I had thought I would head to a small alpine shelter high on the ridge. I had been up there once before, in Summer, and was keen to revisit. This time around there would be snow on the ground – there was still plenty of it. It had that look about it of late Spring snow – the way it tends to get a bit grubby, and less than pristine, but with the more consolidated look of something that has been around a while, and weathered a few storms. It was only a few weeks ago on a trip in these same mountains, when there had been fresh powder snow everywhere. Not so now. I judged the avalanche risk to be lower than what it was then too. Many of the ubiquitous conifers – stunted and smaller at this altitude – were still under the snow. I had found myself plunging into waist-deep holes around their snow-covered branches in places.

I’d settled on climbing up a rather obscure gully which should lead up to my objective in what I judged would be a fairly straightforward manner. I climbed to around 2000m, with all of my alpine gear – a second pair of rigid boots for the snow, ice axe, mini crampons, cooker and fuel, tent and sleeping bag and all the usual stuff. I set up camp beside a large boulder at that point. Now there was a problem, and that problem was a lack of water. I had not found any lower down, and there was none around here, and I knew from my last visit that there was none at the hut. One could get lucky with a Spring snow pack, and find a little seepage somewhere. I scouted around, but there was no sign of such seepages. The words of a high school outdoor-ed instructor came to mind: “If you think you’re going to get by melting snow for water, think twice.” Yes, think twice. Icicles were best, followed by slushy snow. Powder was the worst. That was not much better than trying to melt air into something drinkable. There were no icicles to be seen, so I scraped the slushiest snow I could find into my pot, and poured a little of the water I had carried over top to get it started in the right direction. Then I put it aside to start doing its thing.

The sun reached the basin early next morning. It was a glorious, welcome sunshine after the cold wind and cloud of the night before. The sun shone brightly on the snow and rock faces. I pulled back the tent fly, feeling a great lack of resolve to continue climbing up the series of steep basins towards the ridge. Nevertheless, after a leisurely breakfast of coffee and porridge, I headed off in that direction anyway. No harm in having a look. Already, the snow was soft. I plugged steadily up to the head of the basin I’d camped in, and sat down at the edge of a grimy patch of snow with fine gravel and larger rocks deposited on the surface. I tried to recall what geomorphological process could be responsible for this phenomenon, but struggled to come to a definite conclusion. Some rocks clattered off the higher peaks, as if suggesting an answer, with that distinctive and slightly unnerving sound that falling rocks make in alpine places. I knew I was well clear of them here. The sound reminded me of high camps many years ago, when I heard that sound in the night.  

From here the terrain steepened up. I looked at the map. There was about 400m of height gain left to get to the top of the ridge. Peanuts, really. And yet I felt a great lack of motivation about going anywhere today. In some ways the conditions were ideal for it. In other ways, less so. And there was still the water issue. I looked at the partially snow-covered conifers higher up, and considered how much plunging into snow holes there would be. It occurred to me that back in my late teens and early twenties, I would have romped up those slopes without a second thought. If I’d ended up dehydrated or exhausted or sunburnt or all three, it wouldn’t have mattered. If it took all day to get there, it wouldn’t have mattered. I would have revelled in climbing out of the holes even as I fell into them. Now, I sat on my pack in the basin carefully applying my sunscreen and thinking about the effort involved in climbing up through what would be waist deep snow in places, with the need to ration water. Maybe this was the difference in being younger, or older. How set was I on getting to my objective? Not very. It was lovely in the basin. There is a unique sense of calm and peacefulness that comes from sitting in an alpine basin on a sunny morning. It was with a feeling of blissful gratitude that I dug my heels into the slope and lay back on my pack. 

Some chamois caught my attention on the bluffs to my right. They skidded around in the snow the way teenage boys might, and pranced around playfully on the rock faces. Occasionally they looked with ambivalent curiosity in my direction. Their behaviour was nothing like the harried, haunted creatures I was familiar with from the Southern Alps. No one shot at them here. The place was theirs, or ours – seeing as I was sharing it with them this morning. I considered the fact that there were no drones in the basin. During the Summer months I had encountered tourists flying drones in some of the more popular spots. This got me thinking about the drones I had encountered more recently in Winter, in Ukraine, that were of an altogether different kind: attack drones. It all seemed so far away sitting in an alpine basin like this, yet it was still happening. Was it frivolous to just sit here in this snowy basin, doing nothing much, and that on a Monday morning? I suspected it was. It was not constructive in any way that I could think of.

Bulgaria had won Eurovision. Now there was another thing that could be deemed frivolous – Eurovision. How Israel had been allowed to participate was beyond me. Even setting aside the matter of Israel’s participation, the thing itself was close to what might be called the pinnacle of frivolity, and the heights of frivolousness. I might well be frivolously sitting here in an alpine basin having these judgmental thoughts, but that was largely a private matter of whether I was using my time constructively, and what might or might not be a more constructive use of my time. Eurovision, with its public reach, was very much a coordinated spectacle; a public exercise in frivolousness. Maybe if the performances were dedicated to highlighting a social issue, or bringing injustice to attention, then that might be different again. I considered that I was definitely showing my age now, and I was being critical, and I knew it. And my thoughts were not in the moment – they were miles away. Still, when there was so much going on in the world – both close by and further afield, was just having a bit of fun still an acceptable thing to do? Did the particular flavour of that fun matter?

I was grateful to have been able to walk up here. I had taken walking for granted once, a bit like I’d taken breathing for granted. But since the accident that shattered one of my vertebrae into tiny pieces, I have not taken walking for granted in quite the same way ever again. I am more grateful for it now. When I took the first tentative steps beyond my hospital bed after ten days of being horizontal, it had felt like a minor miracle – and something that had to be carefully relearnt. The ground seemed very far away. I couldn’t remember having had those thoughts as a toddler learning to walk, and it’s quite likely I didn’t have them then. The ground wouldn’t have been as far away from the centre of my thinking either.

It would have been hard to convince anyone else of the merits of my wandering. I had climbed hundreds of metres up a random gully in order to camp in conditions that were somewhat less than comfortable, only to give up on the objective altogether and sit in the sun in a snowy basin for a few hours instead. Maybe that was part of the reason why I liked these solo journeys so much – there was no one who had to be convinced. It was frivolous, yes, but as always, I wandered back down to the lowlands with a renewed sense of gratitude.