Motivation
Organisation
Training
Getting to the start
Ben Nevis
Fort William to Wasdale Head
Scafell Pike
Wasdale Head to Pen-y-pass
Snowdon
Afterwards
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Motivation
As a boy I had spent many happy family holidays camping in some Lake District valley or other, and the three peaks had always been a challenge that I wanted to do. Up until now I’d never got enough motivation to do it.A chat with Andrew about doing it established the first of my companions, and Rob was soon in on the scheme too. I don’t exactly know how Steve got involved, and then when Andrew invited his sister Susan to join us, our company was complete.
The others have admitted now that they agreed to the challenge expecting that it would be just one of those good ideas that remained just that, but before they knew it I had everything booked, and we were on our way to Fort William.....
Organisation
As four of us live in Bournemouth, and the other in London it seems a long way to Fort William. However Ryanair fly daily from Bournemouth to Prestwick and as we booked about 3 months ahead, the four of us would all be in Scotland for just over 100 pounds.After trying a couple of companies who wouldn’t give us a one-way hire car, we managed to secure a big people carrier to bring us all the way back down to the south coast, via the three mountains.
We had agreed that we would share the driving between the guys, which was the part of the organisation with which I was most uncomfortable - you read time and time again about the advantage of dedicated drivers and to be honest that would have been much better. Still we were all there to walk, not drive for hours on end and sleep in a car!!!
Accommodation for the night before was sorted by Andrew and Susan’s mum kindly offering to put us up in Dumbarton on the Friday night.
At first we contemplated camping in Wales at the end of the challenge.
Thankfully we dismissed this idea and instead settled on a B&B in Llanberis. With hindsight under no circumstances should camping be attempted, you will not regret spending the extra £20 per person on a comfy bed and a decent breakfast the next day.
Training
All of us are pretty active types - I had done my first sprint triathlon two weeks before the date, Rob seems to spend all his weekends marching air cadets round the lanes of Dorset, Steve does plenty of walking, and Andy does at least 2 and a half lots of exercise a day and that's when he's taking it easy.
However, living in Dorset put us at one big disadvantage - there is not much scope for hill training.
However, we decided that the coast path would be hilly enough to give our legs a bit of a wake up call and so three walks were arranged in the lead up to the big day.
The first training walk took us from Studland to Swanage (chippy) and back via Old Harry Rocks (about 8 miles).
I missed the second walk which was somewhere up near Blandford (I think).
The final and most arduous walk was from Lulworth Cove to Ringstead Bay and back, via Durdle Door and Bats Head. This was over ten miles with some good steep cliff sides to negotiate.
Although we were not in mountains, walking the coast path is equally spectacular and we felt lucky to live so close to somewhere so idyllic for a training walk.
Getting to the start
We flew up from Bournemouth to Prestwick on the Friday afternoon. Having picked up our VW Sharan, we drove north to stay with Andrew and Susan’s mum in Dumbarton. Saturday morning saw us visiting Asda for supplies for the whole trip, Andrew making a mountain of sandwiches, and a final check of our equipment. We loaded up the Sharan, with not much room to spare, and set off for Fort William at about 11:00.Following a lovely drive past Loch Lomond and Glencoe, we arrived at Fort William in very light rain around 1.30pm. We had a walk up and down the high street, taking in a good pub lunch in the Ben Nevis (where else?) pub.
We then drove over to the starting point, arriving at about 4pm, which gave us an hour to pack our bag, reorganise the car and have a rest.
At 4.30pm it bucketed down with rain – we sat in our car and watched it, expecting that we’d be walking in that sort of weather very soon.
Ben Nevis
At 5pm on the dot we set off on the path up Ben Nevis, starting from Achintee Farm. Given the rain not 30 minutes before we had plenty of layers on, but soon found ourselves disrobing as the evening was lovely and warm with little wind.We made good progress up the tourist path, which is easy to walk on and none too steep at any point.
The cloud was down at around 800m, and so shortly before that we clothed up again in readiness and headed up the zigzags into the mist. At least it wasn’t raining! Towards the top we walked through a patch of about 20 yards of snow, and although visibility was poor, the succeeding cairn was always easy to spot, allowing us to reach the summit by 7.50pm. By now we had hats and gloves on, and due to the cold we stopped only briefly for a photo before setting off down the hill.
We came out of the cloud at around 800m into what was a glorious late evening, sunny and quite warm. We reached the car park by 10.02pm, a disappointing 2 minutes behind our nominal schedule.
After a complete change of clothes we got in our car and set off for England at around 10.20pm.
One footnote on our attempt on Ben Nevis is that most other groups seemed to have parked on the other side of the valley at the Youth Hostel, which suggests that it must be a shorter walk from there.
Fort William to Wasdale Head
The journey was quite boring, although there were a couple of items of interest. Steve drove us to Glasgow, during which we stopped to check if the boot was properly closed at which point Rob almost fell over as one of his muscles decided to play hell on standing up again. The same thing happened to me at Glasgow services – so beware when getting out of the car!!!
I drove from Glasgow to the Lakes, which gave me the chance to take a good decision - get some fuel for the car at Gretna, unless you are sure to get to Lancaster services ‘cos there is nowhere on the route to fill up in between. We so nearly didn’t which would have cost us dear.
Scafell Pike
We arrived at Wasdale Head at 3.30am and just managed to get the last parking space at the head of the Wasdale Head Hall Farm road (the nearest point to the mountain). It was still pitch black, but this gave us the 30 minutes we needed to repack our bags, get organised and head off at literally the crack of dawn at 4.03am. We’d slipped a whole minute on this journey, putting us a whole 3 minutes behind schedule. The sky was overcast and it had obviously been raining heavily, but it was dry as we set off.We ascended Scafell Pike by the Brown Tongue path. This is steep and the stones are quite slippery. At Hollow Stones we went left towards Lingmell Col. The Mickeldore route was allegedly closed at this time due to erosion although a lot of other groups were using that way up. We entered cloud again at around 2800ft, and trudged to the top to take a very similar looking photo to the one on top of Ben Nevis. We reached the top at 6.15am, and again after a quick stop started our descent.
Due to my experience of walking round Wasdale, I knew that an alternative route may be easier on the legs, rather than using the purpose build path we had used in ascent.
Therefore we headed straight across Lingmell Col, rounded Goat Crags, and took the shoulder of Lingmell down to the valley. This is a nice grassy walk, it’s still steep - all of Wasdale is, but it was probably no longer, and a lot more pleasant to do (for variation in walk if nothing else).
We arrived back at the car around 8am, again following our schedule almost to the minute.
Wasdale Head to Pen-y-Pass
As we headed out of Wasdale we made a navigational error. Our sat nav was telling us to head over Wrynose Pass, and I was keen to avoid going over Hard Knott. Hard Knott is a difficult drive anyway, but tired mentally and physically it would be dangerous to undertake. After looking at the map, we decided to take the coast road – which took forever. Well done to Rob for negotiating every bend safely. What we should have done is follow the sat nav to Eskdale and taken the last road before Hard Knott starts. This may have saved us about 20-30 minutes.We stopped at Lancaster services and got our lunch as Andrew’s sarnies had now run out. Steve then powered us down the M6 into north Wales. As Andrew took over the wheel, the Sat nav again may have lead us a bit astray as it took us down an A road SW from Rhyl towards Bets-y-cowed. The road over to Conwy and then south from there may be better.
The sat nav really did lead us into some narrow lanes north of Bets-y-cowed, Thankfully we didn’t meet anything coming the other way – not cos we were going too fast, but the road was so narrow, passing may have been very tricky.
We arrived at the car park at Pen-y-pass at around 12.45pm to see the dreaded ‘Car Park Full’ sign. ‘No Waiting’ signs added to our misery…..Could we use the Park and Ride in Llanberis and still make the time? We weren’t sure but we had been waiting a minute of two so we were about to pull away when……
A car came out of the car park – ‘QUICK REVERSE!!!!!!’ I’m not sure any of us knew if anyone was behind us, but apparently they weren’t as we gleefully careered towards the treasured space.
It occurred to me on the way up Snowdon that if a space doesn't come available it would have been worth having a quick whip round in the car to see if the attendant could be 'persuaded' to find an extra space in the car park....if time is crucial then I reckon an extra 10 pound cost on the trip would be worth the lifetime of bragging rights of having done it in 24 hours!!
Snowdon
Buoyed by our stroke of luck we packed our bags quickly and set off for the summit of Snowdon up the Pyg track, starting at 1.02pm – still 2 minutes behind schedule. Our schedule had 30 minutes slack in it – so to only have used 2 of those minutes was encouraging indeed. Again the weather was overcast, but dry and we ascended the meandering and gentle path in the company of by now familiar faces of fellow 3-peakers.After about an hour we had enough rain to take the decision to don waterproofs for the first time, although it soon stopped. Again we entered cloud at around 800m, and headed up towards the summit.
Many reviews lead you to believe Snowdon is the easiest. It maybe not the hardest but it is no walk in the park on a Sunday afternoon (it as Sunday by now I was lead to believe!) The last bit goes on forever – in the cloud you cannot see the top and as you are weary physically and mentally it seems to go on forever. You walk past the legions of day-trippers in their inappropriate footwear, with no rucksacks, smiling faces, and wonder quite why you are doing this with full gear and little enjoyment.
At last the summit was reached at 3.10pm, again in complete cloud. At this point Steve and I were concerned about not making the time, and so we split into two groups – Steve Rob and I set off apace, leaving Andrew and Susan to follow hoping to make the time. Looking back we should have held our nerve – 2 hours 15 minutes up, gave us a comfortable 1hour 45 minutes down. However tiredness and desire to make sure the 24 hours was achieved forced us to panic a little bit.
We set off down the hill – by now very tired - but shortly it became apparent that time was actually quite comfortable. Steve eventually was the first to finish at 4.34pm, a whole 4 minutes behind the proposed schedule.
Ed following 3 minutes later, followed by Rob with 15 minutes to spare. By now I was cold and completely knackered mentally as I had not been to sleep at all. I got in the car and got changed, not expecting to see Andrew and Susan to appear within the time. However, Steve spotted them entering the car park, and as I had lost sense of time by now, a quick check of the watch showed that they we had all done it – with a whole 5 minutes out of the 1440 available to spare.
Afterwards and getting home
Following a quick celebration, and packing up of the car we retired down the valley to Llanberis to check into our B&B, Plas Coch.After a shower and change we headed off to Pete’s Eats – a well-regarded café in the town for a big plateful of grub with welcome big mugs of tea and beer. The plan to go out and relive it all over a few cold beers was quickly dropped in favour of going to bed at 8pm – we were all so tired.
The breakfast on Monday was truly superb – I haven’t had better. I’d recommend the Plas Coch to anyone staying in Llanberis, and if you like your food simple, plentiful and cheap then pay a visit to Pete's Eats too.
We got in the car again at just after 9am for the 7 hours back down to Bournemouth.
Overall Schedule
Saturday 13th/Sunday 14th July 2007Sunset (Fort William) 22:04BST
Sunrise (Kendal) 04:53BST
| Time | Activity | Planned |
| 17:00 | Base of Ben Nevis | 17:00 |
| 19:50 | Summit of Ben Nevis | 20:00 |
| 22:02 | Base of Ben Nevis | 22:00 |
| 22:20 | Set off for England | |
| 03:30 | Arrive at Wasdale Head | |
| 04:02 | Start ascent of Scafell Pike | 04:00 |
| 06:05 | Summit of Scafell Pike | 06:30 |
| 07:52 | Base of Scafell Pike | 08:00 |
| 08:15 | Set off for Snowdonia | |
| 12:45 | Arrive Pen-y-pass car park | |
| 13:04 | Start ascent of Snowdon | 13:00 |
| 15:10 | Summit of Snowdon | 15:00 |
| 16:34 | Steve completes Snowdon | 16:30 |
| 16:37 | Ed completes Snowdon | |
| 16:45 | Rob completes Snowdon | |
| 16:55 | Andrew and Susan complete Snowdon |
Services just south of Glasgow
Gretna Green services (fuel only)
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