Guy Procter, ex-Trail editor, looks back on a golden era

Outdoor headlines

22 July 2010 09:11

I was a hill-walker from my childhood and Trail was the only outdoors magazine that I felt I could leave hanging around my bedroom without feeling like an old fart in a young body. I think it’s still that way.

How did I get involved with Trail? It’s a cliché, but the idea of getting paid to look at maps and plan adventures was unbelievably attractive. It still is too! I prostrated myself at the foot of then-editor David Ogle’s desk and said I’d work for free for as long as he’d have me. The weeks I was there (still claiming the dole) were like a long drawn-out job interview for if a post ever became available.
 
The sweatiest I’ve ever been in my life was when I woke up and realised I’d missed my plane to Scotland to do two days’ walking in the Trossachs for a feature. I was only 20-odd and was petrified I’d get the sack. So I re-booked the flights for the next day for me and the photographer on my debit card and we had to do the two days’ walks in one, changing clothes half-way through to make the pictures look a day apart. It was knackering.
 
The other memories that stick out are barrel-rolling in an RAF jet over Fleetwith Pike and waving through the cockpit at walkers just a few feet above my head, overcoming and then rediscovering my claustrophobia in a pothole in Yorkshire, cooking bacon on an environmental fireplace on a grassy patch in the bend of a river beneath Suilven, discovering Coniston Bluebird beer in the pub it’s brewed in, finding some once-priceless smugglers’ ‘wadd’ on Gable Crag, driving the north coast road in Scotland, seeing the curvature of the earth at dawn from the summit of Kilimanjaro and beating the NME (my other favourite mag) to PPA Specialist Magazine of the Year in 2005. It was, and is, an incredible subject and a brilliant magazine.