Adventures in Scotland: Day 2 - The Ben

Holy mother of god. Scotland is cold. Mountaineering is hard. My body hurts.

Today's target was to summit Ben Nevis via one of the north face routes, doing some proper climbing and not using the tourist track that winds its way up the easier south face. Although it's called the tourist track, it's still quite an undertaking - especially in winter. Our walk-in from the Glen Nevis Youth Hostel took us on the bottom section of the path, and it's long and sloggy and thigh-testing. We got going at around 8.20 in the morning, just as the sky was brightening - a proper alpine start. Despite the early hour and the cold weather I stripped down to my baselayer on the walk in - it was such hard work that I was sweating enough for water to be freezing on the surface of my shirt. Gross, eh?

Our route however would take us up the north face, so instead of going up we followed the smaller path around, slowly dropping into the freezing line and feeling the reason why the north face is regarded as the harder of most north-hemisphere mountains because the weather sucks. It's windy, it's blowy, it's snowy and it's raining - the reason why over thousands of years the north face has been turned into a vertical, rocky wall whereas the south is a very long, very hard hill. This weather would end up scuppering our initial plans - when we got around to seeing it, the north face looked covered in windslab and about ready to avalanche in places - you could almost feel the tension of the snow on the face, just waiting for the magic amount of vibration or snow to fall for it to go. So, we decided on going up the slightly less vertical west face, summiting the smaller mountain at the edge of the Nevis range and then walking across the plateau, heading up to the summit, topping out and heading back down the tourist path. It shouldn't take anything more than a few hours and we could be home and dry before darkness closed in at around 4 in the afternoon.

However, I am fat, unfit and with little practice in the use of crampons in the ascent over long periods - so I was awful. My technique was off, I had absolutely no energy and my legs started cramping up in muscles that weren't used to being used. It was painful, it was sloggy and I was extremely slow - which (understandably) pissed Charlie off no end. I'd take between 3 and 15 steps and then be out of breath or cramping up and have to stop, and as we were roped together, so did Charlie. If it'd been me I'd probably have untied and just left or retreated off, but being the bloke he is Charlie kept going, kept yelling abuse at me and eventually we got up to Carn Dearg (1,221m) after around 3 hours of climbing, which in reality is far too long. We were only around 100m below the summit of Ben Nevis though, so there wasn't much more slogging left to do before we could summit.

At the stop I took on a massive amount of liquid and forced some food into my body despite my total lack of appetite and eventually felt a bit better and we trudged up towards the summit of Ben Nevis. We were extremely lucky with the weather - absolutely clear skies and bright sunshine greeted us on the plateau, something Charlie (who has summited the Ben 4 or 5 times) has only seen once before. It was truly beautiful, especially with the view out over the south face of all of the snow-capped peaks and the clear valleys. It felt very special. However, as we started to walk towards the summit we watched dark clouds descend and obscure the summit ridge and we decided it would be mature, prudent and the right thing to back off from the summit bid and descend.

On our butts.

It's the best way to get down a mountain.

Not an overly brilliant day as I was, to put it mildly, shit, but we eventually got something done and we realised I really, really need to work on my endurance and leg strength. Hard work paid off with some beautiful views and cracking weather, although it kind of smarts that if I'd been fitter and faster we probably could have made the summit before the weather turned, but I couldn't have physically given any more - I was exhausted. It's a day off tomorrow, so I should be able to get a good meal in me tonight, a good rest and use the pain and suffering I went through today to improve my fitness over the next few days. Let's hope so anyway.

Here's some other photos too:

(The Adventures in Scotland series is a collection of all my posts from my first foray into winter mountaineering. Find all the others here)