Record-breaker Helen Rennie on clocking up 120 consecutive months skiing on Scottish snow



The understated way in which Rennie marked her achievement won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows her. The photographer and filmmaker Henry Iddon, who is preparing to release a short film about her achievement, describes her as “a very gentle person, and a very private person.”
“She just loves skiing,” he says. “She loves skiing and she loves the Cairngorms. The thing I love about Helen is she’s 65, she’s just retired, she’s a capable skier but she’s not some hot shredder – she just loves skiing in Scotland and she keeps on skiing all year. She’s not doing it to get on the speaker circuit or become a professional outdoor athlete by doing a ridiculous challenge. She’s just doing it because she loves it, and that’s so authentic and pure and honest.”



Rennie made an initial attempt to ski on Scottish snow for 12 consecutive months in 2006 – she managed 11 months, but then in October 2007 she was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, and in early 2008 she underwent major surgery to have part of her oesophagus removed.



“When I had the cancer diagnosis,” she says, “and then the surgery and the fact that I was alive ... I never planned ahead, and I still don’t, I just take each day and I’m grateful for each day and do the best I can with each day and enjoy it.”



For the next couple of years Rennie says she didn’t ski much, partly because she was still recovering from her illness, partly because the late Naughties weren’t a great time for snow anyway, with some commentators suggesting that the Scottish ski industry was as good as finished thanks to the effects of global warming.



“I got back on skis a couple of months after the surgery,” she remembers, “but I wasn’t able to carry skis or anything. I didn’t go up [to the mountains] that summer and then the following summer I don’t think I did much – I don’t think it was a particularly great summer ski-wise. 
“But then I went up in November 2009 because it was the opening day of the lifts at Cairngorm, and that was my first time on skis since probably late spring.”



As luck would have it, the winter of 2009/10 turned out to be one of the snowiest in living memory, and the coldest in the UK since 1978/9.
“2009/10 was just an amazing year,” she says, “absolutely fantastic – probably the best skiing ever. That year Cairngorm ran a tow on Midsummer’s Day which doesn’t happen very often. I remember [extreme skier and former Scottish Ski & Board cover star] Jamie Johnston and I going up in July and there was still plenty of snow at the top of the Ptarmigan Bowl to ski, and then there was plenty over in Ciste Mhearaidh [to the south-east of Cairn Gorm summit] in August.



“In fact, that was the year I skied the Headwall [above Coire Cas at Cairngorm] from 2 August to 2 September,” she continues, “and I made a wee film about that. And then of course I thought, ‘Well, that’s 11 months done,’ and then it snowed right at the start of October, so I ended up doing the 12 months. But it was never planned, because, like I say, after my illness I didn’t plan ahead – I still don’t – I just take life one day at a time.”




Finding snow to ski in Scotland in winter and spring isn’t usually a problem for the aspiring year-round skier – in most years the resorts are open from December to April and sometimes the lifts keep running until May or even June. After that, however, if you want to ski the snow that’s left you have to hike to get to it, and as the year wears on and the snow continues to melt, the remaining patches become smaller, fewer and further between. The crux time for anyone hoping to ski every month of the year, then, isn’t the summer, when temperatures are at their highest, but in early autumn, as it’s then that the snow patches have retreated the furthest, with the first serious snows of the winter often still several weeks away.



Before Rennie – better known in the Scottish skiing and hill-going community as Hilly – began her great adventure, the previous record for the longest number of consecutive months of skiing in Scotland was held by a retired army major called Richard Eccles from Nethy Bridge, who skied once a month for 34 months in the 1990s. He had more stringent rules for what constituted skiing than Rennie: for him, a snow patch had to be at least 100m from top to bottom, and he had to be able to complete at least 20 consecutive turns. On one occasion he donned a climbing harness and had mountain guide Eric Pirie lower him into a gully overlooking Loch Avon in order to meet these strict criteria. By contrast, Rennie’s approach is much more relaxed: if she can complete a single turn, she’s happy.



“Funnily enough I met him,” says Rennie. “It would’ve been August 2017, I was walking up to the summit [of Cairn Gorm] to photograph some snow patches and then I was going over to Ciste Mhearaidh to ski what was left, and this guy had stopped on the summit and he introduced himself as Richard Eccles. He said ‘I used to do this, and I’ve heard about you since’ so it was very nice that I actually met up with him. He was much more extreme than me.”




In a former life, Henry Iddon was a member of the Great Britain Speed Skiing Team, with an eye-watering personal best top speed of 176 kph. For the last couple of decades, however, he has built a solid reputation as an adventure sports photographer, and he is also arts officer for the ever-expanding Kendal Mountain Festival. He’s no stranger to testing working conditions, but his decision to make a film about Rennie, following a chance encounter with her daughter Yvonne in the spring of 2018, brought with it a unique set of challenges.



Iddon is based in Blackpool and travels all over the world for work. In the winter, Rennie tends to ski as often as she can, so he knew that filming her then wouldn’t be a problem; in the autumn, however, he knew there would be fewer opportunities: if the snow suddenly started falling he would just have to drop everything and high-tail it to Scotland as quickly as he could, from wherever he happened to be at the time.



Iddon filmed Rennie several times this year, including a session in full winter conditions at the Cairngorm Mountain ski area in April and on a hunt for remote snow patches on Aonach Beag in the summer. Unfortunately he missed Rennie’s historic ten-year ski at the start of October (although footage shot by Yvonne will feature in the film) so when it snowed again later in the month he was determined to get to the hills no matter what.



“I was in Oman doing a piece about mountain biking for Crank magazine,” he says, “and I flew home on 20 October. I landed at Manchester at 7.30pm, got on the train at half eight, looked at my phone and I saw all these pictures of snow on Cairngorm and I thought ‘Well, we’ve missed the actual footage of the skiing at the beginning of October, but if she goes up again and there’s decent snow that’ll really do the ten years justice – I’ve got to go!’



“So I messaged her from the train, and I decided to go up. I got home at about nine, swapped my camera bags about, had something to eat, got to bed at half-12, got up at half-four, drove to Aviemore and met Helen at 11am in the car park. Then I spent all day filming with her and got back to the car at 5 o’clock.”



Iddon is hoping to have his film ready to show at the Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival and the Fort William Mountain Festival in February. Rennie confesses that she found it a little strange being filmed to begin with, but over the months she and Iddon built up a good rapport. “I’ve got to know Henry now so I’m quite unselfconscious in front of him,” she says.




After filming Rennie at intervals over the course of the last year, and with access to hours of archive footage from the previous nine, Iddon should be able to paint a representative picture of her ten years on Scottish snow. However, Rennie has skied in so many different places over the last decade, and in such varied conditions, that there’s no way he could ever hope to encapsulate the full breadth of her experiences on screen.



Of all her skiing adventures since 2009, Rennie says two really stick in the memory. The first was in August 2013, when she visited two big patches of snow on the slopes of Carn Ban Mhor in Glen Feshie that tend to last well into the summer.



“I could see that there was a little bit of snow so I walked up,” she says, “and that’s when I discovered these amazing snow tunnels. Down the middle of one of the patches there was a stream going underneath, and the roof had collapsed high up, so I was walking down a huge channel and then it led into this tunnel.



“I had never experienced anything like that before and it wasn’t what I was expecting. Then to actually ski down the patch – obviously away from the middle, in case it collapsed – it was lovely skiing.



“I skied the first patch and then I walked over to the second one and it was the same, with these amazing snow tunnels.”

 

The other memory she returns to again and again has nothing to do with skiing, even though she had her skis with her at the time.



“I think it was 2016 and I was skiing my hill at Slochd, which is just by the Slochd path. I go up there because it’s really easy to access from the A9 and it’s a lovely hill – not too steep, not too gentle – it’s just lovely to skin up and ski down, and it used to be absolutely full of mountain hares. My husband Gordon had given me a telephoto camera and I’d learned the technique of ... I’d start skinning up but then if I see a hare I’d go down on my knees and I’d skin on my knees, just to creep up on the hares. This day I got to within two metres of a mountain hare and he was there for 25 minutes. He did everything. He cleaned every part of his body, he rolled in the snow, he got up, he nibbled the heather through the snow ... and that was an amazing experience, to be so close and be able to see a hare just doing what hares do.



“It’s often the way,” she says, “that you go up and you don’t know what’s going to happen, and then these sorts of special things happen and they just make the day.”  



Evidently Rennie’s approach to the hills owes more to the gentle philosophy of Nan Shepherd than the more goal-oriented mindset of Sir Hugh Munro, but as the winter of 2019/20 seems to be shaping up to be another snowy one, is she tempted to go for another record? Eleven years? Fifteen. Twenty?



“No,” she laughs, “I just take it one day at a time. It depends on the weather, it depends on health, you just don’t know what the future holds.
“I always find hoofing up gets a bit harder in the autumn,” she continues, “but it’s not so bad once you get snow and you’re skinning up. Once I’m on snow it’s rejuvenating – it gives me a big boost. I love being on snow. Everything else disappears – you’re just so focused on what you’re doing up there, it’s fantastic.”