3#04 Dougie Baird: the mountain path builder
“It sounds a strange thing to say about a 400 million-year-old mountain like An Teallach… but it’s fragile”
00:00 - Introduction.
02:22 - Welcome, all about “It’s Up to Us”, “there’s not really any organisation or government body that’s there to care about this problem”, complex funding models and the loss of European money.
09:30 - “... it’s physically very hard, the conditions are often unpleasant to say the least…”
10:34 - Why is it important to repair and maintain the paths on An Teallach? Rainfall, footfall, scars, and cycles of erosion… “some of it looks like it’s been shelled”
13:50 - “It sounds a strange thing to say about a 400 million year-old mountain like An Teallach… but it’s fragile”
18:50 - Is it possible to repair every path on every hill? And how to volunteer
21:55 - A day in the life of a path repair team
30:10 - “There’s nothing worse than having a bag of helicopter stones even fifty metres away from where you want them. It’s a nightmare”
33:13 - “The few days where it’s nice to just lie back and enjoy the scenery and soak up the sun are so rare that you’ll take a bit of time off for them, you really will. More often than not it’ll be quite cold. Possibly raining. Possibly snowing. Possibly hailing”
37:45 - “Day eight was a killer. You felt like you were working three times as hard, but your productivity definitely dipped. Your effort didn’t, but your productivity did”
38:25 - Women in path work
40:20 - Getting started in path repair, being an “unemployed youth in 1980s central Scotland”, working with redundant miners, discovering conservation “I’d just seen land as a thing I grew up in that you used to be able to work in and couldn’t anymore”
46:59 - “My gear was… so bad”
49:00 - “I’ll never forget watching the sun go down at 11 at night in late May, with the eagles circling… the mountain you see after all the visitors and hillwalkers have left… I thought it was absolutely fascinating”
51:10 - Finding funding for conservation “I never knew if I had a job next year until New Year’s Eve”
56:35 - Taking part in work “that’s going to outlive us”
57:30 - Greatest Mountain Memory: climbing Kebnekaise in Sweden in a “hostile, extreme physical environment” with 24hr sun, “I’ll never forget having the entire mountain to ourselves as we walked out at two, three in the morning in that glaciated, arctic landscape. That’ll stay with me forever”
59:44 - All the time, money, freedom… where would you go and what would you do? Walking the Pyrenees from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, “there’s something about it… it’s got culture and history that I find really compelling”