Mountain rescue teams: the heroes of Scotland's high places

She is wearing a crisp white T-shirt and her red and black backpack seems heavy on her shoulders.

She’s not smiling.

In her backpack are her father’s ashes. And the rocky path leads to Creagan a’Choire Etchachan, the last route he walked. Now it is taking her to where his body was found to see what he last saw and to scatter his remains on the hills he loved.

“My dad was a really kind and gentle man who was content living a simple life. After his family, hill walking was undoubtedly what he loved most,” she says.

“It is most likely that my dad was caught up in whiteout conditions and fell from the crags of Creagan a'Choire Etchachan.

“He was then buried deep in snow, which is why the search operation was so difficult.”

Her father, Jim Robertson from Cathcart in Glasgow, was an experienced hillwalker who had climbed all 284 Munros. It was the last Monday in February 2016 when, a few days before he was due to celebrate his 61st birthday with his family, he set off for Braemar to base himself at Bob Scott’s Bothy in Glen Lui on the Mar Lodge Estate, and to spend a couple of days walking in the Cairngorms.

When he failed to arrive home for his birthday five days later, Lynn and her brother Paul made the missing person call to police that everyone with a hillwalker or mountaineer in the family must dread.

At its peak, the search for Jim involved more than 80 volunteers from Scottish Mountain Rescue teams, search and rescue dogs, police and a Coastguard helicopter. The news would not be good.

Lynn remembers Matt Smith, the Braemar Mountain Rescue search leader, keeping her family informed of developments. As hours turned into days, hope faded.

“Matt helped us to accept that it was no longer going to be a rescue, but a recovery.”

Comfort came from visiting the rescue centre, to see the team at work and to tell the volunteers how much their efforts were appreciated. “One volunteers, Pete, took us out to Bob Scott’s Bothy for the first time,” recalls Lynn. “We saw for ourselves the severe winter conditions that my dad had been caught up in.

“While we were there, there were teams on the hills risking their lives for my dad.  We were truly overwhelmed by their selflessness and compassion.”

It would be mid-May before Jim’s body was found. The search had continued throughout, with teams from the Aberdeen and Braemar areas gathering over Easter holidays to retrace steps and explore spots that earlier had been too treacherous or too thick with snow cover to properly scour.

When Jim’s body was found by a hillwalker, the Braemar team hiked to the spot within hours to wrap him up, bring him home, and pay their respects at his funeral.

They then walked with Lynn to the spot where her father was found and waited while she lay down and grieved.

“I found some comfort being there and seeing the breathtaking view,” she says, “because I knew my dad died in a very special place doing what he loved most.”

As Scotland’s mountain rescue teams gear up for what everyone hopes will be a quiet winter but which will, sadly, almost certainly bring challenges, Lynn’s account of the care given to families in their darkest moments is a side to their selfless work which is rarely heard of.

And yet, says Scottish Mountain Rescue vice-president and leader of the Ochil Mountain Rescue team, Kev Mitchell, it is what they do.

“Not every rescue ends up with a happy ending,” he concedes.

“No mountain rescue team likes to have anyone missing on their patch and people will put a lot of effort into trying to find someone. Even if a period of time has passed and it's very unlikely we will find anything positive, people keep looking.

“Sometimes the best thing we can do for them is to bring someone's body off the hill with dignity.”

Last year Scotland’s 24 mountain rescue teams – made up of around 850 skilled, trained volunteers – dealt with a total of 588 incidents, significantly higher than the 423 they handled the previous year.

Among their tasks was the grim job of recovering 13 bodies.

Around half of the incidents were mountain-related, most the result of a slip or trip, a navigational error or simply getting hopelessly lost.

Some involved people in the midst of a medical emergency, some were cragfast, weather-bound or benighted. Some were overdue, blown over, exhausted or separated from their party.

One was the result of a rockfall, another lightning. Six had relied upon technology only to find technology let them down.

With so many potential hazards and so much at stake, those who don’t venture to the hills in winter may wonder at what draws others to risk life and limb.

And yet, winter climbing and off-piste skiing in Scotland is rising in popularity, prompting mountaineering organisation to this week launch a joint ThinkWINTER campaign urging hillwalkers, climbers and skiers to "up-skill" to ensure they have the knowledge and expertise to cope in harsh, changeable conditions.

“There’s a stillness, there’s a magic about hillwalking and climbing in winter, you get a different view of everything,” Mitchell explains. “But you have to be good at navigating, you have to carry more stuff, maybe a head torch and not be over-optimistic.

“You need to be on top of the weather, you need to know what it’s going to be like and what it’s been like the week before.

“You need to know about the avalanche forecast, it might mean a change of route.

“What is good to keep in perspective is that there are hundreds of thousands of hill days with people on the hills but the accident rate is remarkably low. Anyone can slip or become lost.”

For the past two years, Lynn has spent the anniversary of her father’s death walking in the Cairngorms, visiting the bothy where he last slept. It helps, she says, to feel closer to her dad.

This year, she has her new baby daughter, Callie, and the emotional wrench of knowing her dad never had the chance to meet her. Remarkably, she met her partner John Murphy because of her father’s search – while she pleaded on social media for help to find her dad he was online too, asking others to help find his father who had gone missing from home.

Daughter Callie, she says, is a ray of light from both of their tragedies.

As winter bites, she is bracing herself for news of winter mountain searches. “It genuinely hurts my heart when I hear of other missing walkers because I know the pain the family will be going through,” she adds.

For those who must endure the anxious wait for news, she offers some comfort. “From the very beginning of the search, the rescue volunteers gave us every reason to put all of our trust in them.

“They gave us hope when initially we thought nothing could be done. As the days passed, they treated us with honesty and helped us come to terms with our loss.

“Moreover they showed a commitment to finding our dad that never once wavered even as more and more time passed.

“Words can't actually describe how I feel about them,” she adds. “And I know that my dad would never believe what they did for him – the devotion they showed and the efforts they went to.”