The 3 Peaks Challenge!
Posted by Bex on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
Last weekend I found myself sat in a dreary café in Fort William, Scotland, feeling a little peaky as I contemplated what the next 24 hours ahead were going to bring. I had signed myself up for The Three Peaks Challenge! The challenge involves climbing the highest mountains in England, Scotland and Wales; these being Scafell Pike, Ben Nevis and Snowdon, but the catch comes when it all has to be done within 24 hours! What a great idea?! The plan was to start the trip at 4pm on Saturday in Scotland and finish at 4pm on Sunday in Wales, travelling over 500 miles in between and scaling up to 1344m in elevation for the highest peak. We thought it was a great idea whilst sat in a cosy pub in central London, but now the plan was all of a sudden real it wasn’t half so appealing. We had stocked up on energy drinks / bars / refuelling shakes / gel packs, in fact anything that we could get our hands on that we thought might help and finally met our driver so it was actually happening, and at this point I was considering inflicting some elaborate injury upon myself to avoid the task ahead! Eventually, at 3.45pm we set off up Ben Nevis, on the western end of the Grampian Mountains. The rain was relentless and the terrain hard going but it was a huge relief to have started; I was walking and it wasn’t actually so bad, in fact I made it happily to the top of the highest peak and had enough energy to run down! This I can only attribute to the overdose of glucose, but still, I was enjoying it! After a couple of hours sleep in a particularly smelly van, we were woken at 2.30am to put back on our wet clothes and start Scarfell Pike, in the dark, this is when I rapidly starting un-enjoying it! Then again it was also quite satisfying reaching the summit at dawn and making the descent in daylight, especially knowing that out of the three teams doing the challenge that evening we were the only group not to get lost! The final hill was Snowden, which was definitely the most interesting climb. Walking up waterfalls and scaling rock faces, whilst being a little delirious I thought was nothing more than crazy, but we made it to the top! I was still banking on catching the railway down, but seemingly this is against the rules, so I hobbled down Snowden and made the whole trip within 24hours and 35 minutes. We raised over £1000 for charity and however satisfying it was to finish I don’t think I’ll be doing it again in a hurry!
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