Ralph Storer

New for 2021: Corrour Bothy: A Refuge in the Wilderness

A celebration of 100 years of Highland adventures in and around the world’s oldest and most celebrated bothy, brimming with evocative extracts from a century of visitors’ books. Illustrated, informative, and, most importantly, great fun.

New for 2020: See You on the Hill

If you read one book about hillwalking this year, make it this one. (Undiscovered Scotland)

Also new for 2020: The Ultimate Sex Trivia Quiz Book, Baffies Great Outdoors Inappropriate Advice Column and Baffies Great Outdoors Inappropriate Glossary

Humour for discerning adults only.

I was born in Kent, schooled in Lincolnshire and went to university in Dundee (then a college of St Andrews). I guess I’m just an east-coast boy who kept feeling the pull of the north. It was in Dundee, at the age of 18 in 1965, that I fell in love with the Scottish Highlands – the landscape, the history, the romance, the adventure, even the winter storms through which we battled our way up steep snow and ice to cornice-bound summits... and the convivial evenings that followed in local hostelries. Little did I know then that I would write guidebooks to these mountains.

After graduating in Psychology I took a job in the burgeoning IT industry and this eventually led me to lecturing in software development at Napier University in Edinburgh, where I now live.

I’ve been writing guidebooks since 1987. Inspired by Gaston Rébuffat’s 100 Best Routes books on the Alps, I wrote 100 Best Routes on Scottish Mountains. This was the first English-language book of its kind, although the format is now commonplace.

Such books can give a good overview of their subject but necessarily lack the space for much on-the-ground detail. So three decades later in 2008 (I had other things to do) I embarked on two series of more comprehensive guidebooks to Scotland’s Munros (the 282 mountains over 3,000ft high): the Ultimate Guide series to all the Munros and the accompanying Baffies Guide series to the easy ones. Baffies (my alter ego) is the Scottish word for slippers. I’m currently five volumes into the former series and three volumes into the latter, with uncooperative weather and the 2020 pandemic slowing further progress.

In my writing style I aim to avoid standard guidebookese in favour of more interesting and witty text, while still retaining all the necessary info you’d want from a guidebook. Guidebooks should surely be well-written and fun to read as well as being informative.

His books are exceptional… Storer subverts the guidebook genre completely. (The Angry Corrie fanzine)

As a writer I’m probably best known for my guidebooks to the Scottish Highlands, although other favourite mountain ranges include the Alps, the Pyrenees and America’s Rockies and Sierra Nevada.

For a more off-the-wall approach to adventure around the world, in the style of Tim Cahill, one of my favourite authors in the field, I’ve also written three volumes of adventures and humorous diversions: The Joy of Hillwalking, 50 Shades of Hillwalking and See You on the Hill. These are where to look if you should ever want to know, for example, what it would be like to get stuck on an icefall, get lost in an unmapped cave or even walk on Pluto.

Moving one step further into humorous writing, I confess I’m also responsible for Baffies Great Outdoors Inappropriate Advice Column and Baffies Great Outdoors Inappropriate Glossary. But be advised: the former especially is for adults only.

For many years I also contributed non-fiction essays to Jade, the magazine of the Guild of Erotic Artists. Some of that experience has gone into The Ultimate Sex Trivia Quiz Book, which is hopefully as informative as it is playful (again for adults only).

For more of my books, check out my Amazon author page. You may even come across Love Scenes (a novel), Exploring Scottish Hill Tracks (the first book on mountain biking around the Highlands) and others that are now past their sell-by date.

Of course, I’d be a dull person if hiking and writing were all that defined me. Two other passions of mine are cinema and darkwave music. I still have ambitions to have a film of one of my screenplays ‘coming soon to a screen near you’ and hear one of the floor-fillers I synthesise on my home computer blasting out at my local Goth club.