A film I made over on the Fort William Mountain Festival channel about Caitlin Connor - an ice comp and dry tooling specialist. It was pretty tough to film this and not join in with the training! Caitlin received the Youth Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture this year. If you would like to nominate a young person making an important contribution in the mountains for this award, you can do so here.
Check out the film I made about Fort William Pro downhill MTB rider Mikayla Parton. Mikayla is receiving the Scottish Youth Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture this year and for good reason. I thought Mikayla has all the ingredients needed to be a successful athlete and was really impressed by her clear vision of where she wants to go and organised approach of how to get there. The comments of both Mikayla and Miles in the film allude to what those ingredients are.
I’ve been making these films for the Fort William Mountain Festival for both adult and youth awards and shooting them has been a fascinating study in the common ingredients that underlie great achievements in life. These obviously take many forms - great literature, art, activism, filmmaking, and sporting success to name some. In most of the recipients, a driven and uncompromising nature seems either immediately apparent or not far below the surface.
Where does this come from? I feel that it can originate from many different sources. Influence from a parent or mentor can be important, or really strong experiences in nature at a young age. I have no doubt that some experience of hardship might be important in a few as well.
Another important ingredient is agency. The ability to take hurdles by the throat and solve them even if they seem impossibly big or complex at the outset. A question I still have; is this agency a separate ingredient for success that evolves separately from a driven nature, or is it a downstream consequence of it? Or is it a mix of both? Perhaps If I keep making the films one day I might have a more useful insight into this!
In the meantime, enjoy getting to know Mikayla in this film and remember the Fort William Mountain Festival is live online now and you can stream the festival films any time over the next month.
For several years I’ve made films about the recipients of the Scottish Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture. They are always fascinating to shoot and hard to edit because the people are so interesting and are often my heroes!
This year Dave Morris is receiving. Among many other environmental campaigns, Dave played a central role in securing the superb access laws we have here in Scotland that give us all reliable access to our mountains and wild places. Something I feel grateful for nearly every day, as I spend my life on highland estates that were not always welcoming places to climbers and walkers.
Check out the film I made about Dave. I’ve uploaded all the other films onto the Fort William Mountain Festival channel as well. If you enjoyed my Nevis Faces series you might like these films too.
The Fort William Mountain Festival runs over this coming weekend. This year It’s online of course. A lot of good mountain films will be showing so check it out.