In March 2023, 82-year-old Wilf Bishop found himself almost a thousand metres above sea level, snowshoeing across a mountainside in Austria. “I’m not a spiritual person, but it felt so peaceful being up there, even though it was arduous,” he says. “Mountains address something in us. It’s addictive.”
It was a brave moment of exploration that followed the hardest period of Bishop’s life. Three years earlier, his wife, Janet, had died of ovarian cancer. The pair met in 1959, at a mountaineering club in Hull, when he was just 17. “I saw this beautiful girl and had no idea how to talk to her, but I eventually gathered the courage,” he says. “She was the first girl I’d ever kissed and we fell in love. A few years later, we were married.”
The couple had four children, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. They enjoyed an active life, filling holidays with sailing, skiing and hiking. Then, in April 2020, Janet suddenly succumbed to the cancer she had been diagnosed with two years previously. “It got very serious in only a matter of weeks. Since it was the start of the Covid lockdowns, it was very isolating,” he says. “We had to have an unattended cremation and it was a grim time for everyone.”
Home alone, without the person he had always turned to for support, Bishop went for daily walks in the nearby Yorkshire Dales and tried to write about his experiences. “It distanced me from the pain,” he says. “It put it elsewhere for a while, on to the page, since no one can live with that amount of anguish forever.”
He had given up skiing a decade earlier out of fear of taking a bad fall and doing irreparable damage to his body, but he found himself longing for the experience of being on the mountainside again. “I wanted to find a way of getting back to the outdoors, to experience the wind and the majestic views,” he says. “I also needed it socially. When you have spent a lifetime talking to a lovely woman, the silence becomes very present.”
A mountaineering friend offered a solution. He suggested that Bishop try snowshoeing, a low-impact activity that would allow him to walk to high altitudes without the risks of skiing. He called up the leaders of a forthcoming week-long expedition being organised by the UK branch of the Austrian Alpine Club; they assured him that if he could walk, he could snowshoe. By March 2023, Bishop was in the Tirol mountains in the Alps with a dozen strangers from across Europe and a trained leader.
“It was really strenuous activity, walking up to eight hours a day, but I had the most wonderful time,” he says. “Plus, I was with a fantastic selection of people from their 40s upwards, all open-minded, generous and keen to share this experience together.”
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Learning mountain-rescue techniques and methods for spotting signs of avalanches while he walked, Bishop was enthused by the combination of physical and mental challenges. When he returned home, he booked another week-long expedition for the next winter.
“Since it’s so active, the snowshoeing trips have encouraged me to get healthier and do 20 squats every morning, as well as regular tai chi and pilates,” he says. “I’m lucky that I can maintain fitness in my older years and it’s a tremendous ego boost – the leader of the December trip called me inspirational!”
His family are keen for him to keep going. “They joke that it’s the way I’d want to go anyway, so they’re great supporters,” he says. “Although none of them have been tempted to take a trip with me yet.”
Bishop has another expedition planned for this month. This time, he is training to become an assistant, leading beginners on walks. He hopes to undertake a more strenuous hike in Finland, with stops in alpine huts inside the Arctic Circle. “I got hooked on this whole mountaineering thing when I was 17, so I’ll keep going as long as my joints will allow me,” he says. “When we get older, we might drift out of sight a bit, but it’s our time to do whatever we please. It is what Janet would have wanted.”
