I was once asked in an Interview why I like walking for day after day through mountains. On another occasion I was speaking to a colleague working at a bar and they asked me why I walked up mountains when I could just look at them.

While Mallory’s ” because its there” is my usual go-to for questions like these I never thought my interlocutors were very impressed with this. The reference escaped them, which is one thing, but so did the message. Growing up in a household where walking up things down things and round things was the done thing makes it very difficult to explain why?

Firstly there is a sense of achievement from having done something challenging. This is the most boring way of expressing any desire to do anything. Of course as you develop the bar goes ever higher in terms of achievement and so you do harder and harder things. But there are all manner of things this most basic of impulses could apply to so why walking?

Walking day to day has its own appeal. There is an extremely gratifying ability on completion to draw a line on a map and say I have walked from X to Y. This is what compels so many to go to do the West Highland way or other such walks, even though one could do a much demanding and much wilder walk people are drawn to walking even if you are just on a big track a few kms from the metalled road to Fort William.

Walking through the mountains multiplies this further. Looking back along the mountain chain and seeing the peaks you climbed and passed days ago is a special sight. The memories of the long early mornings in the shade before breaking out into the Iberian sun as you reach the col or the summit. The scrambles and difficult passages over fields of boulders which go on with no path for km after km, the evening camps by glacier fed lakes. All of these memories from the journey appear back to you as you look back on each summit and range.

Another part is the genuine consequence, away from the tourist paths you can feel very alone. Once on the first day walking alone after my friend had to retire injured I came across a group of Wild Boar. The vigorous shaking of the bracken alerted me and I stood transfixed as the mother boar looked at me and then thundered on through the trees. A week earlier trying to escape the ruins of a glacier led to me and my friend traversing a frighteningly steep and terrifyingly loose scree slope. I had spent the entire morning leading up to this worrying about the mountain we would climb the next day but then had by far the scariest moment of the adventure half an hour later. A life lesson if ever there was one.

Thru hiking at this level goes beyond exercise. Anyone can walk 25 even 50 km in a day if they have some decent fitness and the necessity. The challenge of altitude lack of paths camping and rough terrain changes this though. So many small skills are tested and crises have to be weathered. Being caught in a storm on top of a mountain with an injured companion certainly focuses the senses. Even then the real skill is not physical strength but patience. As you sit in a poorly sheltered gully with the hail pouring over you and the lightning breaking through the fog everything is oddly still. There is nothing you can do but sit there and be cold. This leads to a remarkable stillness as cascade of hail makes the gully rattle with sound. You just have to steel yourself till you are given a weather window and then you have to exploit it.

The total challenge thruhiking provides is best exemplified by this. It is not particularly dangerous lightning, falling down nevées and exposed scrambles are the chief dangers but these are rare. Nevertheless, you will be hard pressed to go into the mountains for long enough not to feel a real fear which helps you keep a more general perspective on life.

Before the 19th century few people ever went up the great mountains of Europe. Many in the Pyrennes didn’t even have names. Petrarch famously claimed to be the first man to have climbed a mountain for the view since antiquity when he climbed Mont Ventoux. On reaching the summit Petrarch famously quoted St Augustine and said that instead that admiring natures creation man should spend more time admiring the soul. Maybe walking in the mountains allows one to do both.