Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV - Part V

Part V

In the bar at Glenmore Lodge, midway through the International Winter Meet, I overheard James Edwards talking with a tall guy named Roger Webb about finding a guest climber to explore the Northwest Highlands.

I raised my hand and said, “I’ll go.”

I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, but I knew the northwest was the least populated part of Scotland, and that its steep sandstone and quartzite mountains seldom saw climbers. Webb, a lawyer in Inverness, had spent years exploring these peaks and doing new routes, and, he said, “I saw more climbers today on a single route in the Northern Corries than I’ll see in an entire year in the Northwest Highlands.”

At dinner the following night, Webb told me to pack up: I’d be going to his house for the night, along with his partner, Mikael Bo Kristiansen from Denmark; we’d pick up Edwards at his house on the way west. Before leaving, Edwards asked, cryptically, “You do know how to ride a bike, right?”

In the morning, well before dawn, we managed to load four packs full of winter gear into Webb’s small wagon, along with a disassembled bicycle; three more bikes were strapped to a rack on the back. “Keep a sharp eye out for deer,” Edwards told Mikael, who was sitting in the front passenger seat. “If you see one, yell loudly.”

“You’re being driven by a one-eyed man,” Webb explained—he had lost his right eye to stone fall on the North Face of the Eiger, many years earlier.