Climbing Ben Nevis

Charlie — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 12:54:24 GMT

So who wants to know about our exciting trip up a big, very, very, big hill? Well... I will take that as a yes. But before I start, I just want to let you all know that I have embedded one or two videos. which I hope won't cause a problem for people with slow internet connections, since it should only start downloading if you click on the video. The page is about 900KB. You should also be able to click on any of the images to be taken to picasa, google's image site, where I'm now going to store all my images.

Let me quickly point out to all uninformed readers that I have recently made it to the top of a very big hill. One so big that they even went as far as to labeling it the biggest hill in Great Britain, or UK. Ok, I will now stop calling Ben Nevis a hill… and proceed to give a little amusing definition followed by some interesting stats:

“A mountain is generally steeper than a hill, but there is no universally accepted standard definition for the height of a mountain or a hill although a mountain usually has an identifiable summit. Mountains cover 54% of Asia, 36% of North America, 25% of Europe, 22% of South America, 17% of Australia, and 3% of Africa.” - taken from the wikipedia

Now let’s back track to the beginning of the trip, so we can at least build up a little bit of a story, perhaps introduce a few characters and then end off with the sad trip home.

It was a cold miserable day, but not so miserable since I was excited about the adventure that lay ahead! Oh, and not so miserable since I got to sleep in a wee bit. (Note I said “wee”, which means that I’m indeed still in Scotland… and this story does take place in Scotland – just thought I clear that up right away)

The phone rings… and I answer it expecting that my lift has arrived. At this point in the storey a new character is introduced! “Good morning Mark,” I say, in one of those morning voices. “Good morning to you,” he replies in a normal sort of voice… and then we move on to discuss whether or not we should be taking sleeping bags… But this isn’t at all important, but only used to introduce my good friend Mark.

A few minutes pass… and Jan comes speeding along in her blue fancy Peugeot, eyeing out a good parking spot from about 200 metres away, she checks her rear view mirror and pulls hard on the hand brake locking the back wheels into a screeching skid as the car is flung a full half circle around and into the VIP parking right outside my front door. This, my friends, is Jan, our driver for the trip. Mark and I jump in as the tires are still steaming, we glance at each other, nod that we are good to go, the hand brake is released, and we screech away leaving on-lookers gawking at the efficient start to a weekend away! (Please note that this paragraph is mostly made up, and should not be quoted out loud, I suppose you could whisper it)

Our final character we don’t meet right away. First we do some much needed shopping for sweets, drinks, chips, and oats. The last item can not be explained, even now, as I sit here on the coach thinking of something clever to say about it, I scratch my head and just think that there must have been more to it. I mean… why did Mark by a bag of oats to take with us… I ask you… it’s the one bit of the whole weekend I’m still confused about. Oh and there is a bit about a raccoon that was spotted in Fort William while painting the town red.

Moving onwards, we headed up towards Inverness, stopping first at a small café as you can see in the picture above, and then along the famous Loch Ness we stopped to find a nice quick cache.

After that we paid a quick visit to Urquhart Castle and then headed back to Drumnadrochit, since there wasn’t a suitable place to meet our 4th character.

What we needed was a place to sit down, to perhaps have a bite to eat. But even Drumnadrochit didn’t offer us much, and we settled for some nuts that we acquired at a shop across the road from where the sporty Peugeot had found a park, and was cooling off in the light drizzle with a SA flag wound up against the window to indicate we were in the vicinity. We didn’t rush, oh no, all we could do was wait… so we waited, standing outside the shop staring at what look very much like character four’s gardening vehicle. The timing was slightly out but we almost made it to our car at the same time as Jude was retracing her steps back to her car after failing to find us in the vicinity of the flag. Perhaps a moment of confusion was felt by all until someone explained the reason for us wondering the streets of Drumnadrochit was that all the eating places closed at 4.

Onwards, and this time, I had the honour of riding in the gardening vehicle with Jude, and we stopped a few more times to take some beautiful photos along the remaining stretch of Loch Ness. Finally we arrived at our youth hostel in Glen Nevis. That evening we painted the town red, visited all the clubs, and finally found a nice cosy table near a nice cosy fireplace within a nice cosy pub. And the food was yummy yum yum! I even convinced Mark to have a cider that smelt like beer but didn’t taste as bad. We didn’t want Jude to get too rowdy so we only gave her half a glass ;)

After a photo was taken to prove that we did indeed visit a nice cosy pub with a cosy fireplace, (since painting the town red might not be very accurate), we headed back to our cosy bunk beds to enjoy the few hours of sleep we had before being woken up by character number 5. Yip, this guy gets his own character number and everything in this story! This fellow had a slight snoring problem. Even his wife, who was squeezed in with him on the top bunk of this tiny bunk bed, must have agreed. And she possibly feared that her husband might be attacked by angry sleepy roommates, since we tried our best to make audible grunts and sighs of irritation as we tossed and turned in our beds. I even tried the whole fake coughing technique, which turned out to be quite fake indeed, but with no effect to the resonating sound that flooded that cosy little room. Jude did have a trick up her sleeve though, she managed to get her alarm to go off… not sure if this was intentional, but it kept 5 quite for a short while… until it all began again. I think Mark was even having trouble sleep talking over all the noise! It must have been quite frustrating for him! Well, at least we had to get up early, and get breakfast started.

The making of the bacon rolls and hot super yummy coffee took us quite a while and we were about ready to set off up The Ben when we paused just outside the front door looking out over a very wet world! It was only drizzling, and it was sure to clear up, so we didn’t worry too much, but I did uncomfortably manage to get my rain coat over my bag and everything. We seemed as ready as we would ever be, and so off we went. At the start of the trail we huddled together and asked our Big Daddy upstairs would look after us, and that we would have a good time.

The first 2 kilometres were about the worst in terms of fitness… but that was the least of our worries. After about 3 km we were all going strong, and even managed to have one stop to drink coffee. The reason I say “managed” is that the wind had picked up quite a bit, and it wasn’t possible to find a spot out of it.

So stopping to pour a cup of coffee was a little tricky. I mean there were waves in my coffee cup that any experienced insect could surf! A bit further up, about halfway now, and the sun sort of came out, it cleared up enough for us to take a few pictures and enjoy the magnificent beauty of God’s creation.