THE trail climbed steeply out of the creek’s gully to follow a crest that paralleled the edge of the cliffs. Soon, it gently dropped down to the clear waters of Yosemite Creek where white granite slabs sloped down to the lip of Upper Yosemite Falls. The stream flowed gently over the smooth slabs before suddenly gathering itself to plunge over the lip of this sheer cliff to become the 1,430 foot Yosemite Falls, one of the longest waterfalls in the world. Earlier in the day I had stood at the bottom of the falls, full of admiration for John Muir…

IN a message on Facebook someone recently asked about finding accommodation on the West Highland Way in June. “The plan is to turn up each night along the Way and hope to get a room somewhere without booking in advance.” It didn’t take long before an avalanche of response said “forget it.” It was clear from all the comments that accommodation is extremely scarce on the West Highland Way in June. Some said they had tried to book rooms in January for a June trip but with little success. My wife tried to book accommodation on the West Highland Way…

I’M beginning to feel a little like the Rev IM Jolly. The only time the Glesca clergyman and I are on the telly is at Christmas! This year our two hour-long programmes feature a campervan journey between Dornoch Point in Sutherland and North Ronaldsay, the most remote island in the Orkney archipelago. Last year we broke from our previous format of filming a long walk somewhere in Scotland. We’d walked the length of the Hebrides; we’d crossed Scotland from coast to coast a couple of time; created a new long distance walk in Sutherland; backpacked the length of Skye and…

Cameron McNeish admits to having been hugely inspired by Sir Chris Bonington’s early failures, rather than his successes. IT was a long time ago and I was lurching between jobs, unsure of my future and dreading the thought of suffering some corporate nine-to-five regime for the next 40 years. The only things I really wanted to do were to climb mountains and explore wild places and at that relatively youthful stage in my life I couldn’t think of a career that would enable me to do that. At 24 I was married with a young son and I didn’t have…

I WAS saddened to hear of the death of the wildlife writer and naturalist Mike Tomkies, a man who penned some of the most riveting accounts of living in the natural world alongside golden eagles, wildcats and pine martens. He was a man who more or less shunned society so that he could live as close to his wild subjects as possible. Mike had been the Hollywood correspondent of The Times and had interviewed and befriended cinema personalities like Ava Gardner, John Wayne, Dean Martin, Elvis Presley, Peter O’Toole and Sean Connery but the showbiz life eventually soured and he…

I generally don’t do much in the way of hero-worship, at least not since I was a teenager. In 1964 a 22 year old Welsh athlete by the name of Lynn Davies won the Olympic Games long jump event in Tokyo, an achievement that gripped my imagination. I decided there and then I would be a long jumper too and I wrote a long letter to the Welshman, congratulating him on his success and, rather naively, asked him for some tips! Much to my surprise Lynn replied to my letter, the beginning of a correspondence that lasted for years. Some…