Climbers, skiers, activists & entrepreneurs: the outdoors people who made a mark in 2024

Some of the outdoors folk to visit the notional Four Seasons sofa in 2024, clockwise from bottom left: Brendan Paddy; Sam Christopherson; Hannah Bailey (right, with Lesley McKenna); Caitlin Connor; Andy Hadden; a scene from Bailey's film Thrawn; Andy Meldrum; Ben Larg (in blue); Philip Hughes | Contributed

Back in September, the Four Seasons column reached its 15th anniversary (or I suppose you could also say it has now weathered its 60th season.) Either way, the last 12 months have seen a particularly colourful cast of outdoors folk stopping by for a chat on the now very-much-showing-its-age Four Seasons interview sofa, so, by way of an end of year review, let’s revisit a few of the highlights...

In January, Brendan Paddy, director of Ramblers Scotland, swung by to shoot the breeze about the ongoing campaign to re-open the Radical Road, the ridiculously scenic footpath on Edinburgh’s Salisbury Crags which was closed to the public by Historic Environment Scotland in 2018 due to the risk of rockfalls. Paddy said he thought the trick to persuading HES to open it again would be finding “a solution that alerts people to the risk, helps manage the risk but also accepts that eliminating the risk isn’t realistic”. Happily, his constructive approach to the issue seems to be paying off: a partial re-opening of the path is now scheduled for the spring.

Walkers on the Radical Road in Edinburgh's Holyrood Park before the closure. | Ian Rutherford / The Scotsman

One of the best snowsports flicks to emerge from Scotland in recent times, Hannah Bailey’s film Thrawn focused on some of the strong female characters that make up the snow-sliding scene in the Cairngorms, notably Olympian Lesley McKenna and environmental activist Lauren McCallum. In February, ahead of its screening at the Fort William Mountain Festival, Bailey discussed her roundabout route into filmmaking, the significance of Beira, Celtic goddess of winter, and the special kind of determination it takes to pursue snowsports in a place where “perfect days” can be few and far between.

Caitlin Connor | Dave MacLeod

In March, Four Seasons caught up with competitive ice climber Caitlin Connor of Cambuslang, following a strong showing in the UIAA Ice Climbing World Championships in Edmonton, Canada; the landscape artist Philip Hughes, who had an exhibition of his very well-travelled notebooks in Stromness; and also Iain Ramsay-Clapham of Snowsport Scotland, who gave us the lowdown on an impromptu backcountry ski and snowboard contest called The Maverick, brought into being at very short notice when ideal conditions suddenly materialised at Glencoe.

In April, it was a pleasure to talk to Sam Christopherson of Coast to Coast surf school in Dunbar – a semi-regular visitor to the Four Seasons couch since it was first retrieved from a skip in almost-new condition. On this occasion, we discussed the decision to move the longboarding​ division of the Scottish National Surfing Championships ​(of which Sam is a past winner) from the not-particularly-longboard-friendly reef breaks around Thurso, where it has traditionally been contested, to the better suited waves of Pease Bay in the Scottish Borders. The move paid dividends, making for an engrossing competition, and the men’s division was eventually won by young Ansel Parkin, aged just 15, who was Four Seasons’ star interviewee for May.

Ansel Parkin, surfing in the final of the Scottish National Longboard Championships at Pease Bay | Malcolm Anderson

In June, I paid a visit to Edinburgh Napier University to interview surf science guru Brendan Ferrier, director of the Surf Lab. Technically I was there to talk about wetsuits, and in particular the project that had seen Ferrier testing several different brands on behalf of the about-to-open Lost Shore inland surf resort near Ratho. In reality, though, we ended up ​d​iscussing everything from the minutiae of aerial surfing manoeuvres (Ferrier has a PhD on that) to sports psychology. And, of course, we talked about the idea of the partnership between the Surf Lab and Lost Shore, and all the myriad forms that could take. Also in June, Four Seasons caught up with Paul Stark, the new CEO of the Scottish Surfing Federation, to chew over his plans for the future. The ultimate goal? A Scottish surfer on an Olympic podium. 

July may seem like an odd time to talk about skiing, but it’s when the Scottish ski resorts usually release their “skier days” statistics – a useful metric with which to measure the success of the past season. An interview with Andy Meldrum, owner of the Glencoe Mountain resort and also the man in charge of the marketing body ski-scotland, made two things very clear: first, the 2023/4 ski season had been poor; second, it could have been an awful lot worse without artificial snowmaking, particularly Snowfactories.

In August and September, with the £60 million Lost Shore development about to open, I spoke to some of the people involved in making it happen, notably the resort’s founder Andy Hadden, first a guest on the Four Seasons couch back in 2018. In that earlier interview, Hadden said he hoped to get Lost Shore up and running by 2020. “It’s been a long journey,” he said ​this time around, “but a great journey.”

Another repeat visitor to the Four Seasons sofa is ​S​cottish big wave surfer Ben Larg. In 2019 he blew minds by surfing a 30-foot wave at Mullaghmore in Ireland, aged just 14, with a jetski towing him in. This autumn, he returned to the spot where he first made a name for himself to see if he could ride the waves there under his own paddle-power. How did it go? Success in the end, he told us in November, but not without getting “pretty flogged” first.  

A very big thank-you to 2024’s interviewees for sharing their stories, and here’s to another year of good yarns in 2025.