 Above Ballachulish in January 1999  With the hiking club, easter 2000 Introduction Before Manchester, I did walks in Wales three times a year with my dad. The very first time I did mountain walking was with the Air Cadets back in 1992. We climbed Cadair Idris. From then on I was quite interested in the mountains given the contrast with West Sussex. Little did I know then how much time I'd devote to the pastime!  A perfect moment high up just before sunset The History of University Hiking Further into my university career I went out to Scotland. First with the club, I didn't realise how addictive these hills would be. I was soon hooked! I later went out most months to climb every 3000foot mountain top known as the Munros. They were good trips, often very wet but there's been some real good days as well.  On the Aonach Eagach ridge, January 2000 In December 1998, I got a decent SLR camera and got very enthusiastic about it taking plenty of photos. Soon after, my website started up. Two months later, I became the webmaster for the Manchester University Hiking Club. That position lasted about a year before I handed over the reigns. Late on in University I got pretty addicted to growing both websites, thinking that I'd make a name for myself with skills to make me employable. Remember these were the days of the dom com boom. I essentially quit the fourth year of university to focus my attention on these sites and my munros campaign. That decision was one I now regret, it was probably the worst decision of my life in all honesty. Despite that, my work for the three years of study earned me a 1st class honours degree in Physics. After Graduation I lived in Scotland for about six months between March and September of 2001. Falkirk - halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh was where I lived. It didn't get off to a good start with the Foot and Mouth restrictions, but ever since the restrictions started to be lifted from Mid March onwards I found myself very busy. Often I would find myself out walking for three days a week - and it was at this time that my website got updated more often than folk could keep up with. The station master at my local station - Polmont often asked where I was going to top up my suntan next!! I also completed my last munro at long last - Liathach, Torridon, August 11th 2001! The gamble to find work in Scotland didn't pay off, after five months of searching I got a job offer to work for an aerospace company down in Preston and so the Scottish life ended come the beginning of September 2001. Looking back, my work at the grid would have actually moved me to Preston anyway, and given that their graduate training scheme was actually pretty good, it was another bad move in my life.  Me and my car at Eilean Donan Castle, April 2003 Preston One year after moving to Preston I initially felt like I sacrificed a lot moving down south, but I've come to realise that there's still loads of opportunity for walking and in addition there's all the other good things in life. I got myself a car in 2002, so was at last free from the shackles of public transport and I had my friends from Manchester who I met up with regularly. Manchester Airport was handy for trips to Norway and it wasn't too much distance to see my parents every now and again.  Myself in 2005, before climbing Tryfan Fast forward onto 2004, I received a curious message in my old guestbook from the owner of rippingyarns.com, a small publishing company in Aberdeenshire. He invited me to co-author a walking book on Norway. After some pondering, I signed on the dotted line. 2005 was an interesting year, probably my best year for some time. I've met a few new friends in Preston after been introduced by another mate at work. We went out on a Glen Coe January camping trip. It was jolly cold, but damn good fun. It was on that trip that I mentioned the possibility of climbing Stetind in Norway - their national mountain. Six months later, after I started to get into climbing, all six of us got to the summit. Getting to the top was probably my finest moment, trumping both my final munro and bagging the inaccessible pinnacle in my climbing career. Now, a huge print of Stetind sits on my wall in my home. I've been out to Norway three times in 2005, my greatest number of foreign trips in any year and the work on my book is done. I also moved house to a bungalow just outside Preston in Warton. Aberdeen It's never good to rest on your laurels, so following on hot on the heels of our book launch was a fairly intensive period of job hunting. The end result is that I've now moved back to Scotland in June 2006, living in Aberdeenshire on a new job with a Norwegian marine and offshore company. It's the end of one chapter in my life, and the start of a brand new one. The end result is that I am living within striking distance of the highlands.  Commisioning in the Langeled receiving facilities, Humberside The Present Come 2007, I have now moved on to a new project which is a floating oil production vessel. This is a long term secondment out in Norway initially, with commisioning in Thailand and then Singapore. For now, most of my life is now spent abroad. It's an exciting time! Things can only get more interesting..... |