Historical Badass

Hamish MacInnes

Saved hundreds of climbers — and, eventually, his own mind

Hamish MacInnes chased Hillary to Everest on a shoestring, made pioneering climbs from the Amazon to the Alps and his native Scotland, and befriended movie stars along the way. Yet despite a prodigious climbing résumé, he is known less for the routes he put up around the world than for the hundreds of climbers he brought safely down from the hills of Scotland’s central highlands.

He founded the Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team in 1961 and led it for more than thirty years, becoming known as the father of Scottish Mountain Rescue, or simply the Fox of Glencoe for his cunning way of finding victims and the creative tools and techniques he developed to get them safely home. MacInnes designed the first all-metal ice axe and a folding alloy stretcher still used by mountain rescue teams worldwide, and he wrote the International Mountain Rescue Handbook. First published in 1972, it has never been out of print.

Hamish MacInnes was born on July 7, 1930, in Gatehouse of Fleet,

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