Answer

By Anonymous

#1 Navigate Britain’s bleakest landscape

The challenge of Dartmoor is obvious from the second you lay eyes on it: a bleak, featureless, seemingly endless wilderness of wind-blown moor. Tinkling becks, quaint stone bridges and idyllic towns soften the edges of this gaping hole in humanity, but the central mass of Dartmoor provides little in the way of comfort: only peculiar, wind-sculpted tors dotted around its rolling slopes and beguiling streams criss-crossing beneath them offer anything that resemble landmarks. Standing stones, burial grounds and unusual ancient crosses lie undisturbed and unfenced on the inner plain of Dartmoor.
Within a country notable for commercialising its monuments, this is testimony indeed to this area’s natural isolation.   

You’ve got a great story if you’ve completed a pathless, self-navigated track over a good portion of the inner moor. Stepping off the path and striding out on your own is an experience akin to that unnerving moment when you trust your weight to the climbing knot you’ve just tied – your skill and self-confidence are suddenly all that count towards success. The troublingly empty landscape of Dartmoor makes orientation a challenge in itself; complete a walk like this and your skills at reading the landscape will be tight ’n’ tuned to God-like proficiency.

You’ve got free drinks all night if you’ve navigated a linear walk, over two days, in a 40km expedition from Ivybridge to Okehampton. This is a lot harder than it sounds as there’s a far greater chance of error over a long, straight distance on any route; doing it somewhere as featureless of Dartmoor adds an extra tier to your achievement. Your interpretation of the ring contours of small knolls and noting the significance of even the smallest of features will become essential as you struggle to keep a bearing. Simple things such as the location of your camp and the orientation of your tent will demand concentration every step of the way. Think ancient sea explorer trying to
hit a small island in the Atlantic, thousands of miles from his home port...

Want to do it? Dartmoor is the place to go if you think you’ve learned everything there is to know about the map and compass. Practise navigation skills such as those in last month’s Trail Mountain Leader feature before embarking.

Maps OS Landranger (1:50,000) 191 & 202.

#2 Bag each and every one of Scotland’s most remote Munros

Most of us will never climb Scotland’s 284 Munros: it’s sad, but it’s true. So try instead condensing the challenge into a smaller area that shouts an achievement every bit as grand and daunting as Scotland’s most monolithic of tick-lists. The Letterewe range in Scotland’s ‘Great Wilderness’ offers the prospect of bagging mainland Britain’s most inaccessible Munro – A’Mhaighdean (967m). The area’s unpredictable weather, isolation and sheer-sided grandeur poses challenges before you’ve even so much as tickled the jagged flanks of the mountains themselves, so a wild camp in this area is almost a necessity (even for those looking to touch just one summit) – unless you’re really, really hard...

You’ve got a great story if you bag Mullach Choire Mhic Fhearchair (1018m), the Great Wilderness’s greatest peak, and its near neighbours Beinn Tarsuinn (937m) and Sgurr Ban (989m). This massif is less well-trodden than others in the area, and consequently is a rough, largely pathless affair. Don't think of bagging the peaks as challenging in itself, as it’s so much more besides: approaching from the hamlet of Incheril requires a walk-in of around 15km before you even have a sniff at the tops, and it’s a long walk-out should the weather close in, so go prepared for a full, serious expedition complete w