I walked a dirt path at sunrise. Either side of me the gargantuan trunks of the tallest trees on earth rose so high I couldn’t see their tops.

The pillar trunks of the trees stood silent and still in the morning fog. It was ghostly quiet and nothing moved until a bird flew between the trunks, but any sound from its wings was swallowed by still sword ferns and mosses. The light was soft and fell in sure beams through the foliage.

Coast redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, grow from seeds as small as tomato seeds to giants the size of Big Ben. They are so immense that other big trees grow on the soil that accumulates on the branches in the canopy. The oakwoods where I live in Scotland also host epiphytes (plants that grow on other plants) but they are diminutive ferns and honeysuckle. Here in the redwood forest, Sitka spruce and Western hemlock trees, as tall as forty feet, have been found growing in the canopy. It’s as if each redwood tree hosts its own forest ecosystem with all its associated species: flying squirrels, giant salamanders and spotted owls.

Sitting there I wondered at how resilient the forest appeared. With roots that intertwine with the roots of neighbouring trees, the forest is resistant to the wind, and with bark twelve inches thick, the trees are resistant to fire. The forest felt strong. It seemed reassuringly invulnerable. But that was an illusion. The immensity of the trees, their lofty maturity, hid a history of destruction.

I was sat in a fragile scrap of old growth redwood forest; only five per cent of it remains following widespread logging during the gold rush in the mid-1800s. There are people today who strive to protect it, people who were as overwhelmed as me when they first walked the quiet paths beneath these totems of natural wonder. The founder of the Save the Redwoods League, Henry Fairfield Osborn, declared in 1918 that he considered “the destruction of these trees one of the greatest calamities in the whole history of American civilisation”. The league were successful in purchasing redwood groves and saving them from sawmill companies. It’s thanks to them that I, and many others, are able to wander in what remains.

My appreciation for their work was tinged with regret that the forest still needs protecting today. Why would anyone want to pull the cord on a chainsaw and hold it against the bark of a tree that has grown, over the course of two thousand years, from a speck of a seed to a living giant? I lay a hand on one of the tallest trees I could find and looked up. It was already a giant when the first Europeans came ashore in the east. At that time the native American Chilula lived unthreateningly within the forest. The Chilula elder had a word of warning for the new arrivals:

“Destroy these trees..and you will eventually kill mankind”.

Visit www.savetheredwoods.org to learn more.

The high plateau of the Cairngorms is often called a true Arctic environment, right here in Scotland. Having been to the Arctic a number of times, to Lapland and Svalbard, I can testify that the Cairngorm plateau, aside from being well south of the Arctic Circle, is the Arctic in every other sense. There is that same raw glaciated topography, the same soft, pink and cobalt light, and the same savage cold wind.

I’ve always felt you can only get to know the mountains, or any wild place, by spending day and night out there, free from distraction. It takes a day or two to slow down and by rushing we miss what is right in front of us. Wild places become wilder to us when we sleep out in the elements. Nipping out of the house after breakfast and returning to a warm bed before dark is merely dipping your toe in.

On this trip I opted to set up camp for three nights at about 800 metres and explore from there each day. Rather than aiming for a particular summit, I wandered with no plan other than to find two things: the beautiful winter light that falls on the mountains and the cold-adapted wildlife that confirms this as a slice of the Arctic.

Among the granite blocks – scored by ice-bound stones of the past, blades of rime ice down their wind-blasted faces – are mountain hares, ptarmigan and snow bunting. I saw all three on the plateau. The ptarmigan and hare were both hunkered down in the lee side of rocks and both were now well camouflaged in their respective white winter feathers and fur. Both species have been here since the last ice age.

Small flocks of snow buntings flitted from summit cairn to summit cairn in search of crumbs dropped by hill-walkers. In the summer, snow buntings nest on the plateau, the only resident breeding pairs in Britain, but at this time of year there are more of them, as birds from the far north fly south to over-winter in Scotland.

Unlike north of the Arctic Circle, there is no twenty-four hour darkness at this latitude but the days are short and when the long night falls it has the essence of the cold north. My tent was pitched high in the northern corries. It was minus 10C with not a hint of a breeze. The moon had not yet risen so conditions were perfect for stargazing.

Each night I stood outside watching the imperceptible rotation of stars from one dark horizon to the other, snow crunching underfoot as I stamped on the spot to keep warm. I watched the stars every night, and on the final night the northern sky was washed green with a gentle aurora. My homespun Arctic adventure was complete.

The notion of sleeping rough in the wild with no tent, for fun, baffles a lot of people when I try to explain it to them. I usually describe my bivi bag as something akin to a body bag. This doesn’t help my argument that it’s something they should try. Next year my bivi bag celebrates its 20th birthday. Unlike the modern bags you can buy today it really is like a body bag; just a large, floppy gore-tex sack with a zip over your face. My bivi bag had a grand start to life; it kept me dry in one of the wettest regions on earth for three months: Patagonia. Remarkably it is still waterproof today.

For its latest outing I wasn’t expecting rain. But in the Highlands, autumn was in the air and the nights were getting cold. The deer sedge had started to brown, from the tip down and from a distance the slopes had turned tawny. I love being in the mountains at this time of year, so much so that a day’s walk is not enough. I had to be out there day and night, up high, alone in the wind, above the corries with the ravens. I set aside three days and two nights and to fill that I needed a ridge long enough that I didn’t reach the end of it too quickly. So, my bivi bag and I headed for the north Glen Shiel ridge, encompassing the Five Sisters of Kintail and the lesser-known brothers further east along the ridge.

I set off in the late afternoon from the Cluanie Inn, that lonely pub at the east end of Glen Shiel. I was torn between a desire to sit outside with a pint of ale and the need to get to the top before dark. I headed up the steep slopes on the north side of the glen, the wind snapping at the moor grass. It was pretty cold at the summit of Aonach Mheadoin. I got there an hour before sunset; the shadows were lengthening in the glen and the western sky had turned pink. I rolled my bivi bag out on the flat mossy top, just in the lee of the summit cairn. To the north was the pyramidal peak of Ciste Dhubh, neatly scoured on all sides by the ice that, if I had been here 15,000 years ago, would have filled the glens all around.

From the comfort of my bivi bag I could cook, eat and fall asleep while watching the sun set over the raggedy line of mountain peaks out west. In a tent, all you hear is fabric flapping, but in a bivi bag you fall asleep to the hiss of wind through the grass and around the rocky summit cairn. My face was cool but the rest of me was snug. I heard ravens in the distance just before I fell asleep.

I woke at dawn. The light, as it often is at sunrise, was beautiful, catching the crests of ridges and casting deep shadows in the corries. I had a long day ahead, walking the roller-coaster ridge all the way to its highest peak, Sgurr Fhuaran, on the Five Sisters ridge. It looked a bloody long way from where I was stood so I packed up quickly and got going.

There were signs of autumn everywhere. The Devil’s bit scabious added little spots of purple to the landscape. The tiny flowers are arranged in a spherical cluster at the end of a long thin stalk so that they sway wildly above the dying grasses. The plant was once thought to cure scabies, hence ‘scabious’. The rest of the name relates to the stumpy roots; the devil was supposedly angry with the plant for curing folk, so he bit the roots off.

I was followed on my walk by six ravens; probably the ones I had heard the night before. They followed me all day, stopping when I stopped and flying on ahead of me when I walked. This has happened to me before and I can only assume they see me as a prime candidate for tripping off a cliff and becoming carrion.

On the seventh peak of the day, Sgurr na Ciste Duibh, I had lunch and watched a golden eagle soaring over Ben Attow across the glen. It rose slowly in great circles to a tremendous height until I struggled to see it. It made my eyes hurt trying to make it out so I re-focussed on the ground by my boots. When we are in the mountains we tend to think big and look at the view stretching out in all directions. But it’s good to look at the small stuff too; down at ground level there were more wild flowers to see. In the dark nooks of a rocky bluff I found starry saxifrage, a real beauty of a flower with five delicate white petals. It is a flower of the Arctic or Alpine regions and, in Britain, can only be found on the highest of mountains.

My second night on the ridge was on the highest of the twelve peaks I would climb: Sgurr Fhuran at 1067 metres. The wind had picked up to such a degree that I was starting to feel less smug about the merits of bivvying as a lifestyle choice. It was very cold and the cloud bubbled up in the glen below me, occasionally sweeping over the ridge and engulfing me as I tried to cook dinner on my stove. The weather was changing. After wolfing down some pasta tubes I zipped myself right into my body bag. The wind pummelled against the bag and, okay, it wasn’t as idyllic as the first night.

But in the morning I had the most extraordinary walk to the end of the ridge. I still had four summits to cross. One of the advantages of sleeping on mountains is you get to be up there at first light, the best light of the day. I walked along the ridge, on the edge of the corrie backwall thinking this was the best morning stroll I had done in a long time. To the west was Loch Duich and the jaggedy Cuillin ridge on Skye. And ahead of me was my next peak, Sgurr nan Saighead. On its east face are great slabs of rock, upturned by tectonic forces, sweeping down in perfect straight lines from the summit to the glen floor. For me, it was the most beautiful mountain on the ridge.

By the time I had walked over the top of the last mountain of the three days, Sgurr na Moraich, I realised I had seen just two people since I left Cluanie. On the knee-cracking descent to the A87 near Shiel Bridge I met one more couple on their way up. They seemed surprised that I was already on my way down so early in the day. So I told them how I had slept on the summit in a body bag. “Right,” said the guy, looking confused.
I guess it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.