Terry the Mountain Goat, Part Two - Mount Snowdon

The initial trek up Snowdon was via a reasonable path and I felt quite pleased with myself that this, as I had imagined, was just going to be a bit of a stroll. Twenty minutes later however, after encountering the first in a series of rocks and stones that acted as a semi-natural set of steps, I was panting like a Bullmastiff.

I knew that there were these type of steps but I had imagined a more uniform pattern, one in front of the other at roughly the same height. They weren’t. With each step you had to look and decide whether you wanted the steep one on the right or the slippery one on the left, like some extreme uphill version of Hopscotch. I made my decisions by watching whoever was in front of me, but it was hard going and I realised for the first time that this was not going to be quite as easy as I’d thought.

As well as this little problem I was also having a couple of other issues. The rain was blurring the view through my glasses and, with all the hot breath emanating from my open mouth, they were steaming up. This I solved simply by removing them and putting them in my rucksack. My vision without my glasses isn’t the best but enough, I thought, to get me by.

Issue number two was that I realised as the remainder of the light faded that I needed to rely on my borrowed head torch to shine the way forward. Unfortunately it wasn’t up to the job and only semi-illuminated the ground in front of me. These two things combined so that when I looked at the ground it was often hard to get any sense of how even or uneven the path was in front of me. I was relying on the lights of my team mates and watching where they trod.

We made our way up, crossing streams and encountering steeper and steeper sets of rocks to clamber up. To our left there was an ever growing void of blackness, but even with poor visibility we knew that was the valley below. One slip could lead us tumbling towards a substantial and life threatening drop. This was fine when the path was wide, but more and more we encountered parts of the route that involved clambering around a damp and slippery rock face, trying to find whatever footing was available.

It was long and arduous but it wasn’t too cold. The rain was keeping us nicely cool as we journeyed ever upwards. When we stopped for a breath we looked up and could see the long trail of little white lights of the teams ahead of us, and looking back, there was a longer snake of lights behind us. We were like a procession of Glow Worms heading up the mountain and it was a strange and eerie sight to behold in the middle of nowhere.

As we got higher the little radio we’d been given crackled into life every now and then with team after team reporting that they’d got to a checkpoint, or in some cases, to the summit itself.

Eventually, a very steep set of rocks turned us around to a new side of the mountain we’d not been on before and a viciously cold wind whipped around us. However, we knew we were near the top as we encountered more and more teams on their descent, so we didn’t want to stop to add more clothes.

Up and up the path went until finally we seemed to stop by a flat-topped stone plinth. I clung onto it in the freezing wind and increasing rain and watched as Neil brought out the radio to announce we’d got to the summit. I hadn’t realised.

I didn’t feel elated, I just felt cold and tired. We were there for just a few moments before descending.

If you’d asked me before I set off, I would have said that the trip down was going to be easy. Sadly I realised on the way up that it wasn’t going to be. For the most part you are heading down but the same problems around finding the right footing and scaling around rock faces were still ahead. If you built up speed and fell in the wrong place, you’d probably fall forwards and increase your chances of tumbling off the mountain.

As it was I slipped a few times as I gingerly made my way down. Every time I landed hard on my backside and fortunately each time on a flat, if wet, piece of rock.

Before long we were in a long line of other teams all heading the same way and we began to slow up, just as the rain began to pelt down harder and noisier than ever.

My light was as bad as ever and as the fatigue kicked in it was becoming harder to find the right footing with each step. I continued to fall on my arse a few times and I occasionally mis-judged the ground and stepped just that little bit further than I was expecting. On one of these occasions I felt a sharp and unexpected pain in my groin at the top of my right leg but the cold and the rain and the thought of being in the dry and the warm kept me going.

Eventually we saw the lights of the car park twinkling some distance below, but the agonisingly slow descent seemed to make our destination come no nearer, like we were trying to reach the mythical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

We got there eventually but it hadn’t been quick or easy. We were guided towards a packed café where other drenched individuals were huddling around in shock. It was 3am and all we wanted was to get somewhere warm and dry and sit down.

We found our way on to one of the coaches and sat in the dark, shivering. We listened to the rain beating heavily on the roof and knew that, in just a few hours, there was another mountain waiting for us.

Perhaps, we thought aloud, the rain won’t be as bad as this at Scafell Pike.

TOMORROW: RAIN, RAIN, AND MORE RAIN.