Harold Raeburn is acknowledged as the father of Scottish mountaineering. At the dawn of the twentieth century he was pushing the boundaries of what was possible on the ice wreathed cliffs of the Scottish mountains and later in the Himalayas. Listen to author, Peter Biggar, talk about his new book, Harold Raeburn- The Steps of a Giant and his quest to chronicle the life and achievements of this enigmatic figure whose name will be written forever on the face of Scottish climbing.
Raeburn was not a climber who sought to publicise his achievements and only wrote about them in very modest terms. For this reason, as Peter explains in the interview, researching the book was often difficult and the author frequently had to rely on the accounts of Raeburn’s contemporary’s.
Peter Biggar author
Harold Raeburn
As Scottish Mountaineering Press, the book’s publishers, explains the background to the book.
In feats of extraordinary vitality, he made winter ascents of Tower Ridge, North-East Buttress and Crowberry Gully in four days, cycling from Fort William to Glencoe in between. His breath taking ascent of Green Gully, cutting steps up near-vertical ice with a single axe, was doubtless the hardest ice climb anywhere at the time and was unsurpassed in difficulty in Scotland for nearly three decades. But perhaps Raeburn’s finest achievement was the first winter ascent in 1920 of Observatory Ridge, which remains one of Ben Nevis’s longest and most serious winter climbs.
These routes, amongst so many others, were visionary, while beyond Scotland, he pioneered climbs in the Alps, Norway and the Caucasus, attempted Kangchenjunga and was Climbing Leader on the calamitous 1921 British Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition. Tragically, the latter was to be his undoing, precipitating a ‘melancholia’ that had perhaps, to some degree, dogged him all his life.
With extracts from Raeburn’s own elegant writings and accounts from his friends and climbing companions, The Steps of a Giant is an intimate portrait of a master craftsman, chronicling his outstanding mountaineering record while digging beneath the surface of his modest reserve to reveal a complex, driven character upon whose shoulders subsequent generations of climbing luminaries stand. SMP
This is an important book and one which rightfully holds its place in the history of Scottish Mountaineering. John D Burns
