Strictly come camping

The perfect Saturday night for many people is to be wrapped up indoors in front of the telly watching Strictly Come Dancing. But for me it’s being out in my tent in a remote, wild place in the mountains. I love my tent and there’s no place I’d rather be.

I bought my first tent many years ago with my boyfriend of the time. He was from Fife and the tent was from Army & Navy. It was cheap and heavy, one of those old A-frame style tents that took an hour to erect and even then you were left with one section of pole that didn’t seem to fit anywhere. The first meal we made in the tent was fish and the aroma lingered for the rest of the tent’s days. But we lovingly christened it “The Receptacle” and had many happy nights under its stinking canvas.

Since then camping has become my passion. Of course it’s wonderful to climb a mountain or cycle the open road but the best part of the day is often finding an idyllic camp spot, getting the tent up and making a cosy little home for the night. There are obvious advantages to camping. It gives you incredible freedom to wander at will, knowing that you always have a place to stay and that you can change the view from your door every day. It also allows you to enjoy wild landscapes with minimum impact – no need for holiday resorts or ugly hotels – so you can leave the place exactly as you found it.

Being in a tent is great for getting closer to wildlife as well. It often happens that when you gently unzip your tent in the morning, there will be deer quite close or, as happened to me when camping in Australia, kangaroos! And I’ve had frogs, toads, hedgehogs and mice come right under my flysheet. Mind you, when I'm camping in bear country in North America, I don't want the wildlife to get that close! Birds are also more likely to come near as your tent blends into the natural surroundings. I’ll never forget pitching the tents with a friend by Loch Dochard in late winter as a flock of whooper swans flew right over our heads, their underwings catching the golden light from the sinking sun.

I think camping also fulfils a basic need in me; a need to leave behind the modern, cluttered world where life is made easy and comfortable by appliances and gadgets. In camping I can live, albeit briefly, in my own world where I have everything I need on my back or my bike; where I have to walk to the river and sometimes break ice to collect water; where I am out in the elements all day and all night. 

I camp all year round but love the winter best which surprises a lot of people who imagine it must be too cold. But the tent gives you a real sense of cosiness especially when the weather outside is foul or freezing. In winter you really appreciate snuggling up in your sleeping bag or scoffing hot porridge in the morning. The only difficult thing is plunging hands into icy water to wash the pot! I remember one winter weekend camping at Corrour, a remote train halt high on Rannoch Moor. So much snow fell that the Sunday evening train home couldn’t get through. In contrast to that, I recall another camping trip to Glen Derry in the Cairngorms during a period of hot winds from Africa. I woke in the morning to discover my tent covered with what looked like custard powder but was actually sand from the Sahara.

One of the most valuable aspects of camping is that it allows you to spend longer in the wilds and when you camp out overnight in the mountains, you get a greatly enhanced feeling of being detached from the modern world and all its woes. You feel much more immersed in the wildness and the mountain. I love that feeling when the tent is pitched and the light starts to fade and you know that anybody else who might have been out there has gone home and you have the mountain to yourself.  Nan Shepherd wrote in The Living Mountain, “No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it.” When camping in the wilds you can experience the elements, the landscape and the creatures that inhabit them by night, as well as by day.

But perhaps the best thing about camping is lying in your sleeping bag with the tent open on a crisp, clear night and gazing up to a sky full of stars sparkling like the sequins in Strictly Come Dancing.

Dalwhinnie - What would Dougie Vipond do?

My skis were waxed and ready to run when I stepped off the Friday late-night train at Dalwhinnie. There were just two problems. Firstly, there wasn’t much snow. Secondly, I couldn’t find a spot close to the station to pitch the tent. It was already late and bitterly cold as a wintry wind blasted clouds across a crescent moon. I plodded around in the dark, searching by torchlight on either side of the trail for a piece of dry, level ground but found only soggy lumpiness.
  

When faced with a problem that you can’t solve, it’s useful to turn to your hero and ask yourself what they would do in the circumstances. And so I posed the question, “what would Dougie Vipond do?” The unhelpful answer that I arrived at was that he and the Adventure Show crew would of course check into the nearby hotel! As that wasn’t an option, a little more scouting eventually revealed a grassy, tent-sized shelf behind the railway line. 


As for the problem of not much snow, there was nothing for it but next morning to haul my heavy pack and skis a long way up the hill to the snow-line. At the top edge of a patch of forestry I cleared some snow and made base camp in the last of the trees where there was a little shelter from blasts of icy wind that whipped across the hillside. 

I strapped my skins to my skis, my skis to my feet and headed uphill, threading together the remaining lines of snow. At the top of the hill the skins were off and so was I. As I descended the snow that lingered in the narrow stream gullies and made my own twisting tracks, I felt quite the expert ski-tourer and, despite my dire downhill technique and the gusty wind, I somehow managed to stay upright all the way back to the tent. The wind pummelled the tent all through the evening and into the night but I was quite comfy inside, passing the dark hours with a pot of hot tea and that fine literary tome, the Scots Magazine.   

Next morning the wind and the thaw had diminished the snow cover a little further so I left the skis at the tent and headed out on foot. The land was still dressed in dowdy browns where the snow had receded and a low ceiling of grey cloud completed the drab scene. But a few rays of sunshine penetrated the gloom to catch in their spotlight a herd of red deer grazing below the snowline. To the northeast deep passes in the Drumochter hills revealed tantalising glimpses of the snow-covered Cairngorms. Red grouse flapped back and forward in a frenzy and every now and then a white mountain hare exploded from its hiding place, kicking up a plume of snow with its big back feet and leaving behind snowshoe-shaped footprints.  

Back at base camp the wind had saved me much of the effort of taking down the tent. But at least the sun came out and bathed Dalwhinnie and its surrounding green pastures in faintly warm sunshine. A lapwing made its “peewit” call overhead, a sound that I always associate with spring in the way that the screech of swifts makes me think of summer or the noisy cackle of passing geese conjures up winter. I packed up, picked my way back down the hill and plodded to the train station along Dalwhinnie’s main street, pausing by the hotel. 

Peering in through the windows of the bar, I could have sworn I saw Dougie Vipond.

Fact file

Start/finish: Dalwhinnie Rail Station, occasionally serviced by the Inverness trains.

Map: OS Landranger 42

From Dalwhinnie I took the track that goes a little way along the south shore of Loch Ericht to access the lower slopes of Geal Charn. I was using Rossignol Free Venture skis, a very short, fat ski with a binding that fits leather winter boots designed for a step-in crampon. The binding has a fixed position for downhill skiing or free-heel position for climbing and the skis have their own skins. In case you don't know this term, skins are furry strips that attach to the underside of the ski to give you grip for skiing uphill. Basically the "hairs" of the "fur" allow the skis to glide on the snow in a forward direction only, so you don't slide backwards. They were originally made from seal skins but of course these days they are synthetic. The skis are a bit of a compromise on all fronts and not ideal for any particular type of skiing. But because they are short, light and can be used with winter walking boots, they are very versatile for accessing distant snow by foot – perfect for Scottish conditions.