Outdoors
The End of Winter: hiking the Cape Wrath Trail in February 2019
"Genuine silence is rare and special in our hyper-connected era. You might discover something about yourself and the world around you if you take the time to listen."
Features in the August 2021 issue of The Great Outdoors
Plenty from me in this month’s issue of TGO.
The Meaning of Adventure: Hiking the Haute Route Pyrenees
If I could never tell anyone about this trip, never publish anything about my experience or share any of my photos, would I still put myself through this?
Field Notes – Isolation and Connection, a journey through Knoydart
Why do we search for solitude when we go into the mountains? Is it to get away from it all, or is it to connect with something else?
When Glen Coe resembled the Himalaya
The perfection of winter in a collection of images from ten years ago It’s easy to forget, when away from the mountains, just how good winter mountaineering can be at its best. There is nothing in the world like it. The anticipation, the planning, the failures, the gradual accumulation
A Test of Mettel
In a year in which Swiss glaciers lost three per cent of their total volume, Alex Roddie returns to an Alpine peak he first climbed a decade before, and finds huge changes. This feature was first published in the August 2019 issue of The Great Outdoors. 2007 ‘My sleeping bag’
Field notes: the Mercantour Traverse, Maritime Alps
In the October 2020 issue of The Great Outdoors, you’ll find my feature, ‘Shared Silence’, about hiking the Mercantour Traverse. Here are a few notes on the trail, plus some previously unpublished images. In some ways, 2018 feels like a lifetime ago now. It was early summer when, casting
Field notes: Back to Basics in Torridon
In the June 2020 issue of The Great Outdoors, you’ll find my feature about traditional navigation in Torridon. Here are some words and images that didn’t make the cut. For several years now, I’ve been a digital-first mountain navigator, preferring GPS and smartphone tools to paper maps
The voices of birds: a greening of lockdown
Lockdown has brought many hardships, but for some of us it has created the chance to build a closer relationship with the wildlife all around us. Here’s what lockdown has meant to me. That we live in strange times is so self-evidently true that the phrase itself has become
The gear that I would have taken on the 2020 TGO Challenge
Sadly the 2020 TGO Challenge is not to be, but here’s the gear I would have been taking on my journey across Scotland… As I write this, I should be in Oban, preparing to set out on my very first TGO Challenge (here is a little about the route
