These last couple of weeks have been a little challenging in a couple of ways. First I was off down in London helping to judge the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards. The challenge there was just being in London and cooped up in a small, sweaty room with a bunch of feral wildlife photographers. The second challenge was a prototype skiing course that Blair Aitken (British Backcountry Skiing) set up to see if he could take a complete novice (me) and in two days get them skinning up and skiing down Cairngorm. And it nearly worked - we did skin up and ski down bits of Cairngorm (here’s a brief GoPro video showing conditions).

The final challenge is on a scale way beyond these, however. A couple of weeks back, seven planning applications were approved to build run of river hydro schemes on nearly every tributary of Glen Etive. I’m not typically an activist of any sort, but after submitting objections to the original planning applications, it quickly became clear that there were no locals actively objecting (even though many didn’t like the idea) and I was in a position to help through local knowledge, photography, availability and access.

Now I’m no NIMBY, we have hydro schemes just down the loch in Kinlochleven, a new one being built near the West Highland Way, which I don’t object to at all. However, three of the schemes that have been applied for are in designated Wild Land areas and National Scenic areas. One, in particular, is probably known to many landscape photographers and that is Allt a Mheuran or the river known as Robber’s Falls below Ben Starav. What could I do but get involved?

I’ll be writing more about these schemes in the next issue and more details about the background to the objections. More importantly, I’ll be writing about what role photography can play in some of these controversial planning applications.

If you’d like to see the river in questions, you can take a look at a clip from some drone footage I made yesterday . You can also find out more if you’re on Facebook by visiting facebook.com/SaveGlenEtive.

Click here to download issue 178 (high quality, 120Mb)

Click here to download issue 178 (smaller download, 64Mb)