Mighty Quinn Young has become the youngest girl ever to scale all of Scotland’s 282 Munros - at the age of ten. The Inverness youngster has braved wind, rain and snow to scale all peaks in Scotland over 3,000ft - including many which have claimed the lives of climbers who have gone before.
Quinn’s final ascent of the remote Càrn nan Gobhar, west of Inverness, was one of 12 around Loch Mullardoch that she did in one weekend this month with dad Ian. The trip included a summit bivvy camp on Mullach na Dheiragain, with the final rock being placed on a cairn when Quinn was 10 years, three months and 13 days old.
Despite the conquest taking the best of ten years, the schoolgirl has pledged not to give up her climbing passion. She has already started repeating the conquest of highlights of her Munro bagging years.
Quinn, a pupil at Duncan Forbes Primary, in Culloden, said she was proud to be finished - and now may try to bag all the Corbetts, of which there are 221 at over 2,500ft.
She said: “I am really pleased to do them all. My dad and I were having such a good time doing them all. It was a bit scary some of the time when the weather was bad but we really enjoyed it.
“We might do all the Corbetts after this and we will definitely not stop climbing.”
Quinn’s dad Ian, a shop manager, completed all the Munros a year earlier and was there to film his daughter at the windy top of her final peak.
He said: “She is very brave and she has stuck at it through some very challenging conditions.
“Quinn has amazed us all to be honest, as she has just got her head down in the toughest weather and she never complains or asks to go home without finishing.
“She has also been carrying her own pack and we’ve had some interesting camps together - which are probably a bit more of a challenge to primary school kids than they would be to grizzled mountain climbers.”
Quinn’s name is now recorded in the register of “compleators” - at No 7033.
Quinn’s mum Fiona, an advanced nurse practitioner, said: “I’m proud of Quinn. She’s been an inspiration to me and I hope she is to other youngsters - especially girls. They can achieve so much when they put their minds to it.
“Quinn also learned some great life skills and shared some priceless times with her dad, which neither will ever forget.”
Quinn’s feat included scaling the notorious Inaccessible Pinnacle ‘In Pin’ on Skye, in the Skye Cuillin, which is notorious as the most difficult of the Munros.
The youngest person to complete the full set previously is believed to be Daniel Smith, of Glasgow, who was nine when he scaled his final top with his dad in 2013.
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