Wild Moment: David Thomson 

David Thomson became one with the mountains on the day he was avalanched...

I tumbled head over heels and awoke cocooned in the snow as a school child. The perfect age, everything was fun. Hills are just big mounds covered in grass, right? In winter they are good for sledging. How can a hill be dangerous? 

Then I remember 40 years ago, climbing Liathach in Torridon with friends, we have no idea that this hill is steep and complex. On a perfect summer day wearing shorts and carrying only water, we ascend to the summit ridge between two giant U shaped valleys. It is truly miraculous like being in an aeroplane. The air is still and a bumble bee flies past. The cars in the valley are tiny. This is like no hill I have ever imagined. It is scary and exhilarating. We descend by the wrong gully using flat stones to surf the small stones of a perfect scree, where no one has been before. There is a precipitous drop ahead but we notice it, because we are alive, alert and learning. 

Now I am kayaking to Suilven. A gloomy hill, hunkered down, elbows sunk in the peat, with flanks of rock like the sails of a tall ship. Glacial, slabs of cold rock sapping the heat from every day this year. 

Leaving the loch’s edge, we dance across the bogland dotted with pools like silver paper. A raven caws and the mist swirls. Later the sun comes out and the giant mountain galleon is sailing for a moment above the mist. 

Now I am looking at weird ice shapes in a melting lochan, looking at a lone tree amid a deer ravaged moor, I am collecting seed catkins, and I am planting trees. I am on a snow summit in moonlight, and I’m talking in the pub about the missed opportunity to re-wild the island of Rhum in the 1970s. 

Gradually I move my limbs and I emerge from the snow leaving behind all the protective layers of my life, like exiting from a Russian doll. All the ‘me’s  I have every been, are still with me and I find myself alone and happy in the mountains.

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