The Mountains of the Mind

Lake Bujuku in the centre of the Ruwenzori

How a decision to try something different made a dream possible

I should never have taken up mountaineering, mainly because I was so bad at it. I’ve lost count of the crags and cliff’s I’ve fallen off, but remember the avalanches I’ve been in and the occasional long drop, such as falling headfirst down a Scottish gully after getting to within 10m of the top. 200 m later, I was dazed and confused at the bottom, with only a dodgy knee and a deep scar where an ice axe impaled itself.

It’s these precious moments that, as a friend said, “puts life into perspective”. But in 1990, I was a young climber, in the English Lake District, who had been all over the local rocks, started snow and ice climbing in Scotland and was taking the next step, that of progressing to the French and Swiss Alps.

There were a couple of problems. One was that I had a healthy concern for my own well-being that expressed itself as a wish to stay alive. This is a barrier to the heights of mountain climbing. Secondly, I was more interested in doing something different. After a weekend’s ice climbing, I was staying with a friend, who was a Himalayan expert. Our conversation moved onto the commercialisation of mountaineering and that it was harder to do any exploration. As I headed off to bed, I picked up a small guidebook to read, on the Ruwenzori mountains of Uganda. 

Published in 1972, it was recognised as a small but insanely complete guide to the 150km long range on the Congo/Uganda border. These fabled mist covered mountains have fascinated travelers for millennia. Around 500 BC the Greek poet Aeschylus wrote of " Egypt nurtured by the snows". Not to be outdone, Aristotle in 350BC, declared the source of the Nile to be " The Silver Mountain ".

An account of a journey to the Ruwenzori was written by the Syrian geographer Marinus of Tyre in 120 AD. He related the tale of a Greek merchant, Diogenes who claimed a 25 day journey inland from the African East coast to "two great lakes and the snowy range of mountains where the Nile draws it's twin sources." A few years later, in 150 AD, Ptolmey wrote of the Lunæs Montes, or Mountains of the Moon being the source of the Nile.

The mystery began to clear after the mountains were sighted, in the far distance, by Henry Morton Stanley in 1876, who took a brief respite from savagely beating his porters, to name them after his boss, the editor of the New York Herald, Mr Gordon Bennett, whose lifestyle and editorial flair turned his name into a British slang term for ‘I don’t believe it’. Sadly, the 5,107m high main summit has been renamed to Mount Stanley.

The more I read, the more intrigued I was. however, looking at the remoteness and other factors, such as a conflict going on in the area, I realised this was a journey I was never going to make.

Then I stopped. Why would I never go there? What was stopping me? I quickly realised that the main thing stopping me was... myself. So I decided to go. To make the trip happen, there were several steps, so I tackled them. 

Finding a climbing partner was easy. I take pride that many of my friends were up for climbing through a jungle to scramble over glaciers on the equator. The biggest issue was information. The guidebook had been out of print for many years, but I tracked down a second hand copy from the original publisher, who only sold me the book after I had assured him that I was actually going there. Maps were more difficult. I found a 1:150,000 map, that seemed to be alarmingly vague.

Money was a problem, so we booked the cheapest flight to Nairobi and jumped on a bus to the Uganda  border and another to Kampala and another to Kasese in the foothills of the mountains.

The warm and misty atmosphere also meant that anything living grew to outlandish size. Earthworms were 3 or 4 cm thick and the heather grew to the size of trees. As we entered the centre of the high peaks, we were already higher than Mont Blanc but were still having to cut our way through jungle.

It was a hard trek into the Bigo bog, under the main summits. This was because the range is also known as the Mountains of the Mist, and the bog turned out to be very bigo indeed. We spent days jumping from tuft to tuft to make progress. 

Eventually we got on the rocky slopes and then the glacier, until we climbed above the mist to the summit.

Since then, I’ve never told myself that I can’t do something. I’m also going to return to the Ruwenzori. I’ve had an idea for a journey that has never been done. Want to come along?

Consider the Lily Tarn

Loughrigg may not be as well known or celebrated as the English Lake District's 'Big Three' mountains; Scafell, Helvellyn and Skiddaw, but it should not be under-appreciated.

Squatting at the Northern end of Lake Windermere, it has an undulating plateau of hollows, tarns and shiny streams.

It is an easy yet safe place to get lost on because you can, in good weather, take your bearings on the higher, distant fells in the knowledge that if you go in vaguely the right direction, it'll work out.

The ascent from Ambleside is very steep at the start, but after a lung cleaning hundred metres you take a left and it levels off before winding its way to one of the more famous views of Lake Windermere on a trio of rocky outcrops.

When I first arrived in the village a few decades ago I was living, well squatting to be honest, under this fell and it was on this rocky perch that the Lake District began to work its magic, just half an hour from the madding crowds pounding the tills of the multitude of cagoule shops below.

Back then, the kindest word to describe me would be 'lost'. I'd come through a series of misadventures that had turned darker and darker until I thought that something inside of me had died.

I'd paid a heavy price but had escaped with my life somehow, heading to the hills like a bandit fleeing a posse of nightmares.

But sitting on the rocks with birdsong in the air, there was a whisper from the void within me. "Here, this is the place," it said. I was too exhausted to ignore it, to explain it away, so I took to wandering up Loughrigg frequently.

If I couldn't seep, I went alone in the night, especially near a full moon, where there was enough light to climb a well known path.

The fiercest storms were a challenge, so I climbed in howling wind, when rain blasted my face and hurt and I danced like the madman I was in the hail and snow.

Over the months, from the end of Summer to the harsh Winter, something happened, something changed and it is only recently that I began to understand it.

After looking over the lake, the next stop was always Lily Tarn, set in a high hollow, one of nature's infinity pools with a small island near one bank where a solitary tree grew, braving the elements, safe from the chomping jaws of the herdwick sheep.

It was small tarn, roughly 25 metres in wide, but it felt far from anywhere, hanging on the edge, with the grander hills behind.

Yet, it was a place of stillness, helped by being in a natural windbreak. I visited in all its moods, when giant dragonflies darted around, when the midges came out, the smallest vampires.

And as the sun set one Winters' eve, I saw the stillness of the tarn seem to hold, to pause and edging to the waters' edge, little clear lines appeared, forked and fragmented across the surface.

A few minutes later, they faded and the water turned to ice as I watched, feeling the cold numbness spread to myself.

There are a million ways of looking at a mountain tarn. It takes time, but in the end you are rewarded if you learn to love the unfolding of its moods and colours as the seasons cycle past.

In the end, the fells gaze back into the visitor and it is this that transforms so many who love them: They tell you who you are.

If you are patient enough and humble before nature, something happens that recalls Neil DeGrasse Tyson's observation of the Apollo space program, "We went to the Moon and discovered Earth."

In the Lake District, you don't need to fly so high to make the longest journey, to find your heart and soul.