Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Go to the Limits of Your Longing by Rainer Maria Rilke

I press the shutter and rush towards Finn, counting to ten. As I reach the magic number, we launch ourselves into the air, giggling. We’re making so much noise we can’t hear if the shutter did actually click open and shut. Rushing back to the camera we agree that this time, finally, we’ve done it. There we are, jumping madly, grins all over our faces.

Behind us, the elegant bulk of Derry Cairngorm and Ben Macdui glower under late afternoon shadows. But we are bathed in a gold that grows ever more intense as the minutes tick by towards sunset. We’re at the top of Bynack Mor, a mountain in the north-east of the Cairngorms, another of Scotland’s great wildernesses. They may not be huge, these wildernesses, but they can easily disorientate and kill. In 1971 five fifteen-year old schoolchildren and their eighteen-year old leader died during a blizzard on the Cairngorm plateau to our right. It’s still Britain’s worst mountaineering disaster.[i]  

But we don’t have to worry about snow, or even rain and low cloud. It’s a glorious September evening, the clouds hanging gently above the mountain tops beginning to fizzle out into a long thin line on the northern horizon. This was what I thought of, on that dismal Sunday back in April, as Nick and I drove home from Kintail. To come here and watch the sunset across the Cairngorms. I’ve only been on Bynack Mor once before, nearly forty years ago, at the end of a two-day mountain safety course at Glenmore Lodge. The three of us from Glasgow University Mountaineering Club dashed up it to be rewarded with an incredible cloud inversion, only the very tops visible like floating islands.

I hadn’t imagined I’d be doing this with Finn either, but the stars aligned very nicely. A few months ago he graduated from Aberdeen University and now he’s about to start a job working in a sports centre so he can still hang out with the University drama group, not least in the hope he can direct his first play, a rewrite of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya (as you do when you’re 22). He can worry about his next steps in another year. And Aviemore has the right combination of stuff for a middle-aged mum and her twenty-something son to amuse themselves doing for four or five days. Not to mention the possibility of fulfilling my promise to myself in April.

On reflection, I don’t think it’s a good idea to stay for the sunset itself. For one thing, I now realise the sun will go down much further to the north than I’d imagined, so we won’t see it for the great tapering length of Cairngorm. And, though Bynack Mor is an easy mountain with a path all the way to the top, the final short climb is littered with loose rocks and even looser sandy soil. Best not to do it even in the semi-dark. I take some more photos from the very top, in the midst of a citadel of granite tors.

It’s now after 6. Time for us to go too. We both concentrate on the way down, testing out the best paths, for there are many. But I’m relieved when we reach the plateau where we can stomp along at speed. It’s the golden hour, the sea of heather and grasses all around us becoming molten, the hillsides facing us turning ever blacker, surrendering at last to the complete absence of light as the sun bursts on the edge of the ridge and is gone.    

But we catch it again as the ridge dips and we stay high. We can see forever to the north and west now, pale blue clumps of serrated mountain tops in the far distance. But we’re losing height, the dark waters of the River Nethy glinting with the last of the light. Reluctantly we switch our headtorches on.

It’s hard to find the words to express how magical it is. Perhaps the magic comes partly from my feeling that there’s something almost forbidden about walking in the dark these days. And yet, we’re so much better equipped than the prince and Glenaladale, it’s not exactly hard going (which is another reason for picking Bynack Mor with its well-worn path), and I don’t know how many times I’ve been out for long days in the hills and come down in the dusk or beyond. I did feel a little nervous about deliberately going up so late in the day, but – as Sarah says – once you’ve begun to feel the fear and do it anyway, every new adventure makes the next one less of a big deal.

And watching the sun finally disappear, a burnt orange afterglow smouldering across the horizon, I am, once again, nowhere else but here. I have done what I wanted to do, a little thing of no consequence to anyone else, but life-affirming to me. We spot the first star, a tiny mote of gold dust in a royal blue sky. Blue turns to black. More stars appear above a shapely silhouetted pine. The gathering darkness holds me and my son close as we stride through it together. I’m perfectly sure the universe couldn’t care less how old I am, what I did yesterday and might do tomorrow, how much I earn, what scares me and brings me joy, and if I did, or did not, finish the Cape Wrath Trail.

[i] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-59048640