by Tony Lourens
There we were, walking along the boggy path across the Moor Fea from Rackwick Hostel on the small remote island of Hoy, a few hours by ferry north of the Scottish mainland. It was chucking it down, all four of us clad head to toe in Goretex rainsuits, en route to climb the Old Man of Hoy, arguably the most famous and iconic sea stack in Britain, if not the world.
The rain was incessant and it looked unlikely that we were going to get a weather window to climb the Old Man, but the forecast said that the rain would stop at about 8.30 am and stay that way for the rest of the day. I put my trust in the weather gods and the UK met station and continued plodding along to the top of the mainland that looked across to this famous sea stack.
I first heard about the Old Man of Hoy about 50 years prior, when I read about it in one of Chris Bonington’s seminal autobiographies of his early climbing exploits. I was an avid reader of mountain literature in my teens during my early climbing years and, amongst other celebrated routes that I added to the tick list that I gleaned from these books, the Old Man was one that stayed near the top of that list – a route, a summit that I really wanted, one that I dreamed about for decades.
It was first climbed in 1966 by the all-star cast of Chris Bonington, Rusty Baillie and Tom Patey, then famously re-enacted for a huge BBC production the following year, with more renowned climbers joining in the mix for the cameras, including Joe Brown, Dougal Haston, Peter Crew and Ian McNaught Davis. The broadcast was watched by millions of viewers on their tellies throughout the UK, catapulting the previously unheard-of sea stack to mega fame status.
Now, standing on the barren, cold, windswept mainland of Hoy, gazing across at this legendary 140-metre-high teetering tower, seeds of doubt started to tickle the pink lining of my brain where apparently your ability to reason with yourself is kept. How badly do I really want to climb this thing, I thought to myself? Dreams can sometimes turn into nightmares. It looked scary, exposed and decidedly uninviting. But we were there, and the rain had stopped. And I wanted this summit badly. I pushed my fears to the back of my head and quelled the butterflies in my stomach to a semi-controlled fluttering as Mhairi, Brad and I started down the muddy, treacherous descent approach to the crashing seas surrounding the base of the Old Man. My wife, Patsy, very altruistically volunteering to sit up on the mainland to record our ascent on camera.
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