Award winner Karen Darke
Inspirational athlete and adventurer Karen Darke has received a top mountain award.
The Inverness-based Paralympian has been named as the 15th recipient of the Scottish Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture.
Early in her sporting career, she climbed Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn in 1991, and won the Swiss KIMM mountain marathon a year later.
But at the age of 21, an accident while sea-cliff climbing left her paralysed from the chest down.
Organisers of the Fort William Mountain Festival, which oversees the award, said her life journey has called for total commitment, determination and resilience.
At 21, Darke awoke from a coma to be told she would never walk, cycle or climb again.
The award organisers said: “With unbroken spirit, will and confidence, the first thing she bought after six months of recovery in a hospital bed was a race chair.
“A year later she completed the Great North Run followed by the London Marathon. In 1996 she hand-biked across the Himalaya from Kazakhstan and across to Pakistan, while still adapting to being paralysed, through the Indian Himalaya in 2005 and 2018, and across the Tibetan Plateau in 2014.
“In 2002 she was part of a team that sea kayaked through the Inside Passage from Canada to Alaska, Vancouver to Juneau, in 10 weeks. In 2006, she took part in an expedition that crossed Greenland’s ice sheet whilst sitting on skis using her arms and poles to cover the 372-mile crossing.
“Sixteen years after her accident, Karen climbed El Capitan in California’s Yosemite national park, a four-day climb that required 4,000 pull-ups. More recently Karen has been cycling the seven continents following rivers and coastlines and exploring ‘Inner Gold’ as a concept behind a book she is working on.”
Karen Darke said: “Receiving the Scottish Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture took me by surprise but is a real honour. Thank you.
“My soul is rarely peaceful without a mountain in its presence. On becoming paralysed almost 30 years ago it seemed at first that mountains were a thing of the past. Thanks to the interesting technology of bikes and skis, and to great friends who have been up for some adventures, mountain landscapes have worked their way even deeper into the fabric of my being. The adventure mindset that mountains have taught me is the inspiration for my next book, which I’m hoping will connect others more deeply to the power in the wild landscapes around us.”
Nominated by the public and her peers as a mountain hero who celebrates achievement, accomplishment and the spirit of adventure, Karen Darke joins previous winners including Dave Morris, Andy Nisbet, Jimmy Marshall, Myrtle Simpson, Ian Sykes, and Dr Hamish MacInnes in the excellence in mountain culture hall of fame.
Currently, Darke is training for the ninth and final leg of her Quest 79 project, to create the Pole of Possibility, sit-skiing with a team-mate, Iona Somerville, graduate of Scottish charity the Polar Academy, which works with teenagers often low in belief and aspiration.
The pair will begin their exploration at 79 degrees latitude in an effort to create a world and Guinness record for sit-skiing to the South Pole. Their mission is to explore and share the advantages of adversity. They will explore how adversity, nature and adventure help us heal from difficult life events and that to enable our individual and collective ability to do more than we might believe possible.
Alvance Aluminium and Jahama Highland Estates are supporting the award. Alvance British Aluminium, managing director Tom Uppington said: “Karen is the worthiest winner we can imagine of this award and an outstanding addition to the list of previous recipients. Karen’s resourcefulness, strength of character and mountain expertise are extraordinary and show qualities we can all aspire to in our daily lives.”
Karen Darke will be speaking at the Fort William Mountain Festival as part of the biking night at the Highland Cinema, Fort William, on Saturday 19 February.
Kirsty Muir. Photo: GB Snowsport
Freestyle skier Kirsty Muir has won the youth mountain award.
The 17-year-old, who was chosen to represent Great Britain in the Beijing Winter Olympics, is the eighth recipient of the Scottish Youth Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture.
Organisers of the awards said: “Described as a ‘one in a generation athlete’ by former Olympic snowboarder Lesley McKenna, and touted as a strong GB contender at the Beijing Games, Kirsty Muir epitomises these winning principles perfectly.
“Her extraordinary rise to the top of the international freestyle skiing circuit, from hitting the dry slopes of Aberdeen Snowsports Centre at ‘nearly four’ years old, to starting to hone her freestyle craft at seven, to multiple youth competition podiums and a memorable maiden slopestyle world cup medal in Aspen, Colorado at 16, can all be attributed to her grit, passion, training, focus, dogged determination for success, and humility.”
Kirsty Muir said: “I am honoured to be this year’s recipient of the Scottish Youth Award for Excellence in Mountain Culture. I hope I can inspire people to get out into their local areas and give sports a go.”
Having achieved a number of under-age titles at British Indoor Championships Ski and Snowboard and The Brits Championships, Muir made the senior ranks stand up and take notice at the 2018 Brits.
The 13-year-old won all three freeski titles – big air, slopestyle and halfpipe – against competitors many years her senior. She went on to be awarded the ‘Spirit of Sarah’ scholarship by Momentum Camps and the Sarah Burke Foundation, becoming the first athlete outside of North America to win the award which included attendance at their summer freestyle camp in Whistler.
In 2019 she made the podium on the international circuit taking first place in her first Europa Cup slopestyle competition, continuing a successful season with a second and a third place at the junior world championships in Sweden.
The biggest breakthrough in Muir’s career when she won a silver medal in the freeski Big Air competition at the 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games in Lausanne, Switzerland. Having also finished fourth in the slopestyle competition, she was chosen as Team GB’s flagbearer for the closing ceremony.
In March 2021, in her first trip to America, Muir claimed her first world cup medal with a silver in the ski slopestyle competition in Aspen. At 16 she was the youngest competitor in the final in what was only her fourth world cup start.
She followed this up with an impressive sixth place in the FIS freestyle ski and snowboarding world championships, also staged in Aspen. Muir was the only British female to qualify for the eight-woman slopestyle final.
She finished the 2020-21 season in second place in the world cup freeski slopestyle standings, also being nominated for the European Olympic Committee’s 2021 winter Piotr Nurowski best European young winter athlete prize.
Lydia Rohmer, principal and chief executive of award sponsor West Highland College UHI, said: “We are delighted that this year’s recipient is so very clearly a young person passionate about achieving her dreams.
“Kirsty is committed and driven to overcome any challenges that come her way to reach the top in her sport. These qualities of resilience and determination are what we endeavour to instil in all our students as well as a keen desire to share their knowledge and expertise by teaching others and we clearly see these qualities in Kirsty too.
“We wish to send our congratulations to Kirsty and wish her every success in her future career.”
