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I generally don\u2019t do much in the way of hero-worship, at least not since I was a teenager.<\/p>\nI generally don\u2019t do much in the way of hero-worship, at least not since I was a teenager.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
Much to my surprise Lynn replied to my letter, the beginning of a correspondence that lasted for years. Some time later I actually competed against the reigning Olympic Champion at a home international event in Leicester. He won and I was last, but throughout the competition he was nothing less than hugely inspiring to this young long jumper. Lynn was a role model in every way, a man hugely committed to sport and to helping others achieve their potential. He is currently President of UKAthletics.<\/p>\n
By the age of 21 I had given up track and field athletics and I lost touch with Lynn. By that time the mountains had replaced my love of athletics and I discovered a new set of role models \u2013 Tom Weir, Bill Murray, Hamish Brown and Chris Bonington amongst others.<\/p>\n
While these climbers inspired me with their writings and achievements they certainly weren\u2019t heroes in the way that Lynn Davies had been. Perhaps hero-worship is a teenage thing but over the years the work of one outdoor writer impressed me more than any other. He was another Welshman and his name was Colin Fletcher.<\/p>\n
Fletcher was something of a free spirit, an ex-commando who, after the Second World War, went off in search of some kind of fulfillment. He spent time in Kenya, and then moved to Canada before drifting south to Berkeley in California where he spent a summer walking the length of the State. He eventually wrote a book about that expedition, \u2018A Thousand Mile Summer\u2019, and followed that with another expedition and a book, \u2018The Man Who Walked Through Time\u2019, an extraordinary account of a long, solo hike through the Grand Canyon National Park.<\/p>\n
Other books followed and it was through the reading of these books that I eventually gave up rock climbing and mountaineering and became a backpacker like Colin Fletcher.<\/p>\n
Fletcher enjoyed a strong and vital bond with the natural world and for the first time in my life I recognized, through his writings, that this \u2018Green World\u2019 was a panacea for all those times I felt disappointed, angry, frustrated or depressed with the world at large. I too began to appreciate the natural world as a sanctuary, a place worth protecting and fighting for when necessary.<\/p>\n
Colin Fletcher wrote emotionally about his appreciation of wild places and the importance of wilderness. He wrote about backpacking gear and techniques in a way that was both lyrical and sensible, but he rarely mentioned his private life. It wasn\u2019t until he gave an account of a walking and rafting trip down the length of the Colorado River at the age of 67 in a book called \u2018River\u2019 that he began to release some very brief facts about himself.<\/p>\n Fletcher died in 2007 at the age of 85. A car had knocked him down in his home town of Carmel, California and he never fully recovered from the accident. The world would have been none the wiser about the private life of Colin Fletcher, had it not been for a man called Dr Robert Wehrman.<\/p>\n I wrote about Dr Wehrman\u2019s book, \u2018Walking Man \u2013 the Story of Colin Fletcher<\/a>\u2019, about a year ago and since then it\u2019s been published and I\u2019ve read it. Part of me regrets having read it for my appreciation of the backpacker and writer that I\u2019ve regarded as my major inspiration for some 40 years has been a tad diminished. According to Wehrman\u2019s biography it seems Colin Fletcher wasn\u2019t a particularly likeable person. I suspect I wouldn\u2019t have got on with him at all.<\/p>\n Fletcher himself has always made it clear that he held his privacy very dear, so the first questions I would ask about this biography are ethical ones. Is it right to expose the darker elements of someone\u2019s life after they have died? Is it right to expose the personal details of someone\u2019s life when that person went to great lengths to protect their privacy when they were alive?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know; perhaps I\u2019m being old-fashioned, and modern biographies often verge on a form of voyeurism but I feel somewhat saddened that Fletcher\u2019s much vaunted privacy has been invaded, even violated. On the other hand, this biography has helped me piece together many of the previously unknown aspects of the character of a man who has played such an important role in my own professional life.<\/p>\n Much of Bob Wehrman\u2019s research came from Fletcher\u2019s own hand. Apparently he left behind copious diaries, copies of all the letters he wrote, and little notelets about the most basic aspects of his life. And from all of this I suspect, although I\u2019m certainly not a psychologist, that Colin Fletcher was somewhere on the autism scale, perhaps a sufferer of Asperger syndrome?<\/p>\n This was a man who was socially inept; he defended his privacy to the point of extreme rudeness; had little understanding or care about others\u2019 feelings and had a compulsive desire towards tidiness and order. He certainly didn\u2019t suffer fools gladly – indeed he didn\u2019t suffer many people at all! He apparently had very few friends and it would appear that even his friendships were a little edgy\u2026<\/p>\n On the other hand Colin Fletcher was a wonderful writer and communicator with an intense and almost evangelistic zeal towards the protection of wilderness. This was a man who could write about outdoor gear (The Complete Walker) in such a literary way that his \u2018how-to-do-it\u2019 books sold in the millions and inspired a generation. This was a man who was active as a solo backpacker until well into his dotage, a man who had planned to walk the length of the UK in his eighties, until a dreadful accident robbed him of all further adventures. <\/p>\n Despite my own reservations about privacy Bob Wehrman\u2019s biography is a massive work by someone who would admit to being a genuine \u2018Fletcherite\u2019. I thoroughly enjoyed and enthusiastically devoured much of this book but was left with a sad suspicion that I wouldn\u2019t have got on very well with Colin Fletcher.<\/p>\n However, I would urge you to read Colin Fletcher\u2019s books for yourself and allow his wisdom to percolate your own thoughts and ambitions. Allow his passion for wild places to inspire you as it has inspired me and many thousands like me, and in doing so be aware that none of us are perfect and that genuine role models, like Lynn Davies the long jumper, are very few and far between.<\/p>\n Walking Man: The Secret Life of Colin Fletcher<\/a><\/strong>, by Dr Robert Wehrman. Available on Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I generally don\u2019t 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…<\/span> <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":15322,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15318"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24909,"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15318\/revisions\/24909"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"fletcher\"](\"\/\/www.walkhighlands.co.uk\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/fletcher-400x600.jpg\")
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