At the end of the May 2011, 9 of my friends and I decided to take a trip to Scotland to go camping. Since I had not seen most of them since the Lincoln 10k race, I tagged along for the ride as my house was on the way, and it’d be a great chance to hang out with my friends (as well as being a holiday).

The trip itself was to a camp site in the Scottish highlands called Glen Nevis, which sits at the bottom of a few of the mountains in the area, and just at the right angle to fool you into thinking that Ben Nevis isn’t as tall as you think it is. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Ben Nevis, but it is an incredible effort to get there. From Middlesbrough, which is considered to be in the North of England, the journey is still six hours in the car, not including bathroom breaks and food stops. Adding to this the 2.5 hours between where they were, and where I was, it totalled over eight hours journey time in three very heavily laden cars (I was absolutely convinced that 10 people and their camping gear could not fit into three cars… I was wrong).

There is quite literally no easy way of getting to the area by car, or anything else for that matter. For the first half of the journey, it is mostly travelling on the highways, and abusing the walkie-talkies to play I-Spy and make assorted childish noises, but once you have driven through Glasgow, and out the other side, you’re well on your way to no-mans-land. Some of the roads travelled were barely wide enough for two cars, and sat at the base of cliffs, with nice plunges into local loches if you aren’t careful. There were plenty of clues on the way to where drivers’ spacial awareness had failed them, and subsequently lost wing mirrors by hitting bits of cliff face. Believe me when I say that squeezing between a wall of rock and a luxury holiday coach on a winding mountain road is enough to put hairs on your chest, and I wasn’t even driving!

Once you’re off the scary cliff road though, you’re well into the Highlands, and I never realised how right people were when they told me how incredible the Highlands were, even while driving…

If you’re interested, you can find the route taken below.

(View Larger Map).

Upon completing our epic journey into what can only be described as the middle of nowhere, we finally arrived at the campsite. The camp site was actually quite well equipped, and had full shower facilities, laundry facilities and even a burger van where you could get some fairly decent fish and chips. Something we ate like starving dogs when we got there. There was even a classy (and expensive) pub nearby! That first night though, we pitched up our four tents (2 x four man, 1 x two man, and a festival tent), in a corner of the site, and settled in by drinking our beer supply, and falling asleep.

Most of the week our diet consisted of fried things, and I developed a very unhealthy taste for fried Spam with bacon. We had some small camping stoves and the like which we used to cook food for ten. This was usually stuff that could either be fried, boiled or simmered, so baked beans, pasta and bacon made up the majority of the food.

On the days when we weren’t hiking, we had a football and a mini american football to entertain ourselves with, and plenty of beer and literature to entertain those who didn’t want to play (or in my case, couldn’t play because of the marble-sized blister I picked up climbing the mountain.

The second full day we were there was definitely the most difficult. From waking up in the morning to almost 11pm, it rained non-stop. After cramming 10 men into a single four man tent for most of the morning and lunch time, we opted for the pub, where we sat down with a game of Family Guy Monopoly. Until we’d almost drank the pub out of Thistly Cross ginger cider.

On the first day of the holiday, it was reasonable weather, and given the dreadful forecast, we opted to climb Ben Nevis. Setting off at 11am, we aimed for the top with bags packed with jackets, gloves and sweets for sugar boosts.

Progress at first was quick and entertaining. Plenty of laughing and running occurred. Granted, this was mostly on level ground, but it was still easy, and we (foolishly) thought that the climb was going to be easier than initially thought. We quickly (within a couple of hours) managed to make it to a fork in the road, where the tourist route and the pro route separated off.

The mountain has two main routes to the top. The first is what we dubbed the “tourist route”, which consisted of mainly manufactured paths that zig-zagged all the way to the peak. The second route was the “pro-climbers route”, which consisted of the same initial walk, followed by a climb up a snowy ridge, finally followed by a scramble to the adjacent peak that was Ben Nevis.

Being ambitious fools, we chose to take the hard route, and after about thirty minutes of wandering across wet rocks and loose mud, another party of boys our age came up to us walking the other way, imploring us to turn back because they’d been stuck for three hours climbing back down after realising that the ridge was impassable due to the snow. We heeded this advice, since we wanted to get back to the camp site the same day, and turned back and ascended the tourist route.

The tourist route was probably the best route in hindsight (even if the other route had been passable), since even climbing the tourist route proved to be difficult. Especially when we got about 2/3 of the way up, and the ground became almost entirely shale, causing the required effort to double since for every step we took forward, we’d slip on the shale and go half a step backwards. The whole climb became a heck of a challenge for me. Besides the fact that I am probably in the worst shape I’ve been in years, I rarely even have to climb stairs, let alone mountains! This wasn’t helped by the fact that we forgot to pack any substantial lunch, and had to survive on our small breakfast and our Mars bars and Kendal Mint Cake.

We finally made the peak at around 4pm, in the middle of a hail storm and about 4 inches of snow (we were very glad to have packed gloves and scarves, since it was sunny and warm at the bottom). It had taken us 5 hours, which included a 1 hour detour from the turn-back. Celebration was made with a large bottle of wine and celebratory photographs and phone calls. Of all the people to contact, my boss at work received a text message asking him nicely to turn on my Outlook out-of-office autoreply message!

In conclusion, climbing Ben Nevis has definitely been one of the most physically challenging things I’ve ever done, but it’s also ticked off one of the things I wanted to do before I died!