Moonwalker: Adventures of a midnight mountaineer

by Alan Rowan

Moonwalker is a unique story, the memoir of a man whose love of Scotland's mountains would override his body-clock and all conventional notions of health and safety. When Alan Rowan finished his shifts as a sub-editor at a national newspaper at midnight, he knew he was too jacked up on deadline adrenaline to attempt sleep. At the same time, he was starting to worry if he would ever complete his ambition to reach the summit of every Munro in Scotland those peaks of over 3000ft. One crazy night, he decided upon a single solution to both problems. He would begin his ascents in the middle of the night, see the sun rise above the clouds and then come down the mountain just as everyone else was going up. We see Alan's transformation from desk jockey to midnight mountaineer, meet dodgy car salesmen, rabid sheepdogs, charging deer, superstitious Germans and crooked confectioners - all the while seeing the best of Scotland in a unique light. Moonwalker is funny and touching; at once a deeply personal memoir and a riotous travelogue.

Genres: Walking, Mountaineering

263 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 13, 2014

Reviews

[Paul Renwick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interestingly, what I liked most about this book wasn’t the description of climbing the mountains, but the stories connected to them.

You could feel the camaraderie between Alan and his friends as he described the car journeys on the way to completing the latest Munro.

[Adrian Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Munroist I can appreciate what Alan Rowan has achieved. No mean feat and I enjoyed his tales of mountains I have climbed. Shame about the choice of final munro though ....

[Leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was always going to like this book – 238 pages about night-hiking in the Scottish mountains.

This book chronicles the author's round of the Munros, the 287 Scottish mountains higher than 3,000'. As such it could have been a dull read, but accompanying the catalogue of hill names, routes, and height gains and losses are the comfortingly familiar tales of being frozen, drenched, exhausted, lost, wind-beaten, and spooked that will bring a nostalgic cheer to any climber of Scotland's hills. Alan Rowan particularly speaks to my condition when he talks of watching the sun come up from 3,000' and that smug feeling of passing early birds heading out just as you're getting back to the car.

There are many other anecdotes, including those detailing Rowan's very many overnight hikes, and I liked the chapter-heading line drawings too (particularly the ones of the dog).

Laugh-out-loud funny in many places, I loved this book, and I believe it would appeal to any mountaineer and/or anyone with a love of the Scottish wilderness.