Three Peaks Adventure – August 4th and 5th 2007

No effort that involves attempting to travel over 500 miles by road and 27 miles by foot in 24 hours should be taken lightly yet it is all too easy to do so. Reading all of the tips and following all of the advice, well most of it, is not enough to prepare for the unpredictability of the real event. Here is the story of our adventure. If you have already participated in a similar effort, I suspect you will find much to nod knowingly about in this essay. If you hope to complete the challenge in the future, I hope this provides you and your team with some practical insight. In any case, we found it a sobering, exciting, exhausting, and entertaining weekend.

I have tried to convey some of the drama in these words. Driving a fifteen-seat long wheel base ford transit is an interesting first time experience. Having decided to ignore the universal recommendation that walkers should not be drivers, we divided the driving amongst the three adults in the mini bus starting from Reading.

Oginally, there were supposed to be five drivers on our bus. Two of our intended party did the sensible thing and pulled out. Anyway, for those who haven’t had the pleasure of driving a fifteen-seat Ford mini bus, you have to remember that there is seventeen feet of it following you around corners. If you don’t steer wide, you clip curbs or worse.

Otherwise, our vehicle was responsive and too easy to drive. It’s easy handling lulled me into treating it like a car until a sharp bend offered an unpleasant reminder that it was a white van with seats and windows added. Of the three of us driving the Reading bus, one conspired to drive only on motorways, one seemed as if he had been driving white vans all his life, and the remaining one, yours truly, had a few narrow escapes.

Personally, I blame the excessive quantities of Red Bull that I drank, to keep awake.

Our journey started well. We were in high spirits. I discovered that Andrew, travelling with me on the Reading bus, is a sales manager. As I run a sales training business and he couldn’t easily get off the bus, I was able to spend a couple of hours talking shop and making a sales pitch. For me at least, it made the first two hours of our journey, fly by.

Chris, the other adult on our bus, listened in bemusement. The boys, my son Tom and Andrew’s son Will, had a games consol to keep them entertained. If you are counting, you may be wondering why we had a fifteen-seat bus. I confess – it was my fault. When I got around to booking the bus, all of the local nine seat vehicles had been taken.

In the end, we were glad of the space and couldn’t imagine how we would have coped if we had ten people on the bus. There was no luggage space so our gear took up floor and seat space. Everyone needed several changes of clothing, towels, and other stuff in case we got wet on all three mountains so we had five holdalls, five rucksacks and various boxes containing food and drink.

The other half of the team, six people from Milton Keynes including my son Brett, my daughter Cheryl, and their friends, John, Andy, Phil, and Haidee rented a more modest nine seat bus and began their journey independently.

Our schedule involved driving from Reading in Berkshire to Fort William in Inverness-shire, western Scotland on Friday August 3rd. We expected it to take all day, which it did. The scenery cruised by, seventy miles worth disappearing every hour as we sped north via the M6.

Just as we approach Cumbria where the scenery begins to rise, I announced loudly that we should be approaching Morcombe Bay and that you can’t see it from the motorway. Well I had never seen it from the motorway before. Just as I finished my tour guide bit, we crested a rise and there it was, clearly visible as we cruised by.

We went east around Glasgow and on to Fort William via the A82 through Glencoe. Andrew, who is quarter Scottish, explained about the Munroes, which are Scottish peaks over 3000 ft or 914 meters. Apparently, there are around 280 of them. People have made it their life’s ambition to climb every one!

The long stretch of the A82 that approaches Glencoe leads you through a forest of them. It was worth the ten-hour drive just to take in this stunning scenery.

After dinner and a couple of beers (really), we returned to our rooms for an early night. Our adventure began anew at 7:06 am the next morning in the car park of the Glen Nevis visitors centre. From here, the path ascending Ben Nevis is easy to follow. While a map and compass might be dispensed with if you stick to the path, having warm waterproof clothing is a good idea for ordinary mortals. We met a red haired chap wearing nothing but shorts and a Hawaiian shirt descending from the summit. It turned out that he and his party were attempting the challenge. We met several other groups on Ben Nevis with the same mission. Soon, little things began to upset our best-laid plans.

One of our party discovered a muscle injury about half way up. He hung on, and pressed on. We reached the summit in three hours forty minutes, about forty minutes longer than intended. Cloud obscured the views. In a gully at the top, a huge snowdrift remained to remind us that even in summer, at at 4406 feet or1334 meters above sea level, it can be very cold. You could watch the condensation and frost forming on people’s hats. There is little protection from the wind, which was gusting to about 25 knots. Stopping only for a few minutes to eat something and put on another layer, we quickly became cold, hands becoming numb as we prepared to descend. By the time we started down, four hours had elapsed.

We got down in by 1:06 pm, an hour behind schedule. Andrew drove, we needed to regain some time. Back on the A82, the magnificent Glencoe scenery distracted the passengers from the Andrew’s masterful manipulation of our 17-foot bus as he blasted past slower traffic. Then things got worse. A large electronic road sign declared that the A84 south, past Loch Earn Head, was closed. This meant we had to stay on the A82 and find our way around Glasgow to the west, with all of the other traffic.

As we reached Loch Lomond, the narrowness of the road and the preponderance of camper vans, caravans and Lorries attempting to go in both directions, slowed us to a crawl. By the time we had cleared Glasgow, heading down the M74, we were two hours behind schedule.

Andrew had checked the weather over Scafell while we drove. It was not encouraging. The cloud base was down to 200 meters and winds were gusting to 45 knots. We arrived at Wasdale Head by 8 pm. It was immediately obvious that the weather report had been accurate. At least it wasn’t raining, to begin with. We donned our coats, packs, headlamps etcetera and set out. About half an hour into the climb, we heard a police siren approaching along the Wasdale Head road. We could see the flashing lights as the vehicle progressed alongside Wast Water.

In a depressingly short space of time after the siren stopped, five members of a mountain rescue team overtook us. They were on a mission to help some people in trouble on the mountain. Then it began to rain. Soon we were in cloud. There was still some light and everyone’s wet weather gear glistened as if we were standing in a bathroom shower.

We had to cross a raging stream. It seemed that we would get our feet wet if we crossed where the path met the water. Tom and Will just leapt across anyway. Everyone else searched the bank upstream to find a better crossing point. We might as well have waded for all the difference it made.

Within an hour, the rain had soaked through almost everything. We pressed on, hoping to impress our sponsors with our resilience and determination. The likelihood of completing the three peaks in 24 hours was reseeding fast. Navigating on Scafell is less than straight forward, even in daylight. Once you reach the first boulder field, the path becomes indistinct and easy to lose. We lost it. Confidence definitely wobbled at this point. Fortunately, we realised before straying too far off track. Otherwise, the mountain rescue team may have had two jobs on the mountain that evening.

We retraced our steps and rediscovered the path. Its only distinction seemed to be the finer gravel that was just visible between boulders and rocks. Beyond the first boulder field is a built up track. As we approached it we met Hawaiian shirt and party coming down the mountain, still dressed in the same flimsy way. We concluded that he must be doing it for a bet. At least we were still on the path.

By now, the faint light that had been penetrating the clouds had gone. By the time we came to the end of the built up track and began the long climb across a series of ridges, it was completely dark and everyone had his or her headlamps on. Despite the light from the lamps, the path was very difficult to see. Progress slowed to a crawl as we cast around to find the cairns that marked the path.

I found that having my head torch on, destroyed my peripheral vision. In the end, the best method of navigation involved two people at the front, one using a powerful head torch and the other with his or her headlamp left off. One by one, we found the cairns. Andrew stayed at the back of our line and used his compass to check our direction. All these precautions seemed essential. It is easy to blunder over crags on Scafell.

Eventually we approached the plateau. We knew it was the plateau because the wind now drove the rain horizontally into our faces. The force of it threatened to knock people off their feet. At this point, I felt that reaching the plateau was good enough. There were no dissenting voices so we turned around and descended out of the worst of the wind. We stopped for a minute or two to eat our energy bars and chocolate. As before, on Ben Nevis, stopping even for this short time left many of us shivering.

Soon we discovered that it was much more difficult to pick out the cairns, which had somehow seemed to stand out as we were ascending. While the cairns were harder to see during the decent, the path became easier to see and we were able to make slow progress. As we neared the built up path, we saw the lamps of others on the mountain. The owners turned out to be the mountain rescue team and their rescued charges who had become stuck on a crag.

They invited us to keep up with them so that we wouldn’t get lost going through the lower boulder field. This proved impossible. My daughter, Cheryl’s knees had had enough and were causing her great pain. Fortunately, Andrew and Will were carrying a walking stick each, which they gladly loaned to Cheryl. With these aids and some Parecetamol from the pharmacy that John had in his pack, she was able to keep going.

Progress was very slow. One of the mountain rescue team dropped back and guided us through the boulder field. Even he lost the path at one point, and then quickly scouted around for it and got us back on track.

Eventually we arrived back at the stream crossing. More water than before rushed over the rocks. Since our feet and shoes where now completely sodden, we simply waded through the white water. It took us another hour to complete the descent.

We had endured the mountain and the weather for six and a half hours. The plan had been to complete it in four hours. Undaunted, we all changed into some dry cloths, laid out our wet clothing in the buses, and by 3 am, set of for Snowdon. Having a fifteen-seat bus for five people seemed a really good idea at this point. There was still enough room for everyone to stretch their legs and get some kip.

The weather at Snowdon was much better. It was also daylight when we arrived at about 8 am on Sunday morning, 25 hours after we began our challenge.

It was a walk in the park - Snowdonia National Park.

Starting from Pen Y Pass, we headed up the Pyg track. Most of the way we could see the summit in and out of the cloud base. This promised to be one of those rare days when you can enjoy astounding views from the top of Snowdon. We were tired. Our ascent took longer than it might have done if we still had the 24-hour goal in our sights.

We took in the views and took pictures.

People’s feet began to cause problems on the way down, slowing our progress further. Eventually, we arrived back at the Pen Y Pass car park to complete our 44-kilometre trek, including a 3-kilometre climb and 500 miles of driving in 31 hours.

With hindsight, I should have chosen a different strategy. If we had begun in late afternoon, we would have completed the Ben Nevis climb by about 10 pm. Traffic between Fort William and Wasdale Head would have been much lighter at that time of night.

We would have started our ascent of Scafell at first light and finished in full daylight. The second leg of our drive would have begun on Saturday morning when many people are enjoying a lie in.

I can see now that this alternative strategy would have given us a greater chance of keeping to our schedule. Other teams that we met along the way seemed to think that completing the challenge in 31 hours was a worthwhile achievement. We were grateful for their praise and certainly happy to have finished.

Someone said that the mountains (hills) are easy. It’s the traffic that catches three-peak challengers out. For us, the mountains tested our limits. We couldn’t choose the traffic conditions or anticipate road closures once we had started.

We had endless choices in the way we dealt with the challenges and frustrations on the mountainside. I am proud of the effort put in by every member of the team and hope that you will think it worthy of your donations to the charities we have supported.

As a rough estimate, including the pledges, your support has helped us raise about £3500 for Multiple Sclerosis of Great Britain and The British Heart Foundation. On behalf of all the walkers and the charities, thank you.