day. When people ask him about it, he tells them he's no different than a golfer who enjoys playing the same course over and over. "They always say, ‘Ah, but that's different every time,' " he tells me. "Well, so it is with this."

We toil on, cresting a little "top," or subsidiary peak, called Ptarmigan, dropping down a few hundred feet to a spongy bog, and then heading back up into the mist. Only it's not really toiling. It's perfect walking country, this: hillsides carpeted with heather and fragrant yellow gorse, crunchy patches of last year's bracken scattered here and there, springy soil underfoot.

The heather gives way to rock and then, surprisingly, snow. Above us, I can just make out the dim outline of Ben Lomond's summit. It's steep and, to the left, downright vertiginous, with big cliffs falling away into a deep corrie, or cirque—a typical feature of Scottish peaks, many of whose northern aspects were formed by glaciation.

Two hours out from the parking lot, we crest a little rise to find a tapered concrete pillar about four feet high. It's a surveyor's mark—a "trig point," Douglas calls it—marking Ben Lomond's 3,192-foot summit. We stand there peering out at the view of... nothing. Then, right on cue, the clouds tear open and we catch a couple of glimpses that, for me, seem to crystallize the dual essence of Scotland: to the south, emerald farm fields, silvery lochs, and the distant smudge of industrial Glasgow; and to the north, the Highlands, a wild landscape of snowcapped peaks, rugged moors, and, as far as I can see, no towns at all.

The clouds close in again. Douglas takes out a little gadget to measure the wind speed and temperature—21 miles per hour and three degrees Celsius, about 37 Fahrenheit—and jots them in a notebook, then starts down the main path in search of a windless lunch spot. A few steps later he stops and turns around.

"Och, I nearly forgot," he says, reaching out to shake my hand. "Congratulations on your first Munro!"

"Thanks," I say, feeling a sudden flush of pride. "And congratulations on your—well, how many Ben Lomonds is it?"

Douglas smiles shyly. "Well," he says, "today would be my 1,317th."

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Contributing editor ROB BUCHANAN wrote about the Blackburn Challenge, an open-water rowing race, in July 2004.

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