I was never going to have a good night’s sleep anticipating
the weekend to come, and indeed it was a broken sleep, but waking up half an
hour before my alarm went off at 4 am on Saturday morning was bad enough, let
alone the shot of adrenaline which resulted from an enormous demon fly buzzing
past my ear ensuring that there was no chance of getting any further rest.
So up I got and off I went.
Pit stop at McDonald’s for breakfast and I was at the office 25 mins
early to make sure I could bag the seat on the minibus with all the leg room -
this strategy worked!
6am was our minibus departure time, but it was 06:02 when
Stuart’s car came screaming around the corner following an over sleep (there’s
always one). Fortunately, this didn’t
delay us too much and we still managed to beat the London bus to our meet-up
point at Cherwell Valley Services.
Much of the drive up to Fort William was frankly quite
dull. The only notable point was Tebay
services, which would get my vote for best service station in the UK! Other than that there was a small scare when
the London Minibus received a dashboard message indicating that the engine
would stop working unless they filled it up with a mysterious blue liquid which
no one had ever heard of. Fortunately,
services stations DO know what this is and were able to provide the required
liquid to prevent an early disaster.
Perhaps modern vehicles are not as good as they sound.
Dinner in Fort William was very nice, but the less said
about the hostel the better. Not that
there was anything inherently wrong about it and I would certainly recommend it
(Chase the Wild Goose in case you were interested), but the room was so hot
with 8 men sharing a tiny region of space-time (apparently everyone breathes as
well which get remarkably noisy) and opening the windows was a no go unless you
wanted to be bitten to within an inch of your life by midges. A second shitty night in a row was not really
what I needed, but it was what I got.
More drama ensued in the morning when Greg and Stuart (yes,
Stuart again) managed to get themselves locked out of their room. With the hostel not opening until 8am and our
plan to depart by 6:30, this left us with a bit of a predicament. In the movies you see many methods which
people use to open locked doors. As it
turns out, it’s not quite as easy as it looks.
With everyone else on the buses ready to go, they eventually resorted to
climbing in through the window on the first floor to recover their keys,
clothes and equipment and somehow, we were only 10 minutes late getting started
up our first ascent.
Ben Nevis is a rubbish mountain. Although, I say that with the utmost respect
for it. The views are suitably dramatic,
especially with the Scottish Mist drifting through the valleys, but the walk
itself is pretty dull up a well-defined path.
Ascending is gruelling, descending is brutal. It seems to go on forever with only
occasional changes in terrain to keep things interesting. Having said that, the final stretch over the
ice field through the cloud is remarkably sobering and reaching the summit is
still an emotional experience. To know
that you stand on the highest point above sea level in the UK will always make
it a moment to remember.
Time for a quick rest, a drink and a few photos with the team
members who arrived with me (or thereabouts) and off we headed back down. Descending through the ice field was slightly
trickier than climbing it. My walking
poles were pretty useful here until I pulled one of them up to discover the
rubber cap had popped off and was now buried six inches in the snow. This was not an easy thing to recover. I tried initially pushing the pole back down
the hole into the cap and levering it up, but that was just not happening. In the end I resorted to digging out a 20cm
diameter hole, six inches deep (quite a bit of effort) in order to retrieve the
cap.
The remaining descent was slow going. Stressful on the thighs and calves and
painful on the toes. Eventually Nevis
got the better of me and my old knee injury returned around 20 minutes from
base. At the very least, this would
destroy any hopes I had of getting up Scafell Pike and potentially side-lining
me for the remainder of the challenge.
Putting on a brave face, I communicated the news to the team
waiting for me at the minibus, but a tearful phone call home with the update
really hit me hard as I faced what seemed like the end of my attempt.
I find it hard to explain exactly what I was feeling. I was deflated, rock bottom, completely and
utterly gutted. I felt empty. I’d put so much time and effort over the last
four months into planning, training and preparing for this challenge. I’d been so excited about it for so
long. I’d been sharing my advice with
the team on matters of equipment and technology, assisting with the
organisation where I could and tried to make myself a key member of the squad. All for this.
To be relegated to a seat on the bus for an unfathomable number of hours
giving me plenty of time to think about arriving home a failure.
Eddie and John, however, whether they knew it or not, were
absolutely crucial to turning my mood around.
With a minibus seat front and centre, I was in prime position to help
out the transport team as we found ourselves an hour and a half behind the
front minibus. The big change came as we
got word from our faster colleagues that an accident on the M8 had caused a
police diversion, slowing them down with a longer route and a whole bunch of
congestion. I was back in action with
Google Maps, scoping out the accident, understanding the diversion and
investigating alternative routes. Our
goal was clear, make up as much time as possible on the front bus and keep both
groups in the running for hitting the 24 hour target.
Fortunately, I was able to see that the accident had been
cleared and the diversion removed before we reached it which meant that we
could stay on our original route and would have undoubtedly made up some time
on the leaders. I would continue to keep
an eye on the navigation from that point on and having something useful to do
snapped me out of my melancholy mood and kept me occupied. Then came Eddie’s stroke of genius, use the
old National Trust car park rather than the approved car park by the Wasdale
Head Inn and we can cut 20 minutes off the next walk. Despite getting stuck behind a
not-in-as-much-of-a-rush minibus down the little country lanes, we managed to
get our group off up Scafell Pike at 19:15, a mere 35 minutes after the other
group and likely only 15 minutes behind on the track.
Then it all went wrong.
A call to Eddie after two hours revealed that they were 200m off the
summit, but had not yet seen the other team coming down. No great panic as they perhaps were not too
far ahead, but still unusual. Eddie’s
ETA was around 23:30. During a second
call to Eddie at 23:45 he informed us that he’d had word from Adele’s
team. They were lost on the mountain,
had no idea where they were and had contacted Mountain Rescue who had
recommended that they sit it out until morning.
We would come to learn that they’d taken the wrong path to the summit,
one which was considerably more treacherous and one which they did not want to
follow back down. Descending fog, was
obscuring visibility and they’d lost any hope of finding the correct path home.
This explained why Eddie’s team had not
seen them. Phone reception was poor
across the whole area, but after exhausting almost the complete contact list, I
finally managed to get through the lost team to get some first-hand details on
their situation.
By the time I got through, Mountain Rescue had managed to
pin point their exact location and guide them back onto the right path, so they
had begun to descend. This was quite a
relief to us on the ground and we could now see their head torches winding their
way down the side of the mountain. Two
further panics came in the shape of a couple of lights breaking away from the
group and taking a different path and later, all the lights disappearing
completely. But these turned out to be
an unrelated group taking a different way down and a low bank of cloud rising
up and obscuring our view respectively.
Eddie’s team eventually reached us at 00:30 and there were mixed
opinions on whether we should take the group on to Snowdon and leave Jeff
waiting for the other team, but I was firmly in the camp at this stage that we
should get everyone down safely before we carry on. We had now thrown any hope of the 24 hour
target out of the window so my priority was making sure that everyone got down
safely. Adele’s group did not get back
until 2 am having spent seven and a half hours on a mountain which should have
taken four, but despite some murmuring about abandoning the challenge, they
arrived with remarkable passion to keep going and conquer Snowdon as well,
regardless of how long it took. I was
genuinely inspired by the group, having endured a nightmare second leg, they were
more determined than ever to finish the damn thing off! This would serve to drive my own personal
challenge to the end as well and I will be forever grateful to every single
member of that team. As much as I was
disappointed that they did not, perhaps, have all the emergency equipment that
they should have had, the way that they had pulled together to get themselves
down was a triumph for team work and should be commended. It was a turning point for everyone which
changed the face of the challenge in more ways than one.
Having experienced a 24 hour challenge before, I was
anticipating the lull which comes with the early hours of the morning. This time around was no different. Subsequent photographic evidence does confirm
that I must have got at least a couple of minutes sleep, but that was about the
extent of my rest across the whole weekend.
The photo in question also explains why my neck hurt so much the next
day.
I learned some valuable lessons about how utterly useless
neck cushions are on a minibus during this stretch of the journey. Once around your neck, they serve mostly to
make you abnormally sweaty and uncomfortable.
Attempting to rest your head on the cushion from this position leads
only to severe neck ache and an inability to sleep. The other option is to use it more like a
pillow. Whilst this is ok to an extent,
you must have a window seat for this to have any chance of success. Having an aisle seat is insufficient. But even if you get this right, the vibration
of the vehicle will gradually shake the cushion down until your head is banging
against the window. If you are
particularly unlucky, as I discovered later, you may have a glass hammer gently
tapping into your head after the cushion has succumbed to gravity.
The drive down to Snowdon was possibly one of the toughest
parts of the challenge. Especially since
the events on Scafell, everyone was completely shot, including the drivers and
navigators. Dark, winding country roads
at night with mass fatigue was a cocktail destined for disaster, so given that
we were no longer concerned with attempting to hit the 24 hour target, we made
a bee-line for the next service station to take a much needed break.
At this point, we were informed by the other minibus that
the satnav had taken them the wrong way and that they were currently in
Lanchester. If, like me, you’ve never
heard of Lanchester, I’ll enlighten you.
Lanchester is a small village in County Durham just South West of
Newcastle, almost a hundred miles and a two hour drive in the wrong direction from
our current location. I asked them to
confirm that they meant Lanchester. They
confirmed.
Minutes later and pretty concerned, we pulled into Lancaster
services off the M6. At this point you
can probably work out what happened here…….Sure enough, there was the other
minibus sat in the car park. Panic over
and a slap on the wrist for bad spelling!
One extended break later and with everyone feeling a little refreshed,
we were back on the road for the final run down to Snowdon.
Having had a reasonable rest, my knee was feeling better, so
I made the decision that I would at least make a start up Snowdon. The Miners Path begins very gently,
originally built to carry copper to Pen y Pass on its way to Caernarfon. The incline is only slight for the first
couple of miles and the track is smooth, so I figured, to make sure that the
weekend was not a total write off for me, I could manage at least that. As it turned out, my knee felt good and as we
started up the scramble for the second half of the ascent, I became determined
to make it to the top.
Snowdon still remains my favourite mountain. The scenery is beautiful and the Miners track
offers what feels like more of a proper climbing experience. Having taken a flat route for over half of the
track, you have to increase your altitude fairly rapidly by scrambling up the
side of the mountain. It was also
raining at this point which added an element of danger to the escapade!
Reaching the summit marked the effective conclusion of the
challenge as we were the last group up.
28 hours and 17 minutes after setting off from the base of Ben Nevis,
which, considering everything we’d been through, was not a bad time at
all. I was gutted that I had missed a
mountain, but I will return to conquer it later this year. All the other summiteers were waiting for us
in the café when we arrived apart from a handful who had elected to take the
train back down. Collectively we decided
that the Miners Path scramble back down would be a little dangerous under the
current conditions, so the 14 of us went back as a single group down the
Llanberis Path which closely follows the railway track. It’s about half a mile longer than the Miners
Path but a steadier and safer gradient all the way down.
Safely back to the ground, we all piled onto one of the
minibuses which had come to collect us from Llanberis and returned us to Pen y
Pass where we all shared our final moments, photos and goodbyes before jumping
back on our respective minibuses for the journey home.
What an experience.
One I will never forget. I have
forged new friendships, built new teams and shared an incredible weekend with a
fabulously diverse group of people. Will
I do it again? Maybe. I’d love to get all three mountains done in
one go. But for now, I need to
rest. Goodnight everyone.
