Here’s to the outdoors folk whose stories made 2025 fly by
These adventurous spirits offered inspiration - and even a bit of light entertainment - in 2025, writes Roger Cox
As Izaak Walton rightly said, “good company on a journey makes the way seem shorter.” A keen fisherman and the author of The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653, Walton was also the friend and biographer of the poet, soldier, lawyer, politician, cleric and all-round Renaissance man John Donne, and you can well imagine that a long walk with him would have fairly flown by. By the same token, Four Seasons has been blessed with such an engaging gaggle of interviewees over the last 12 months that 2025 seems to have zipped past in a flash. Here are a few of the highlights...
In January, a coffee and a chat with Alasdair Steele, Surfers Against Sewage rep for South-East Scotland, cast much new light on the ongoing battle to clean up Scotland’s coastal waters. “There’s quite a lot of spin that goes around suggesting that we don’t have a problem in Scotland,” he told me, “but that’s not true. It’s just not as public as it is in England and Wales, because here less than 30 per cent of [sewage] overflows are monitored.”
While Steele – and SAS more generally – are under no illusions about the scale of the problem, or the time and money it will take to fix, it has at least become easier for people to make informed decisions about whether it’s safe to get into the sea or not this year, both due to Scottish Water launching an interactive map showing where sewage spills have taken place, and thanks to SAS bringing out its own, easy to use Safer Seas and Rivers Service for Scotland – an app which provides real-time alerts whenever sewage is discharged near designated bathing waters.
In March, prodigiously talented freestyle skier Kirsty Muir took some time out of her busy touring schedule to chat about the mental challenge of returning to competition after nearly a year out due to injury. “Social media can be hard,” she said, “just seeing people putting out edits of them skiing, particularly in the spring when that’s the best time to ski cos it’s so much fun with your friends...”)
READ MORE: Snowsport Scotland's CEO on how to ensure a future for Scotland's ski centres in a warming world
All those months of FOMO are now very much in her rear-view mirror, however, and she’s been enjoying a solid run of form, including a recent win at the Big Air World Cup event in Secret Garden, China at the end of November. At time of writing, the official Team GB selections for next year’s Milano Cortina Winter Olympics are still to be announced, but it’s surely now less a question of whether Muir will be travelling to Italy in February, and more a question of what she might achieve when she gets there.
East Lothian-based adventurer Mollie Hughes has a remarkable CV that includes being the youngest woman to climb Everest from both sides and the youngest woman to ski solo to the South Pole. In May, following the publication of her new book, Breathe: Life Lessons from the Edge of the World, she sat down with Four Seasons to discuss one of its major themes: resilience. What’s the key to acquiring this life-changing attribute? According to Hughes, simply having lots of difficult or challenging experiences isn’t enough – it’s how you process them that’s important. “It’s about experiencing emotions as they come up,” she explained, “be it fear, anxiety, self-doubt or anger, then viewing them as a challenge. How am I going to rebound from this?”
Speaking of resilience, Scots kayaker Mark Agnew needed large dollops of it in order to become one of the first people to traverse the North-West Passage under human power in 2023. His book about the experience, There Will Be Headwinds, was published in July and is a remarkable account of his gruelling 83-day, 2,000-odd mile journey. In his case, however, working as part of a four-person team, maintaining morale and resolving conflicts were also key. “The secret is just not to take things personally,” he explained (although he also admitted “that can be difficult when you’re tired”).
In September, Four Seasons headed to Fife to visit wooden surfboard maker Frazer Reid, head honcho of FAR Surfboards. In his workshop in a converted steading just outside Crail, Reid has been making beautiful all-wood surf-craft for more than a decade, but in a new departure he recently started up-cycling battered old beginner boards or “foamies”, rescuing them from landfill, strengthening their cores and then transforming them by adding durable wooden shells. Reid gave an early prototype to a friend with a reputation for carelessness, expecting the worst, but is surprised to find it still going strong. “If anyone was going to trash it it was going to be him,” he said, “but it’s still one of his favourite boards – I’ve got to the point where I’m kinda sick of him sending me texts going ‘Hey, I’ve just had another great surf on your board’ while I’m stuck at work.”
Finally, in November, Four Seasons managed to track down both the great Jimbob McCluskey (aka Stan Intihar) – a ski touring troubadour from Gobbler’s Knob, Tennessee, and a man on a mission to stop the snow-sliding world from taking itself too seriously – and also Mike Gifford, the new CEO of Cairngorm Mountain. The last decade or so hasn’t been easy for the Speyside ski centre, not least due to the time and money it’s taken to get its troublesome funicular railway repaired. Still, Gifford believes the resort is now “turning a bit of a corner” as it heads into the New Year. Here’s hoping he’s right.
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.