There is a moment, somewhere above Kinlochleven, where the West Highland Way crests its most punishing climb and the hills open up completely. If you are lucky — if the night before has brought rain and the morning has answered with sun — you will see the water sliding down the flanks of the green hills in thin white lines, each one catching the light, the whole hillside trembling with it.
Jennifer Stevens was telling me about this moment when she stopped mid-sentence. Not for effect. She had simply gone somewhere else for a second.
"Is this real?" she had thought, standing there. "I feel like I'm in one of those fairy tales. Or I've stepped into a book I used to read as a kid — when you could just imagine these beautiful landscapes."
She came back and laughed, a little self-consciously. "No camera will ever do it justice," she said. "I knew that standing there."
She had just come up the Devil's Staircase. Her pack weighed somewhere around 17 or 18 kilograms. She had never thought to weigh it before she left.
We are talking on a weekday afternoon, the kind of unhurried conversation that only happens when neither person has anywhere to be. Jennifer Stevens makes films about long-distance walking on her Tiny Pine Outdoors YouTube channel — meticulous, honest films, narrated in the kind of voice that makes you feel she is walking slightly ahead, waiting to show you something. The West Highland Way was her first long trail. She did it in July 2020, alone, with no accommodation booked.
"I kind of winged it," she says, then immediately qualifies this in a way that tells you something about her. "I wasn't naive. I knew about the risks. I just thought — at the end of each day, I can camp wherever I want. So I gave myself that freedom."
She had done her research, after a fashion. She had watched YouTube videos. She had googled insect repellents and found bog myrtle lotion on Amazon. "Whether that worked or I was just lucky with the midges," she says cheerfully, "I genuinely don't know."
What the Trail Is
The West Highland Way runs 96 miles from Milngavie, on the northern fringe of Glasgow, to Fort William at the foot of Ben Nevis. Most walkers take seven to ten days. Jennifer took ten, and is unapologetic about it.
"The first bit is woodland walking," she says, "and those first views of the hills are just incredible." Very soon after the trail had properly begun, Jennifer sat down and spent half an hour eating a picnic with some highland cows. She is not remotely embarrassed about this. "They were lovely cows," she says.
I could see the little valley ahead. I thought: I'm going to see a lot more of this. And this is just amazing.
The Bothy
On her third or fourth day, Jennifer was moving through Caledonian pinewoods when she noticed a path heading off to the left. Through the trees, just about: a rooftop. A thin thread of smoke from a chimney. She had not, she admits, done quite enough research to know that Rowchoish bothy was there. "I kind of just thought: I wonder if that's one of those bothies I've heard about." She went to investigate.
Someone had brought a wind-up radio. Edward and Faron had a flask of single malt Scotch that went quietly around the room. Martin and Dave, hiking at a similar pace, would end up sharing the trail with her for the next few days.
"Everyone was just happy to see you," Jennifer says. "Happy to be there."
The community that forms on the West Highland Way is one of its less-photographed qualities — but it is perhaps the thing walkers talk about most when they come home.
The Pack
We should talk about the pack. Jennifer had, by her own admission, overpacked. Three or four outfits instead of two. Extra socks, because what if they got wet? A notebook. Various snacks. Total weight: somewhere around 17 or 18 kilograms. She did not weigh it before she left because she did not think to weigh it before she left.
"On level ground you genuinely can't feel it," she says. "On a hill, you feel every single gram."
The Devil's Staircase — a steep, zigzagging climb east of Glencoe with a rare gift for producing false summits — is where you feel every single gram. She barely filmed the ascent. "I wasn't thinking about the camera. I was thinking about getting to the top. My lungs. My breathing." A pause. "Why can I taste blood."
At some point on the way up, Jennifer had started eating her snacks — not because she was especially hungry, but because every flapjack consumed was another 200 grams she didn't have to carry. If you have ever stood on a steep hill eating frantically for structural reasons, you will recognise this logic immediately.
She got to the actual top and called her mother. "I was like, 'Mum. You will never believe what I've just done.'"
The Smell of the Pines
I ask about the smell of the pinewoods. She had mentioned it in passing — a throwaway line earlier — and it had stayed with me.
"Immediately, I'm back there," she says. "Scots pine and fir. The heat pulling everything out — the sap, the pine needles on the ground, the earthy smell of the mulch underfoot. And the moss. The greenest, cushioniest moss you could imagine, with the light coming down through the branches in long golden rods."
This is my favourite smell I've ever smelled in my life. And I knew I'd never be able to bottle it.
Her most vivid sensory memory from ten days in some of Scotland's most dramatic scenery is not a view at all. It is a smell in a forest. Trails work on you like that. The landscapes end up in the photographs; the smell of pine resin on a warm July afternoon lives somewhere else entirely.
Why You Walk
"I really don't know," she says, when I ask whether the West Highland Way is the one trail in Scotland a person must walk. Then: "But yes. Because of the community. Because of how different it is every time. It's a proper adventure. One you make yourself."
What she comes back to, without being asked, is a word she uses almost in passing: grounded. "It puts you in the moment. You feel humbled by these giants around you. There's nothing like it."
She did the whole thing on a phone camera. The footage from the hillside above Kinlochleven was never going to do it justice. She knew that at the time.
She took the shot anyway. That is, more or less, why you walk.
