Hamish MacInnes: Final Ascent tells incredible story of Scotland's mountain man

During those long, sun-caressed summer days, grey blizzard-filled winters and endless dreich times in between, I discovered many things. Among them was how to pack a rucksack, coil a rope, tie a bowline, figure of eight or prusik knot, abseil, belay, brake with an ice axe and front point on crampons.

I discovered other things too. My limits and fears, physical and mental, for that’s what mountaineering is really all about, exploring the self just as much as the wild places.

I was 13-years-old when this passionate love affair with the mountains and the worshipping of the greatest among those who ventured there began. The best of them were altogether a different breed.

Free spirits they were, nomads, rebellious, daring and as hard as the mica schist of the Cobbler or granite of Glen Etive. The fact that many of my climbing heroes came from working class backgrounds only added to their allure.

There were the Lancashire lads, Joe Brown and Don Whillans for example, apprentice plumbers when not pioneering rock climbing in Snowdonia and the Peak District. Here in Scotland there was the son of a baker from the village of Currie, Dougal Haston, who like myself began his ascent of the high places by climbing local railway bridge walls.

And then of course there was the man who would come to be dubbed the Fox of Glencoe, Hamish MacInnes, a climber once described as being “as tough and uncompromising as one of his own mountains”.

“He couldn’t give a damn about what the establishment thinks about him or even what his fellow climbers think of him,” says Chris Bonington of MacInnes.

A veteran of more than 20 expeditions to various parts of the world, including the first British ascent of the Bonatti Pillar of the Dru in the French Alps, MacInnes has climbed in the Caucasus, New Zealand, South America, but also in the Himalayas, where he has been on four expeditions to Mount Everest. In 1975, he was deputy leader in Bonington’s Everest expedition that climbed the southwest face, even though MacInnes was nearly killed in an avalanche.

Revered also in global mountain rescue circles, it was MacInnes who designed the first all-metal ice axe and invented the specialised MacInnes stretcher, which is used for rescues worldwide. For decades his International Mountain Rescue Handbook, published in 1972 was the standard manual.

It’s hardly surprising then that to many young climbers MacInnes was a living legend whose reputation was once and for all endorsed one night when as a 15-year-old I went to hear him speak after he returned from a recent expedition to the fabled Mount Roraima in South America, one of the last unexplored corners of the world.

Much of that evening in Glasgow – Govan Town Hall if I recall correctly – was a kaleidoscopic journey into everything I’d ever wanted to do. I listened transfixed by his tales, my eyes on stalks at the photographic images MacInnes presented that night following that great adventure in 1973.

His story of trekking through rainforests and swamps inhabited by venomous pit vipers, scorpions and giant bird-eating spiders was remarkable. The rock climb of the mist shrouded 9,000 foot sandstone wall to reach the plateau made famous in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s haunting 1912 novel The Lost World, had me spellbound.

That MacInnes had undertaken the climb with my other mountaineering idols, Brown and Whillans, meant that long after the talk ended, my regular climbing buddy Rab and I hovered for some time hoping to catch a few words with the great men.

Tall, rangy and athletic, MacInnes finally made his appearance towering alongside the gnomic figures of Whillans and Brown. I shook hands with my heroes that night before thrusting a copy of a book in front of them to autograph. It was Chris Bonington’s early autobiography, I Chose to Climb.

On the bus home Rab and I basked in our encounter. Never could we have known then that some years later Rab would face a near death experience in a Glencoe gully where MacInnes himself almost once lost his life and from where he and his team of rescuers would later pluck my pal to safety.

I was at home when news of Rab’s fall arrived. Unable to make the hills that weekend Rab had teamed up with another mutual climbing friend to tackle Raven’s Gully a route high on Buachaille Etive Mor, or The Buachaille as it’s more commonly known among the climbing fraternity.

It had been raining heavily in Glencoe all weekend when Rab and our other friend Kenny set out for Raven’s. Unroped on the easier lower sections of the gully there was a sudden shower of stones from above hitting Rab on the head and knocking him over the edge of an outcrop from which he fell at least 30 feet.

“I was sure he was dead, he was lying in such a contorted way,” Kenny was to tell me later. The impact of the fall had broken Rab’s back.

After Kenny summoned the Glencoe Mountain Rescue team led by MacInnes, what followed was a dangerous operation to get Rab off the mountain, a task made all the more intricate because of his spinal injury.

The rescue involved moving Rab on one of MacInnes’s own custom-designed mountain stretchers to an area where a helicopter could be brought in to winch Rab out before delivering him to Belford Hospital in Fort William.

I was to accompany Rab’s parents on that journey by car from Glasgow to Belford all of us desperate to be by his bedside. Coming into Glencoe, Rab’s father turned and asked me on which mountain the accident had taken place. At the car park opposite the Buachaille, I asked them to stop momentarily.

“There, that dark chasm near the top,” I remember pointing up to the Buachaille.

Tendrils of cloud and mist hung over the top of the mountain making it all the more intimidating. There was an uneasy pause before Rab’s mother and father turned to look at me astonished.

It was only then that I realised that they, like my own parents, knew nothing of what Rab and I had been so passionately engaged with for the past few years.

Throughout the time Rab and I had been coming to Glencoe and other mountain areas to climb both our parents had been oblivious to the levels of expertise we had attained, the routes we were able to tackle and the risks involved in doing so until this very moment.

In an effort to draw their attention away from the towering, brooding presence of the Buachaille I recall pointing out other landmarks.

The bridge near the Kingshouse Hotel under which we often bivouacked, being short of cash for the bunkhouse. The campsites and the Jacksonville hut, temporary base to visitors from the legendary Creagh Dhu climbing club many of whose working class members worked in the Clyde shipyards and on weekends escaped the city to take on Glencoe’s rock, snow and ice routes.

A man wary of clubs and any notion of establishment MacInnes was never a member of the Creagh Dhu, but climbed with these specially talented and ultimate hardmen of Scotland’s mountains

In all his association with them only added to the aura that surrounded the Fox of Glencoe and his reputation of being among the most cunning and resourceful of climbers.

It had been some years before Rab’s Raven’s Gully epic that MacInnes had his own near death experience near the top of the route in an area Chris Bonington later called “the coffin”.

“I was trying to make the first ascent of Raven’s Gully, the rope jammed and I had to take it off, it was too dangerous to go back down and had to climb solo,” MacInnes recalls of that edgy day, in newly released and poignant documentary film about his life entitled Final Ascent showing at the Glasgow Film Festival this month.

“I jammed myself in with crampons against one wall and my back against the other, I was there for eight hours and I couldn’t relax for a minute, if I did I would have been away,” MacInnes recalls nonchalantly along with the fact he was only wearing “jeans and a tartan shirt,” in the freezing temperatures.

In those interminable frozen hours he says he assumed an almost meditative state, visualising breathing heat into his body and harking back to the experiences he read about in a book entitled: With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet by Alexandra David -Neel.

“This is my bible. I first read it was when I was 15, it probably had the greatest influence on me and was about Buddhism and how they prepared for long trips through the desert,” MacInnes explains.

“That’s what I did and I survived, I’ve been on hundreds of big rescues soaking wet and freezing solid but always managed to survive,” he acknowledges, explaining the philosophical significance the book had on events that near calamitous day in Raven’s Gully.

Watching the film Final Ascent is to quickly realise how much more this remarkable and poignant documentary is than a straightforward biopic of MacInnes’s mountaineering life.

As the film’s director Robbie Fraser says, this story is as much about memory, identity and the way in which we treat older people when they slip – or seem to slip – towards the edge, than simply a film about climbing.

For it tells how at the age of 84 this great man of the mountains was institutionalised against his will, suffering from delirium.

As the film progresses it reveals too how after a spell in psychogeriatric detainment in Belford hospital, MacInnes emerged to find his memory gone, obscured and erased as completely as a cliff top by some mountain spindrift whiteout.

What follows is a remarkable story of self-rescue with MacInnes hauling himself back from the abyss as doggedly as some old time climber cutting steps on an ice slope.

Just as this globally recognised mountain rescuer has countless times pulled himself and other climbers out of danger and harms way, so now he sets about doing the same with this own mental health.

That his enforced convalescence was in the same hospital where so many injured climbers have been taken in the past, including my friend Rab rescued by MacInnes’s Glencoe team, has a terrible irony.

For a man who has spent so much of his life in pursuit of the sense of freedom given by climbing, his claustrophobic hospitalisation was a deeply bewildering and traumatising experience.

In one of numerous “escape attempts” from such confinement he managed to make his way to the roof of the hospital, pursued by staff that presumably thought he was suicidal.

Such a thought however insists MacInnes was the last thing on his mind, maintaining he was only in fact looking for that sense of freedom the high places have always given him.

In the months that followed, using his vast archive of photography, films and writings from a 60-year career he began to reboot his mind.

“Memory is obviously very complex and one of the ways I clawed my way back to sanity was by watching a lot of my own films,” he explains making hid own final ascent back to health and memory which by then “98 per cent of which had been recovered.”

“You feel like a spectator looking in… this is how I refreshed my mind, every morning. When I wake up a piece of the puzzle comes out,” he says sifting through his archive.

How fitting it is that climbing and the extraordinary documented adventures he has pursued for so long helped bring him back. Mountaineering and its near obsessive pull for those who engage with it have always had this special quality.

My own pal Rab found out too that his desire to return to the high places played a crucial role in his recovery and within a year given that the damage to his spine was not permanent, was back climbing even if he had to wear a supporting “corset” for which he became the butt of many jokes.

Before making Final Ascent Director Robbie Fraser says he knew next to nothing about mountaineering.

“When I embarked on this project. I thought belaying was something you did on a pirate ship,” he told me over a beer.

Having now worked with MacInnes I asked Fraser what he now thought of mountaineers and what made them tick?

“I’ve come to view climbing at the elite level as a set of contradictions. You’ve got a curious blend of extreme care and meticulous planning, coupled with innate, life-threatening levels of risk. It’s like a massive dare, which is made all the more fascinating by the underlying fact of the non-necessity of the activity,” he replies before continuing.

“Well, we say it is non-necessary, but there’s obviously a deep human drive that’s part of us, which says, go up that big scary thing. We have to show we’re its equal. I often think back to the title of Lionel Terray’s book, Conquistadors of the Useless,” he says, referring to the autobiography of the great French climber.

For MacInnes himself his recent return to health has been a challenge as great as the many faces and summits to which he has devoted his extraordinary mountaineering gifts.

In one of the film's sequences photographs of the great master at work on mountains from the Alps to the Himalayas and beyond are shown as he narrates from the great verse The Golden Journey to Samarkand by the writer James Elroy Flecker.

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further; it may be

Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow

Across that angry or that glimmering sea.

Few in the mountaineering fraternity have gone further in the high places than Hamish MacInnes. What a poignant, poetic and dramatic journey his final ascent has been.

Final Ascent will be showing at GFT on March 3 at 1.30pm followed by a Q&A with special guests Hamish MacInnes and Michael Palin.