Ben Nevis
Climbing the brooding, magnificent and frankly intimidating kingpin.
BEN NEVIS. BEN Nevis. Ben Nevis. BEN NEVIS. Ben Nevis. Ben Nevis. Ben Nevis. Ben Nevis. Repeat anything enough times and the words stop making sense, through a process called ‘semantic satiation’. In effect you repeatedly press the ‘recognise this’ button in your head until the system momentarily crashes. The result is the word or phrase comes out temporarily fresh and clean – washed free of associations, assumptions, baggage and sense. It’s a reset that most of us owe to Britain’s highest peak. As soon as you learn about it in school, Ben Nevis ceases to be a mountain and starts to be a stereotype. The standard unit of Big Achievement. A metonym for massiveness. A storehouse of awful extremes and cautionary tales – of weather, danger, tragedy. Far away, forbidding; best ignored.
But if you grow up to be a walker like me – which is to say a scenically omnivorous but not particularly brave one – you and the Ben are on a collision course. You might as well say you’ll never, not once, look at the sun as say you won’t one day consider climbing Ben Nevis. The thought will light a dancing flame of dare-to-dream in your stomach, even though that will trigger the sprinklers of reasons-why-not.
There’ll be plenty to hand – BBC News will furnish you with as many lost or crag-fast mountaineers as you require; you’ll tell yourself it’s a cliché to climb the one Scottish mountain you know for definite how to pronounce; that the locals will look down on you as just another clueless corporate tag-along using the peak as a particularly large piece of outdoor play equipment. And you’ll garnish this dish of self-deterrence with a few half-understood words like ‘cornice’, ‘arête’ and ‘windslab’ before reaching the desired conclusion that this is not for the likes of you.
And yet. It’s there. You’re sensible. It’s not clever to shrink from a bully. And though you’re not challenge-driven or macho or out to prove anything, how could you not be curious what it’s like to overtop every other person in the kingdom? To scrape the sky and take some of that magic back under your nails? And so you decide to do it. You book a place to stay. And you don’t stop feeling nervous about it for weeks. And then it’s the night before, and you’re going. And then the weather forecast’s okay. And you haven’t got a medical exemption. And oh my god then, here we go.
IT’S A BRIGHT May morning, and I’m trying to eat breakfast in a B&B outside Fort William – Ben Nevis’s hometown, which sits at the head of the 30-mile fjord of Loch Linnhe. Behind the cereals and serviettes, through the window, Ben Nevis looms; the one that ate all the Weetabix. Someone who isn’t going to climb the mountain that day asks if I know what ‘Ben Nevis’ means in Gaelic, before telling me it’s either ‘Malicious’ or ‘ Venomous’. Which is a bit like asking someone leaving on an Aeroflot flight if they’ve seen the film ‘Alive’.
With breakfast stubbornly refusing to digest, I leave Fort William’s crust of edge-of-town housing behind, and enter Glen Nevis – the valley opening up before me like a souped-up Lake District: bigger, steeper, longer, more. The weather seems beefed-up too; the sky taller; the cold air more brazen at slipping inside your jacket; the sun better at pricking your brow with sweat.
I’m following the Pony Track (also known as the Mountain Path, Ben Path or Tourist Route), which is an easy choice to have made. It’s the only way up for a hand-in-pockets walker, which is the submissive rating I’ve given myself, the less to tempt the mountain to raise its hackles. There is another way I reckon I could do in calm conditions – via the sharp, swooping arc of Carn Mor Dearg arete (see panel) – but perhaps not at a first attempt, and definitely not when I can see a fair amount of snow up top. In this round of David v Goliath, victory will come, if it does, not from slingshot to the face but dead-leg and bundle.
Nevertheless, any ascent of Ben Nevis – the hem of whose kilt sits in salt water let’s not forget – requires you to climb about 4400 of its 4413ft. And if that’s hard to put into perspective, compare it to the other Three Peaks – it’s about 2900ft of climb for Scafell Pike from Seathwaite or Wasdale; about 2600ft for Snowdon via Pyg or Miners tracks. That’s 50% more upward effort you need to summon than for England’s highest peak; 70% more than for Wales’s by the most popular routes. Which is why however benign the weather and route choice, Ben Nevis is in a different category
“Though you’re not out to prove anything, how could you not be curious what it’s like to overtop every other person in the kingdom?”
in terms of the toll it takes on your legs and lungs.
Not that the weather is ever wholly benign. Because with altitude comes a kind of seasonal time-travel, and though I left the valley in May, every 1000ft takes me back a month, and after an hour and a half’s leisurely climbing (to an outside observer it may look like trudging) it’s early March and I’m in a snow patch. I bend down and touch it, scoop up handfuls to cool my forehead and lamely toss some about. Reaching snow always feels like a big moment, though on this occasion it’s only half as big as I’m aiming for – still a Snowdon’s-amount of climbing away.
THE BREEZE IS fresh. Up in the jet stream thin clouds are being pulled apart like angel hair, letting the sun glare through. Snow patches shine with pupil-shrinking brightness as I reach the Lochan Meall an-t suidhe, known with dispiriting pointedness as the Halfway Lochan. It’s a desolate place, a scoured wind channel that never gets a rest, a place that looks like it’s always chillier than its
surroundings. The sun goes back behind a thicker clump of cloud and it’s like the shower running cold. Suddenly chilly, I can see the lochan is starting to freeze, the water lapping weakly over the rocks on the edge like it’s trying to get out.
I pat my many pockets for a reviving chocolate bar and look back down into the reassuring, warm-looking greens and browns of the valley below. It’s like looking down the beanstalk.
I reach the zigzag section of path that leads in nine long tacks towards the summit plateau, tramlines of stones handily marking out the way ahead. Despite the views I’ve had all the way up, now the cloud is closing in, and as the world shrinks I’m more conscious of the effort being paid out by my legs. I wonder how much they’ve got in their account. Ponies used to get up here in worse weather, I remind myself – bringing supplies for the tiny observatory on the top, where a small retinue of men kept records of the precise awfulness of the conditions, every hour of every day and night – when it was possible to go outside to check. In 1898, wrote meteorologist William Kilgour in his book ‘20 Years on Ben Nevis’, precipitation at the top of the mountain amounted to 240 inches. Over the ten