Mountain Man: 446 Mountains. Six months. One record-breaking adventure

Contents

Maps

Prologue

1 Navigationally Challenged

2 Back on Track

3 Organised Chaos

4 Calamity James

5 A Double-Edged Sword

6 Day Tripper

7 Sleeping Wild

8 Spies, Elephants and a Porsche

9 Hitch’n’hiking

10 A Strange Double Life

11 The Mind of a Peak-Bagger

12 A Cloud in the Heavens

13 The Bog of Eternal Stench

14 Chasing Aliens

15 Sleeping in A Swamp

16 Liam’s Mangoes

17 Dodging Bombs

18 Boy Racers and Middle-Finger Salutes

19 Mapless and Clueless

20 A Handsome Crag

21 The Final Summit

Epilogue

How to Plan Your Own Epic Adventure

Glossary

Plates

Maps

PROLOGUE

My name is James and there is nothing extraordinary about me. I’m not some sort of super-human, all-action adventurer. I have no idea how to abseil down a precipice, or forage for berries, or navigate in mist. I can’t build a shelter or tie useful knots or run ultra-marathons. I’m scared of most animals and my legs go wobbly if I stand too close to a cliff edge. Dark nights freak me out and I can barely sleep in my tent unless it’s perfectly horizontal. Oh, and I can’t even grow a rugged beard. Rubbish credentials for an adventurer.

There was nothing extraordinary about my adventure, either. I didn’t wrestle a bear, or dodge bullets in a war-ravaged country, or survive a near-fatal accident. There were no poisonous spiders or hostile bandits. I didn’t triumph over horrific personal demons or have any life-changing epiphanies. I never once had to sever a boulder-trapped limb to free myself from a ravine. All I did was put one foot in front of the other on my days off from work.

But that ordinariness is exactly why my adventure was extraordinary. It proved that you can integrate something truly adventurous into your everyday life. You don’t need to be rich, or have 12 months off work, or travel halfway across the world, or be Ranulph Fiennes. You don’t need technical skills or expensive kit. With a little outdoorsy grit and adventurous spirit, anyone can go on a big adventure – including you.

In 2017 I climbed all four hundred and forty-six 2,000ft mountains in England and Wales in just six months – the fastest-ever time. Solo and unsupported, I walked over 1,000 miles, ascended five times the height of Everest and slept wild under the stars over 25 times. And I did it all while holding down my job, moving house and, somewhat miraculously, keeping my personal life just about under control.

The mountains taught me a simple but transformative lesson too: if you disconnect from technology, you reconnect with something innate and natural. In an internet-obsessed world of Instagram likes, Netflix binges and bursting email inboxes, we have lost our way. But if you turn off your phone and go climb a mountain, life is happier. Priorities realign, everyday worries dissipate, and closeness to nature and landscape is rekindled. Your reality becomes wholesome, humble, uncomplicated and fulfilling. It is joyous and liberating.

You learn to savour the simple pleasures in life – the pitter-patter of rain on your tent, a hot drink on a summit, the stillness of a forest, the wind in your hair, the crunch of the rocks below your feet – while simultaneously becoming immune to the stresses and anxieties that plague everyday life. After all, when you’re watching the sky swirl a thousand shades of pink as the sun sets over silhouetted mountains, you really don’t care about your burgeoning to-do list at work; and when you’re hiking along an airy sun-drenched ridgeline, you truly can switch off from the incessant noise of online life; and when you’re feeling like the king of the world on top of an exposed summit, you quickly realise how meaningless and fruitless our technology addictions really are.

Conversely, spending time in the mountains is meaningful and fruitful. Every walk I’ve completed has been time well spent – time for wilderness and solitude, for self-reflection and quiet, for escapism and nature. Every mountain has brought me boundless happiness. To non-believers this might seem a sentimental exaggeration but I stand by the statement. Being in the mountains is good for the soul. Why? Because, in the poetic words of the great fellwalker Alfred Wainwright: ‘I was to find ... a spiritual and physical satisfaction in climbing mountains – and a tranquil mind upon reaching their summits, as though I had escaped from the disappointments and unkindnesses of life and emerged above them into a new world, a better world.’

So what are you waiting for? Grab your boots, turn off your phone and go explore that better world.

Chapter 1

NAVIGATIONALLY CHALLENGED

I’ve always been pretty terrible at navigation. On countless occasions I’ve been well and truly lost in the mountains, wandering around aimlessly, descending into the wrong valley or taking the wrong turn off a summit. One year on the GR20 in Corsica, my friend Joe and I even walked for two full days in the wrong direction, nearly starving ourselves in the process but justifying our schoolboy error with the get-out clause ‘It’s all part of the adventure’. Back in the mountains of Britain I’ve fared little better. Put it this way, if it wasn’t for the GPS-tracking capabilities of the OS Maps app, I’m pretty sure I’d be face down in a gully in the Rhinogs of North Wales right now, with a bemused feral goat nibbling at my rotting body.

My ability to navigate life was, for many years, similarly feeble. I didn’t know where I was going or what I wanted. I lost focus of my passions. I made bad decisions. I chased material goals that never satisfied. I marched steadfastly towards one ambition only to realise I’d taken a wrong compass bearing and was heading in completely the wrong direction. My journey to the start line of this peak-bagging challenge was, therefore, neither straightforward nor guaranteed. I could so easily have never made it.

I grew up in Birmingham and, despite that fact, had a happy childhood in a loving, middle-class household. My parents gave me everything I could have ever wanted – and in return I drove them crazy with what they labelled my ‘ants in pants’ syndrome. I just couldn’t sit still. I always wanted to be outside, exploring or playing football or going to the park. As soon as I could talk, my catchphrase became ‘What are we doing next?’

Mum and Dad, understandably, coped with this by shipping me off at every available opportunity to my grandparents down the road in Handsworth. And it was, bizarrely, in that concrete jungle of north Birmingham in the early 1990s that my love for the great outdoors was forged. Every Saturday, my little brother Tom and I, wearing our matching electric-blue shell suits, would be dropped off at Bush Grove and go for a long walk.

Grandpa, who was as tall as a giant and smelled of roll-up cigarettes, would lead the way. He always looked really smart, in a collared shirt, tie, and boots so impeccably polished you could almost see your reflection in them. Granny, with a fresh perm and bubbly demeanour, would take my arm and sync footsteps as we chanted, ‘Left, right, left right, I had a good job and I left’ – her Brummie version of a military marching song that, fittingly, suited her penchant for telling bosses where to stick it. As we weaved along the back streets of Handsworth, through urban parks and past allotments, Tom and I would listen carefully for the roar of the West Bromwich Albion faithful, trying to predict whether it was Bob Taylor or Andy Hunt who had put the mighty Baggies ahead.

We’d cross the ‘hole in the wall’, a gap in the high brick wall along Park Lane leading to Sandwell Country Valley Park. To me, aged ten, that hole was a magical gateway into a land of endless opportunities beyond the city limits; a land where you could jump in puddles, clamber over fallen trees, run through woods, gaze over rolling greenery as far as the eye could see, throw stones into ponds, feed ducks and pat horses, chase your little brother along country paths with reckless abandon, and hike for mile after mile in a haze of childhood happiness. I can vividly remember thinking my life was going to be full of times like this.

Two decades later, I was sitting on the grey corner sofa in the lounge of my semi-detached house in Birmingham, feeling utterly depressed. I was unfit, unmotivated and unhappy; a jaded, cynical shadow of my former self. I’d snapped moodily at a colleague that morning, got absolutely nothing done in the office, and then bailed on the post-work run in favour of stuffing my face full of fried food. I knew I was in a bad place, but I couldn’t see a way out. I felt trapped. How had I ended up here? Not by design, that’s for sure. Life had just happened. I’d floated along without a pre-planned route map, a victim of not knowing who I was or what I truly wanted from life.

I thought about the long and winding journey I’d been down. After graduating with a degree in modern history, I’d set up Sport 4 Life UK, a charity in Birmingham using sport and outdoor activities to improve the lives of disadvantaged teenagers. It was meant to be my dream job – making a difference, shunning the corporate world, being entrepreneurial and working, at least some of the time, outside. But it didn’t pan out like that. The reality of the job, particularly as the organisation grew rapidly, seemed to clash with my personality. I was stressed all the time and couldn’t relax. The responsibility of employing a team weighed me down. The uncertainty of our funding made me a nervous wreck. I compensated by working long hours, chaining myself to my desk and attempting to control things I simply couldn’t control. It was a great job – but it just wasn’t right for me. It was making me unhappy.

But I stayed for several years. Why? Because I didn’t want to be labelled a quitter and because I couldn’t face admitting I’d spent so long in the wrong job. Moreover, I didn’t know what else I could do and I was worried about the financial implications of dropping down the pay scale. These were all valid concerns, but by listening to them rather than my heart, I was living a lie. My mental health deteriorated as a result. I suffered from low-level anxiety and depression, had a fierce temper, and developed a negative way of thinking that drained the joy out of everything.

Eventually I plucked up the courage and willpower to take some baby steps towards improving my lot. I had therapy sessions; I took a sabbatical and temporarily lived in the Lake District; I reduced my hours at Sport 4 Life and pursued my love of writing by studying a part-time journalism course; I made a conscious effort to spend more time hiking, running or wild camping in the great outdoors; and finally I switched careers, quitting my role as a charity manager to become a newspaper reporter. All these changes helped, but my mood was still up and down. I hadn’t figured out a way to escape an office-centric existence, and my negativity demons were still haunting me.

I was in one of those pessimistic frames of mind as I shuffled along the corner sofa in my lounge trying to get comfortable. I glanced at the alluring mountains pictured on the cover of the Trail magazine lying on the floor. My last escape to the great outdoors – a wild camping and fellwalking weekend in the Lake District – felt like a distant memory. I was dedicating one weekend a month to outdoors adventures, as well as odd days and evenings here and there wherever possible. To many people that might seem like a lot. But for me it was never enough. The more time I spent in the great outdoors, the more convinced I became that I wanted to build my life around it, and the more disillusioned I became with not being able to do so.

Life is shit, I thought, pondering what ten-year-old James would make of this existence I’d carved out for myself. I flicked through the diary on my phone, ignoring the 17 unread work emails that were gnawing away at my brain, and scribbled down some calculations on the back of the magazine.

‘This is terrible,’ I said to Becky, my wife, prompting her to probe for more information.

‘What is?’ she obliged, reluctantly lifting her gaze from our expensive 32-inch flat screen.

‘I’ve worked it out. Last year I spent 235 days in an office staring at a computer but only 48 days travelling, climbing mountains and exploring the great outdoors. My life is a ratio of five parts mind-numbing boredom to one part fun.’

‘Don’t worry about it – you think too much,’ replied Becky, attempting to dodge another late-night, relaxation-shattering discussion about our life goals. But I wasn’t done.

‘Isn’t there more to life than all this?’ I asked, a monologue brewing. ‘Aren’t you bored of living in this city, of sitting at the same desk in the same office every day, of abandoning our dreams, of living for the weekend and hating the nine-to-five grind?’

‘I guess so, in a way – but it’s just what you do, isn’t it? That’s life.’ Becky too had been through a series of career upheavals as she searched for the right path in life. Previously a mental-health nurse, she found the emotional turmoil of that world too great, so she quit and became a manager in primary care. It was well paid and office-based, yet still stressful in a different way.

‘But does it have to be?’ I countered. ‘What if we took a different route? What if we said, Screw it to paying gas bills, setting down roots, investing in ISAs and chasing promotions? What if we chose instead to go backpacking, travel the world and pursue our passions? To watch less TV and climb more bloody mountains?’

‘We’ve been talking about this for years, James, but never done anything. What’s stopping us?’

I was scared. It was comforting to talk about flipping our lives upside down – but terrifying to genuinely consider doing it. There were so many reasons not to: mortgages, pensions, careers, societal expectations, and fear of the unknown. Would we be ruining our careers and throwing our financial security down the drain? Would we be labelled as work-shy wasters by our high-flying friends? What if it all went horribly wrong?

Or maybe, just maybe, it would be the best decision we ever made. I could feel a dizzying, are-we-really-going-to-do-this? excitement rise in my stomach.

‘Perhaps we should go for it then. Better to regret doing something than regret not doing it, right?’ I posed tentatively.

‘OK,’ said Becky, smiling.

And with that simple ‘OK’ our lives changed for ever. A week later our house was up for sale, two round-the-world plane tickets had been reserved, and eBay was cluttered with our unwanted possessions. Others might tell you about a watershed moment that pushed them into an adventurous lifestyle. Maybe they’d hit rock bottom and had nowhere else to turn, or an epiphany had struck while they were perched triumphantly on a mountain summit – but for Becky and me it wasn’t anything saccharine like that. It was simply a conversation on our sofa, surrounded by fish-and-chip wrappers, and the startling realisation that while financially it made sense to stick to our good jobs and secure futures, emotionally it would be self-destructive.

It was a slow and painful process getting things in order. We eventually sold our house, settling for £8,500 less than we’d bought it for in 2006, pre-credit crunch. It was an unwelcome financial hit, but thankfully a decade of working in reasonably well-paid jobs, with no kids and a far-from-flamboyant lifestyle, meant we’d already built up a mini treasure-trove of savings that could fund our gap year.

Once the contracts for the house sale were signed, the situation became real. This crazy idea was actually happening. So we handed in our notices at work. It was a frightening and unsettling thing to do. We almost backed out on several occasions, as 11th-hour doubts crept in. What are we doing? Have we just condemned ourselves to a lifetime of unemployment and homelessness? Oh God, are we going to regret this? But we stayed loyal to our convictions and it felt like a weight off our shoulders.

Despite all the obstacles and barriers and dead-ends, which might’ve tripped and blocked so many, we actually made it out of the maze to the beginning of the rest of our lives. Next, we tied up all the loose ends – closing down accounts, stashing our remaining possessions in my dad’s loft, SORN-ing our cars, applying for travel visas, booking our gap-year adventures – and, finally, we were off. The plan? Six months travelling the world followed by six months of living and working on a remote Lake District farm.

Our backpacking adventure was the trip of a lifetime, half a year of wanderlust-soaked, sun-drenched exploration through Australasia and South East Asia. We lived in a van, trekked through snake-infested rainforests, swam with sharks, chilled on tropical beaches, climbed volcanoes, ate fried locusts in the jungle, camped in the wilderness, learned to surf (badly) – and immersed ourselves in an intoxicating state of relaxation that comes only with having no direct debits, no daily routine and no adult responsibilities whatsoever.

Of course, things went awry here and there: we nearly died when the 175mph winds of Cyclone Winston, the most intense tropical cyclone on record in the Southern Hemisphere, smashed into Fiji; in New Zealand we witnessed a campervan crash off the road to Milford Sound, which left the vehicle crumpled in a ditch and two German tourists in critical condition despite our best efforts to help; and on several occasions our wimpy English dispositions left us screaming as we encountered snack-stealing monkeys, bed-invading cockroaches, tent-raiding possums and myriad other scary creatures. But, aside from the odd mishap, it was a fulfilling experience, a time of feeling as if we were truly squeezing every last drop out of life.

Back in Blighty, our hedonistic journey of self-discovery and reinvention showed no sign of slowing. We settled into life at Snittlegarth, the most northerly hill farm in the Lake District National Park, which boasted one eccentric family, innumerable sheep, five dogs, two pigs, a rowdy brood of breakfast-laying chickens and Marco the peacock, who rarely let you sleep past 7am. We’d arranged the placement through Workaway, a scheme that matches travelling volunteers with local hosts. Our role was quite simple: to put in daily shifts of unskilled manual labour in return for our board and lodgings. The landscape was beguiling; under the shadow of Binsey fell, it was all winding dry-stone walls, rolling green fields, tumbling gills and atmospheric woodland. We fed chickens, tended to the Herdwicks, fixed fences, shovelled shit, painted gates and whatever else Rod the farmer entrusted to us, knowing full well we were ‘townies’ who basically had no clue what we were doing. I loved working outside, with the sun on my back and the wind in my face, and the Lake District scenery tugged at my heartstrings every morning. But it couldn’t last for ever. The end of the 12 months arrived and our gap year in our 30s was over.

The downside? We returned to Birmingham with heads full of memories and wallets empty of money – and no real plan for the future. A vague notion that we’d become Instagram famous or that my blog traffic would skyrocket, enabling us to travel the world non-stop on a wave of money-making clicks, hadn’t come true. Our approach had proved to be boom and bust: 12 months of ‘wahey’ followed by the prospect of a rapid demotion back to ‘meh’. To put food on our plates and a roof over our heads, we needed cash, but how could we do that without falling back into the trappings of our old lives? How could we navigate this next hurdle in life without getting horribly lost again?

We were temporarily living with our respective parents. It was far from ideal. No one wants to be back in their childhood bedroom aged 33. We were desperate for a more permanent solution, but unsure exactly what that would look like. Where did we want to live? What type of jobs should we apply for? There were lots of questions and not many answers.

‘What about this one?’ said Becky, trawling the web for job vacancies in a geographically scattergun approach, as she half focused on her iPad and half watched Emmerdale on her parents’ TV.

‘It sounds horrific,’ I replied grumpily. ‘There’s no way I’m going back to work in an office full-time. I can almost feel the dreaded pull of real life sucking us back in and I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.’

‘Fair enough – this one?’

‘I don’t want to work in a café, even if it is in the Lake District. I want to do something at least vaguely intellectual.’

‘OK, smartarse – what’s the plan, then?’ retorted Becky.

I didn’t know. Perhaps we were destined to be navigationally challenged for the rest of our lives.

Chapter 2

BACK ON TRACK

So I started working on our life plan. And I mean really working on it. I read books, trawled blogs, wrote SWOT-analysis diagrams, scribbled notes, crunched budgets and took long meditative walks. At times it felt like a maths puzzle I couldn’t solve or a riddle I couldn’t figure out. How could we have more adventures, spend more time outdoors, have the flexibility and freedom to hike off into the sunset if and when we felt like it, while simultaneously earning enough money to get by? How could we turn our gap year into a gap life?

I even found myself, like a deranged version of Russell Crowe from A Beautiful Mind, scrawling down algebra-style equations in an attempt to unlock the secret to living adventurously. But clearly I didn’t have the genius for it – the solution to the formula always eluded me. Half in jest, I’d scribble down things like: if x is adventure, y is time and z is money, then x requires y + z, but y and z are inversely proportional, because you trade y for z at work, so to increase y, you earn less z, or to increase z, you have less y, and therefore in conclusion you should (a) buy a lottery ticket, (b) rob a bank, (c) sell your body, (d) jump off a bridge or (e) bury your dreams deep, deep down and never mention them again.

Geeky maths jokes aside, Becky and I slowly began to make progress. We established that there were several options. We could blitz full-time jobs for six months, save up as much cash as possible, and then ditch it all to travel the world again. But then we’d be stuck in a cyclical world of big highs and desperate lows. Perhaps we could become digital nomads, working remotely from laptops anywhere in the world, combining travel and jobs in perfect harmony. But our backgrounds in charity management, regional journalism and primary care were hardly suited to such an approach. Or maybe we could live in a campervan, or volunteer abroad, or retrain as outdoor instructors, or rent a remote cottage in the mountains, or work part-time and use the extra days off to go on smaller adventures. But which option would be right for us?

We found it helped to focus on the things we hated about our old lives – living in a city, working in an office and being too busy for adventures. We looked for solutions and suddenly everything began to fall neatly into place. We left our parents’ homes in Birmingham and rented a small flat in the lovely market town of Cockermouth in Cumbria, putting us within touching distance of the stunning Lake District mountains. Next we found jobs that didn’t involve being chained to a desk. I secured a three-day-a-week job as a fundraiser for mountain-path repair scheme Fix the Fells and also launched my fledgling career as a freelance outdoors writer. At the same time Becky snapped up a zero-stress part-time vacancy at a shop in Keswick. The last piece of the puzzle was slashing our