Did you know that you can listen to many of your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds?

Like Desert Island Discs, where you can hear castaways like Cher, Gareth Southgate and Nick Cave,

and enjoy longer versions of the music they've picked.

Good things come to those who don't wait.

Listen to your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds.

The Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland. Upon reaching the opening, I peered in excitedly.

Snow tunnels are one of the great sites of the highlands

and I had been at enough of them to know how wondrous they could be.

Even so, seldom had I seen anything like this one in Scotland.

I crouched motionless, then dumbfounded.

A cold wind, far cooler than the ambient air temperature, passed down through the tunnel and across my face.

A coldness that had been laid down some 11 months previously was blowing away with the wind.

Mighty pillars of white snow on each side of the small burn supported the most stunning of arches,

which ran the full length of the 75-foot long patch.

Translucent blues and whites, caused by thinning snow being pierced by the

daylight, lent an otherworldly quality to what would normally be just one of a million anonymous

watercourses. The tiny streams babbling noise offered a lyrical soundtrack to the atmosphere.

In addition to the colours of the snow, mosses of luminous green hugged the waterside.

Large, pink granite blocks also contributed to the kaleidoscope of colours which were almost overwhelming. Today the small stream was not anonymous. It was the most beautiful place

in the whole of the Kyrngorms and probably the entire country. At least, to me it was.

That's the voice there of Ian Cameron, author of a new book, The Vanishing Ice.

Now, the name Ian Cameron may not immediately strike a bell,

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