International Mountain Day
Written by John MacphersonHere’s a wee something in celebration of International Mountain Day.
I was born in the shadow of Ben Nevis, the UK’s highest mountain. My grandparents used to take tourists to the summit of ‘the Ben’ on ponies for 1 Guinea (including lunch) back in the late 1800’s. My own dad was a pioneer skiier in the 1930’s, skiing down ‘the Ben’ with some of his mates. I’ve spent a lot of my life around ‘the hills’, running on them, skiing down them, climbing them, and often just sitting staring at them, and I’d have to confess that I consider them to be pretty special places.
As a consequence of being quite happy working in remote locations & hostile conditions, I was asked by Scottish Natural Heritage to photograph a mountain National Nature Reserve, across all four seasons. The images to be used to provide illustrations for a new visitor centre, guide books, maps etc all designed to show the general public just why this mountain area is so very special. And so, on location for a week in midwinter and duty bound to make the effort, I took a chance on a very very bad weather forecast that had already closed the main roads with snow, and headed off up Beinn Eighe.
Coire Mhic Fearchair, Beinn Eighe NNR. © John MacPherson
This is a big, wild, remote west coast Scottish mountain, and I was aiming to get into Coire Mhic Fearchair, a hanging corrie high on the exposed west side of it. By early afternoon I was there, hanging onto a large ice-covered boulder to stop myself being blown over by 60mph gusts of seriously arctic wind, one of which gusts smashed my lens’ 72mm UV filter with an airborne pellet of ice. It was a wee bit harsh.But the magic I had discovered and was determined to photograph was an easily overlooked phenomenon caused by that very same violent wind. The spray being blown off a small loch in the corrie was coating the whole area around it with moisture, which was quickly freezing. And the blowing, freezing, blowing, freezing cycle was slowly but surely enclosing numerous blades of grass in an icy shell. Each one of which had become a fragile confection and which I was desperately trying not to stand on and destroy. That such harshness could produce so many delicate objects was a real revelation.
Grass encased in ice, Beinn Eighe. © John MacPherson
For me this sums up the magic of mountains. They’re big, they have big weather and they take some effort to get intimate with, but when you make the investment sometimes there are rewards, which may be subtle but really quite magical.
We can’t move mountains, but mountains can move us.
Author — John Macpherson
John MacPherson was born and lives in the Scottish Highlands. He trained as a welder in the Glasgow shipyards, before completing an apprenticeship as a carpenter, and then qualified as a Social Worker in Disability Services. Along the way he has cooked on canal barges, trained as an Alpine Ski Leader & worked as an Instructor for Skiers with disabilities, been a canoe instructor, and tutor of night classes in carpentry, stained glass design and manufacture, and archery. He has travelled extensively on various continents, undertaking solo trips by bicycle, or motorcycle. He has had narrow escapes from an ambush by terrorists, been hit by lightning, caught in an erupting volcano, trapped in a mobile home by a tornado, kidnapped by a dog's hairdresser, rammed by a basking shark and was once bitten by a wild otter. He has combined all this with professional photography, which he has practised for over 35 years. He teaches photography and acts as a photography guide & tutor in the UK and abroad. His biggest challenge is keeping his 30 year old Land Rover 110 on the road. He loves telling and hearing stories.