Introduction

Who am I and why am I doing this

My name is Alasdair, and I sometimes go hiking.

I have been on a few exciting backpacking trips over the past few years. On these trips I usually try to keep a journal, with the emphasis on “try”. I start off full of enthusiasm and romantic ideas about the scruffy but transcendently descriptive notebooks I am going to bring home and lock up in a chest for my grandchildren one day to peruse. The first entries wildly overestimate my commitment to the endeavour and set a standard for length and detail that I have no hope of sustaining. And so, I get further and further behind, before eventually giving up and promising myself that I’ll finish them when I get home and have a) nothing better to do and b) a desk.

This blog is therefore an attempt at giving myself a reason to write properly about my travels. In particular, for the moment at least, I mean for it to be a record of my most recent big hike in September and October 2019, when I walked up the highest peaks in Wales, England, and Scotland, and every step of the 500 miles between them.

This was the longest distance I had ever walked, and was a fundraising challenge for Spinal Research. It came three years after I broke my back in a climbing accident and was intended as me proving to myself that my injuries wouldn’t hold me back, and as me helping in a small way to change the future of spinal injury.

I am also hoping that maybe if anyone is planning a similar idea, they might be able to find this and get some inspiration. I had very little idea what I was doing beforehand and found it quite hard to find information online about whether many people had done a challenge like this before. Google “three peaks challenge on foot” and you get results for the normal three peaks challenge, involving a car. Google “walk from Snowdon to Ben Nevis” and you get walks on Snowdon and walks on Ben Nevis. The pages I wanted could have been out there, but they were drowned out by the more common results (I realise that is what will happen with this blog, but I’ll either cross or ignore that bridge when I get to it).

For now, thanks for reading this 🙂