Experiment 000: The Solstice Blackout
Journey 002 | The Lab
20–21 June 2026
23 hours | Four clients | Phones locked away
Photography: George Reese | @wildture_g
All photographs in this Journey were taken by George during the Solstice Blackout.
Mountain Craft’s tagline has been “unique experiences handcrafted in the hills” for a while. The Solstice Blackout probably took that more literally than anything I’d done before.
The idea came from something fairly ordinary. Like most people, my life revolves around a phone more than I’d particularly like. Work, messages, maps, weather, photos, banking, family, music, pretty much everything is in there. Even when you deliberately put it away, you still know it’s sitting in your pocket.
I started wondering what would happen if it wasn’t.
Not if people were encouraged to use their phones less, or asked to stick them on airplane mode, but if I physically took them away. No client smartwatches, cameras or GPS units either. Nobody would know the route beforehand and, for once, there would be no little blue dot telling everyone exactly where they were.
A couple of hours didn’t seem long enough. I wanted enough time for the initial weirdness of not having the thing to pass and for it to genuinely become normal.
Twenty-four hours seemed about right, and the Blackout idea grew from there.
Selling something without really explaining it
John already knew I was developing something along these lines and had said he wanted to be involved. Later I put out a vague social teaser and Steve replied that he was in too.
Neither knew the price, the route or really much about what I was planning. There wasn’t even a properly finished product yet, which was fairly useful evidence that perhaps the idea wasn’t completely ridiculous.
I spoke to them both, then sent the experiment to the Mountain Craft email list. Ash and Paula took the remaining two places within about a week, so Experiment 000 never made it to general public sale.
What the four of them had actually bought was a 24-hour mountain journey with no published route, no client phones, no cameras, no GPS devices and a meeting point released shortly beforehand.
Paula had also never wild camped before.
My final briefing eventually went out at midnight, twelve hours before we met. Very polished operation.
The start
George, who was there to photograph the experiment, and I met the four clients around midday.
By the time I arrived, Steve, Ash and Paula had already worked out that they’d all previously been on the same Mountain Craft day. It was supposed to have been Crib Goch the previous year, but terrible weather had turned it into an equally wet trip over Lliwedd and Yr Wyddfa instead. John hadn’t met any of them before.
We sorted the last bits of kit and food, I handed out maps without a route marked on them, and then everyone’s phones went into the Peli case. That was probably the moment when the odd thing they’d booked became properly real.
I still carried a Garmin inReach Mini 2 for emergency communication. This wasn’t about pretending useful technology didn’t exist. I just didn’t think anybody needed to spend the next day photographing everything, messaging home or watching themselves move across a digital map.
Then the six of us started walking.
Somewhere quiet
I’d spent a lot of time deciding where to take the first Blackout. I wanted proper space and somewhere I could be reasonably confident that we weren’t going to spend the next day crossing busy paths or repeatedly passing other groups.
I’m still not going to say exactly where it was.
The route was deliberately put together through country where I’d only ever seen one or two people myself. Seeing somebody wouldn’t have ruined anything, but solitude was part of the point and I wanted to stack the odds in our favour.
We followed a track for a while before leaving it completely and heading across rougher ground. There wasn’t a list of summits to collect and nobody knew what was coming next, so the pace was easy. We talked a bit about the landscape, navigation and possible camp choices, but mostly just moved through whatever was in front of us.
Not having phones was definitely noticeable at first. There were several instinctive reaches towards pockets, including from me, and plenty of jokes about things we could photograph or look up if only somebody hadn’t locked all the phones in a box.
After a few hours it stopped being particularly strange.
Choosing the camp
Later in the afternoon I sent everyone off individually for a while to look for somewhere we could camp.
The brief wasn’t complicated. Somewhere sensible, discreet and low impact, somewhere with access to water and preferably somewhere that could make the most of what was looking like an unusually good solstice evening.
When everyone came back, most had independently settled on roughly the same place, and I agreed it was a very good choice.
Water was a bit less convenient. Reaching the nearest stream meant about ten minutes of awkward traversing over tussocks, but the camp spot was easily worth it.
People sorted shelters and food, wandered around, talked and naturally drifted off for bits of quiet time on their own. I hadn’t planned that and there was no forced “digital detox” session or structured reflection exercise. Thankfully.
It was simply a very relaxed evening.
George moved around taking photographs without ever turning it into a photoshoot, and Steve had arranged his tarp and bivi with almost geometric precision so he could wake up facing the sunrise.
Then the sky started doing ridiculous things.
Solstice evening
The light was exceptional. A band of high cloud caught the setting sun and briefly lit up with colour from ice crystals, while the surrounding mountains slowly dropped into silhouette.
The sky stayed orange until ridiculously late. Paula later told me she’d sat watching it until about 11:10pm.
For somebody whose first ever wild camp involved carrying everything into the middle of nowhere, surrendering her phone and having no idea where I was taking her, she’d picked a fairly decent night to start.
Even the midges were relatively charitable.
Everyone eventually disappeared into their shelters and, slightly to my surprise, seemed to sleep well. There wasn’t any drama or prolonged 3am reconsideration of the wisdom of paying somebody to take your phone away.
It was just quiet.
The morning
We woke to another clear morning and Steve finally got the photograph he’d particularly wanted from George, with the sunrise reflected in his glacier glasses.
After breakfast we packed fairly early and were moving again at around seven. There was still plenty of time, so we added a summit to the journey and headed for it largely across open ground.
The going later became rougher, through heather, bilberry, tussocks, bog and boulders. Somewhere in the middle of it George spotted two birds in the distance.
I’d nearly left my binoculars behind because the locked phone case was already taking up valuable rucksack space, but for once carrying them paid off. The birds were hen harriers.
We stopped for a while and passed the binoculars around.
That became one of my favourite parts of the whole 24 hours. Nobody had planned it and there wasn’t anything to achieve from it. They happened to be there, we happened to have noticed them, and we had time to stop and watch. Then we carried on.
Back where we started
By late morning we were making our way back towards the start.
We hadn’t seen anybody else for the entire journey. That wasn’t miraculous luck. It was one of the reasons I’d chosen the area and designed the route the way I had, although there was obviously never any guarantee.
At around 11am, roughly 23 hours after setting off, we reached the end. The Peli case came back out and everybody got their phones.
What struck me was how ordinary that felt by then.
For the first few hours, not having a phone had been noticeable. By the following morning it really wasn’t. We had maps, a compass, binoculars, food, shelters, each other and whatever happened to be in front of us.
For that day, that had been enough.
Did it actually work?
I genuinely wasn’t sure beforehand.
It could easily have felt contrived. The lack of a known route might have added nothing. Somebody could have hated wild camping. The phone thing could have become an irritating gimmick rather than making the experience better. Even with four people who had deliberately signed up for something unusual, there was no guarantee the idea would survive contact with an actual 24 hours outside.
Instead, pretty much everything worked.
The group worked well together, George documented the trip without changing the feel of it, the route stayed quiet and the camp was about as good as I could realistically have hoped for. More importantly, the lack of phones stopped being the main event surprisingly quickly.
The feedback afterwards backed that up. Paula described the solitude and the wider experience as ‘amazing’. John had backed the idea before there was much more than an idea to back, and Ash had taken a chance on the first run of something I’d never delivered before.
That was enough for me to call Experiment 000 a success.
The next Blackout wouldn’t be an attempt to recreate the Solstice. Different season, different landscape, different conditions and a different journey. That’s part of the point. But the underlying experiment survived.
For nearly 24 hours, you don’t know the route, you don’t know exactly where you’re going, and your phone is physically gone.
It turns out there are people who quite like that.
About The Lab
The Solstice Blackout was Experiment 000, the first Mountain Craft Lab experiment.
The Lab is where I try mountain experiences that don’t quite fit the normal guided day format. Some will work, some might not, and the good ones can evolve into something else.
Photography credit
All photographs: George Reese | @wildture_g
