I’m miles behind on the blog so I’ve still not written about the second walk I did with Ali on the weekend he was up in November – the day after our sunny walk in Kintail. Maybe I’ve been avoiding writing about it because I’m still traumatised by the experience.
Ali was choosing the walk for the Sunday, and I assumed – naively – that’d we probably take in a leisurely walk since this was day 2. I thought wrong! Ali picked Nevis – biggest Ben in Scotland. And he chose the ‘ledge’ route up which is the scrambling route up the North Face. This route is generally classed as a grade 1 scramble (easy), though some sources consider it a grade 2 (bit harder).
The route started with a long walk in to the CIC hut at the base of the North Face. This is also the start of a lot of climbing routes up Nevis, which we had to be careful not to stray on to. Fortunately for me, Ali was chief navigator, and had done this before, albeit in the early morning dark.
Before long our route up took us over some slab rock, which was wet and extremely slippery. Ali had mentioned there was one tricky bit over slab. We went over one and I asked “was it that one?” (meaning “please tell me it was that one”) but sadly no, that was just the warm up.
Just a wee bit further on, but quite a bit higher up, we came to The Slab. The pictures really don’t do this badboy justice. But please take my word for it – there were practically no holds, the rock was so slippery it was like ice, and there was a big drop waiting if you were to slip.
Ali went first. He got halfway up the slab, and paused. I asked “how is it?”… “Shit!” he called back. Yikes. He was up and over to the other side admirably quickly though. My turn. I managed to find the first couple of teeny tiny toe holds ok, but was pulse-quickeningly aware of the near zero grip I had on the rock. From this angle, that slip slide over the edge and down to the rocks below looked inevitable. I tried to find the next hold and realised… there were none. I was at the point where Ali had called out that it was shit – which I now understood was because of the zero holds – this rock did not want to be climbed.
It was around about now that I really thought I was going to go over the edge. I tried to shout something but my brain couldn’t assemble a word so something like “nfjdkslah” came out of my mouth. Hearing that aloud, I was able to revise it to “fuck”. “Fuck. Fuck. Shit. FUCK.” I was very scared. Unable to go forward, unable to go back, my body decided instead to flood me with adrenaline and tense every muscle which instantly fatigued so I could barely hold on. My first experience of cragfast – being stuck mid scramble and the freak out causing all your muscles to stop working. I really thought this was going to be my first major incident and trip to the hospital.
Helpfully, Ali climbed back down a bit towards me. “Where are the holds?!” I shouted. He confirmed that, basically, there were none and the next step was above my reach. But the only way is up if you don’t want to go down, and I was losing grip where I was. I pressed myself away from the rock enough to lean on my knees and wriggle up. I finally reached a teeny tiny piece of rock to hold on to, which in that moment felt enormous compared to what I had a second ago. I hung onto that for a minute and forced myself to breathe, willing my muscles to relax.
Thankfully I was now over the worst and the rest of the slab had much more reasonable holds. Ali offered me his hand but taking it seemed preposterous – surely we’d both end up sliding off the mountain?! I continued my belly wriggle and eventually clawed my way off the other side of the slab. It looked a lot steeper from the top.
We were now officially over the hardest part of this route. Ali led on and the rest of the scramble was pretty fun – not too easy, and fun choosing your route up the rock, but decidedly more in my preferred category of “high risk of a skinned knee and bruised confidence” as opposed to “meaningful risk of death”.
The weather was worsening, but we were mercifully sheltered by the mountain because the wind was coming from the other side. When we topped out onto the ridge we got the full force of the wind blowing rain into our faces. We donned the waterproof troos and trekked to the summit of Ben Nevis.
What’s the view from the highest point in the UK you ask?
Given the weather and the time, we decided not to do the ridge/scramble over to Carn Mor Dearg – which is also a munro, so I’ll have to come back and do this again. Instead we started the very long walk down – as it was we knew we’d be walking the last of this route in the dark.
The route down was a fair chunk further than I had appreciated. We were taking the tourist path down, which meant we would come part way down the mountain, then loop the whole way back around to the base of the North Face, then back down to where we left the car at the North Face car park. I thought we must be getting close to where we had started our scramble, but Ali checked the map and confirmed that, no, we still had 10k to walk. Hahaha. We debated walking down into town, which would be closer, and getting a cab back to the car, but that would feel like defeat and the faff of finding a taxi wasn’t appealing. We soldiered on, upping the pace.
By the time we made it back to the base of the North Face it was headtorch time. After a couple of moments of uncertainty – this area looked very different from this direction and in the dark – we triumphantly found the CIC hut, and our long path back to the car – only 90 minutes to go!! Our spirits lifted since we were on the home straight, and I ate my second sandwich while we walked to distract from my tired feet.
So there we go. I survived my first scary scramble, and with some bruised knees lived to – after several weeks of procrastination – tell the tale.
Only Young Twice 