Today might not be one in a million, but it is one in 1,461. This is 29 February, leap year day, the cosmic-adjustment bit of the calendar that only comes round once every four years.
For the vast majority of the population 29 February is, at most, nothing more than a passing curiosity – literally a here today, gone tomorrow quirk. For others, however, it has more resonance. This is most obviously the case with those born on the extra day. Only once every four years do they get to open cards and presents on the proper date, rather than having to choose between 28 February or the first day of March – so the chance to celebrate has to be relished given that there are likely to be fewer than two dozen opportunities during a lifetime.
The flipside of this, however – at least judging by the one 29 February birthday person I know – is that it heightens the sense of the inevitable march of time, as the rarity of an actual birthday serves to create the impression that the ageing process progresses via increments of four, rather than by one as with “normal” people.
The hillgoing world includes another category of people with a particular interest in 29 February – those who are quietly chipping away at what is known as a “calendar round”. As with so much in the recreational outdoor world, calendar-round bagging is a pastime with no – or at least very variable – rules. It can take several forms, but the general idea is that one eventually completes the unusual – eccentric, even – task of having climbed a particular hill or one of a specific category of hill on every date on the calendar.
The purest form is the single-hill calendar round: clocking up all 366 dates on the same hill. This might sound ludicrously obsessive, especially given the “linear” tendencies of people who climb hills: visiting all 283 Munros once and once only, for example, is generally deemed much more normal and sensible than climbing one particular Munro 283 times.
Undoubtedly the linear approach is more popular than the multiple-revisit method, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s more sensible. Near-endless familiarisation with the same hill provides a depth of knowledge and awareness that one-off raids can never emulate, and also allows more emphasis to be placed on enjoying (or enduring) the weather and underfoot conditions, as subtle changes of wind direction, cloud level, iciness aspect etc are noticed. It also allows favourite hills to be revisited much sooner than the once-per-round people allow themselves to do.
This latter point is shown by what I tend to call “the curryhouse analogy”. Say there are 283 curryhouses in Glasgow – this is quite possibly the actual number – and say you have just emerged from a particularly good one, where both the food and the service were of the highest standard. Yum. Any statement along the lines of “That was great, must go back there – but only after I’ve visited the other 282 first” would surely be seen as being a bit odd. Much better – and much more commonplace – would be to find a curryhouse, or a pizzeria, or a pub that you really like, and keep going back, with only occasional forays elsewhere. That seems routinely normal in terms of culinary habits, but not, it appears, when it comes to climbing hills.
Actually, the ultra-pure form of the single-hill calendar round would be to climb it every day in the same year (having first made sure it was a leap year): 366 days in a row, up down up down. The only example I know of is by Larry Davis, on Mount Monadnock, a 965-metre peak in New Hampshire. I interviewed Davis in the late 1990s towards the end of a period when he visited the summit on 2,850 consecutive days – which included the complete 366-day leap years of 1992 and 1996.
In a video interview, Davis – now aged 50 – says he settles for 300 ascents per year these days and as of August 2011 was nearing 6,000 ascents in total. In good summer conditions it takes him roughly an hour up and half an hour down, “not counting the extra time I take to clean the trails, do trail maintenance, pick blueberries and socialise” – he evidently serves as a kind of unofficial warden for the hill.
In UK terms, the king of the single-hill calendar round is surely Alan Douglas, of Killearn. Today, he will be on his beloved Ben Lomond yet again – ascent no.2,578 – and will in the process complete his fifth calendar round for the hill. The previous four ended on 11 February 1999, 15 March 2003, Christmas Day 2005 and 20 January 2008, so this will be the first time he has signed off the calendar on its most awkward date.
Like Davis on Monadnock, Douglas puts in a lot of quiet, diligent conservation work, for instance working as one of the path-repair volunteers. He used to go further afield from time to time – a normal Munro round was completed in 1985 and his overall lifetime Munro tally will reach 4,333 with today’s ascent – but these days he mainly stays local. In 2011, for example, he climbed 104 Munros, but “they were all the same one”.
He has needed just 29 February to wrap up his fifth calendar round for quite some time, and had even considered climbing Ben Lomond twice today – with an intermediate descent to Rowardennan – as a means of completing a sixth calendar round. A double ascent now seems unlikely – “I think my days of climbing Ben Lomond twice on the same day are over,” he says – and even if he did manage it twice today, this still wouldn’t complete round number six.
He reached the top on seven of eight consecutive needed “sixths” in January this year, but one day had to be forsaken: “I had to stay at home waiting for an engineer to repair my central heating boiler which had been out of action since Boxing Day – very frustrating because it was a lovely day. It’s surprising what you can do when you have an incentive.”
Overall, the early part of February included, Douglas now has five dates outstanding for calendar round number six – which at least gives him a very manageable target for 29 February 2016. His brother Ian, happily recovering from a recent bout of ill health, has three Ben Lomond calendar rounds to his credit (ending on 5 March 2003, 25 December 2005 and 18 January 2009), but today won’t quite see a fourth one, as he also needs to add another Christmas Day ascent.
Overall, Ian Douglas' Munro tally is a long way ahead of his brother’s – and possibly that of anyone else – as he recently passed the 7,300 mark (including over 2,200 Ben Lomonds). Remarkable numbers by remarkable men.
Away from the world of single-hill calendar rounds, there will also be people quietly eyeing-up 29 February as part of a long-term “category calendar round” – aiming to eventually have climbed, say, any Munro on each of the 366 dates. This idea has been around for a while – Hamish Brown mentions it in at least one of his books – and is open to considerable variation depending on where one lives and the nature of one’s hill ambitions. I know, for instance, of a Lake District-based walker who is working on both a Wainwrights calendar round and one for the Marilyns. The latter is an interesting list to tackle in this way, given that the number of available hills (1554 at present reckoning) exceeds 366, so there is scope for each date having a different hill attached to it. By contrast, of course, a calendar round for the 214 Wainwrights or 283 Munros inevitably requires some duplication.
And as for me, barring accidents and interventions, I’ll be up a Munro – probably on the eastern side of the Highlands, given that’s where the skies look to be brightest – as part of a long-term quest to complete an any-Munro calendar round. Success would reduce the number of “gaps” to 46, but as ten of those are in January and as I’m not rigorously targeting dates at present, it still feels like a decade-long game – a “desultory campaign”, to use the old phrase about tackling such things at one’s own pace. (I completed a Ben Cleuch-only calendar round on 31 January 2011 after 869 ascents in total, but very few things are ever new and I happily doff my thermal bunnet to Tom Bell of Grangemouth, who wrapped up his own Ben Cleuch calendar round on 27 September 1999.)
Today’s Munro will be in the company of a friend who has an “any Scottish hill above 300 metres” calendar round on the go, in which 29 February is likewise a gap needing plugged. He has been out on a previous 29 February, in 2000 – but on the Langdale Pikes in the Lake District, which doesn’t really count. We had intended a Munro together on leap year day in 2008, but it was utterly foul, with blizzards and gales making travel distinctly dodgy. As it was, I had a funeral to attend in Glasgow that day, so couldn’t have managed a hill even had conditions been balmy, but it’s unlikely that even an easy Munro would have been feasible without a major battle with the elements. This time round looks like being much more benign.
Oh, and we’ll also be out with another friend – an experienced hillgoer with no known interest in calendar rounds of any sort. He will simply be coming along for a day’s walk, which is absolutely fine by us. It takes all sorts.
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