OUTDOOR/TRAVEL FEATURE
ALEX RODDIE Summits & Skylarks ( The Great Outdoors )
Alex Roddie is a freelance editor and outdoor writer who works with a
variety of authors, magazines and publishers. He’s perhaps best known
for his writing in The Great Outdoors magazine. In October 2019 he
signed a book deal with Vertebrate Publishing, thanks largely to helpful
advice from fellow OWPG members. He blogs at www.alexroddie.com.
About the feature
This is a very personal piece of writing, and deals with the big stuff :
cancer, the death of a parent, memory, perception, winter, and how we
deal with it all. (Oh, and there are some fi ne Lakeland fells thrown into
the mix too.)
It took me a long time to even begin writing this piece. My
editor at the time, Emily Rodway, commissioned the feature and
gave me gentle encouragement – but also warned that if I found
the experience too raw then I should feel free to submit something
completely diff erent. It took several false starts and a lot of
red ink, but I got there in the end. When my wife read the
fi nished draft, it made her cry. I don’t think my writing has
ever made anyone cry before but I took that as a good sign.
Emily told me that she loved the feature and recommended
that I enter it into the OWPG Awards. I did so with no
expectations. I was as close to the piece as I could possibly
be, and had no objectivity whatsoever; I really didn’t know if
it was good or bad. I certainly didn’t expect it to come ahead of
writers with years or decades more experience.
< Alex receiving his award from OWPG chairman, Peter
Gilman, and Kevin Freeborn of Crimson Publishing
Excerpt from ‘Summits & Skylarks’
I
’d forgotten how busy Helvellyn could be. As
I progressed along the ridge, it got busier:
backpackers coming down from a wild camp;
climbers topping out from Striding Edge and crossing
the well-stamped snow towards the summit in their
crampons; even a squad of mountain bikers on their
fat tyres, plotting a careful course between protruding
rocks. I’m not usually one to appreciate a social
experience in the mountains, but I found a certain
comfort in the thought that so many people had
ignored the snow-free, springtime charm of lower fells
and come instead to this isolated bastion at the end of a
long winter – perhaps answering some deep and primal
call from within that drives us to seek the ice.
Or is it the snow’s very defi ance and survival,
though ultimately doomed, that we respond
to, even if we aren’t aware of it? In Among the
Summer Snows, Christopher Nicholson wrote of
our fascination with Scottish glacier legends:
“What fuels the debate is the aching desire for
survival. We admire longevity... because we long
for it for ourselves.”
I’d managed to avoid getting ice axe or
crampons out until this point – the path was
well stepped-out, the terrain easy – but the
steep descent along the ridge of Browncove
Crags threw an obstacle down in front of me.
For a short distance, the ground became a lot
rockier and icier, and I decided to get my ice
axe out to hack a few steps. Just like that, I’d
escaped from Helvellyn’s island of winter.
There were more snow patches to be seen on
20 Outdoor focus | winter 2019
the gentler, rounded hills to the north, but nothing like
Helvellyn’s brash ice cap – or at least nothing visible.
I soon had the fells more or less to myself again as I
strode out over easier trails.
Far below me to the left I could see Thirlmere.
I thought about that family holiday a lifetime ago,
about that hot day in summer 2003 when Dad pointed
Helvellyn out to me and my brother James. We weren’t
hillwalkers then, not really, but Dad had dragged us
up a few of his old favourites in the Yorkshire Dales,
and stared wistfully across at others from places I now
realised must have been the cherished viewpoints from
another life. Though the mountains don’t change, we