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.

On trawling through the news headlines this morning one in particular struck me. The Mountaineering Council of Scotland has penned a letter to the Scottish environment minister expressing concerns that “Scotland’s dramatic open views and vistas could be threatened by plans to increase woodland cover”. I’m a hillwalker but also an advocate of native woodland expansion. I believe that far from threatening the Highland landscape, restoring our native woodlands enhances it. To those of us who enjoy a good walk in the hills the view from the top is the reward for the hard slog, but to believe the hills offer us nothing but a vista betrays an ignorance of the bigger picture. I’ve written this blog post by way of demonstrating the wonder that is a Highland landscape of mountain…and forest.

Glen Affric

When you arrive in a beautiful place in the dark, waking up the next morning is a bit like Christmas morning as a child. I’d been to the forests of Glen Affric many times before and although the surprise was somewhat dampened by previous experience, I still went to sleep that night excited to see what the morning would bring. The ingredients for a spectacular start were all there: autumn colours and a forecast of freezing fog and frost.

I was not disappointed. When I woke it was minus four celsius and an eerie fog was slowly swirling around the birch trees; the serrated edges of their frozen yellow leaves delicately lined with sparkling frost. Stooped over the heather and juniper were ancient granny pines with great grooves in their trunks. The sweet scent of pine resin drifted through the fog.

Birch leaves

My plan was to climb the hills of Tom a’ Choinich and Toll Creagach but my progress was delayed by the forest. It held me in a magical trance and I resisted any sense of urgency. Instead I wandered. From the many open glades I looked at the great vistas down the glen to the hills. But I also looked at the details. There were spiders’ webs laced with rime ice, strung across dead bracken stalks, and beard lichen hanging from birch branches.

Birch

Glen Affric has some of the finest native woodland in Scotland. Anyone who believes the empty glens, that are typical of 21st century Scotland, are the norm should visit Glen Affric. The forest has survived here thanks to the foresight of the Forestry Commission who bought the estate in 1951 and recognised the importance of the native woodland fragments. They fenced them to prevent deer browsing, and the forest spread.

Sgurr na Lapaich

When I first came to Glen Affric in the mid-nineties I was a voracious hillwalker, out almost every weekend with the university mountaineering club. The eagerness to get high, in a mountaineering sense, was strong. So strong that we were blind to what was around us on the approach to the peaks. Even here in Glen Affric, I can remember walking as if intent on busting a lung, through this great forest, head down, marching to get to the tops and to the view. Hillwalking can do that if you don’t take the blinkers off.

Bearberry

Today, I take it more slowly. It was two hours before I even reached the open hill. I wandered over a rocky landscape where dwarf birch hugged the ground and then climbed a defined ridge where earlier I had watched a golden eagle drift nonchalantly across the mountainside. On the ridge above the glen I sat by a rock covered in blood red bearberry. Its name is a nod to the bears that would once have foraged on these slopes each autumn. Today this native beast was here in my imagination only.

Mam Sodhail and treeless glen

From the summit of Tom a’ Choinich I was treated to the view I had come for but it was a view not of the forests of Glen Affric but of a treeless glen. My enjoyment of the panorama was tainted. There is truth in the maxim ‘ignorance is bliss’; as a twenty year-old this same view would have represented wilderness to me. Now its beauty was blighted by the knowledge that this was an unhealthy landscape: the forest had gone and with it, not just beauty but the species that depended upon it, all the way up to the brown bear whose autumn food supply still grows on the mountain slopes.

Glen Affric – land of mountain and forest

But the forests of Glen Affric and the continuing expansion of native woodland is a reason for optimism. Across the Highlands the land is in a sorry state. Conservationists should celebrate every success in restoring it and hillwalkers, particularly, should celebrate it too.

Further reading
This is the original news item that prompted this blog post
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-38972081

Read about the work of Trees for Life
https://treesforlife.org.uk/forest/

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.