Between the Sunset and the Sea: A View of 16 British Mountains

Ahead, a splinter of angled rock known as the Finger Post marked the top of the Pyg Track, the beginning of which I’d left earlier before turning on to Crib Goch. All around, the smouldering carpet of light was punctuated by huge holes of darkness; it took a moment for me to realise that these were the mountains. It’s an odd reversal; in daylight the mountains take the stage, with humankind very much in the wings – hidden even. But with darkness nothing natural is lit, and the sinuous extent of man’s touch on this landscape is revealed.

Continuing towards the summit on the breezy walkway, my peripheral vision was snagged by something unnaturally linear slinking up to me from the right: the railway. That was it. As much as anyone could – or would want to – on this mountain, I was able to relax. Even if the worst happened, if meteorological hell broke loose tonight and I had to beat a hasty retreat – this was my handrail. It was an odd anticlimax. Normally, such comforting civility is encountered lower down when your expedition is unwinding, not just as you reach the top. This summit was hardly going to be a wilderness experience; but after the emotional test of Crib Goch, maybe I’d earned a bit of security.

A summit camp hadn’t actually been in my plan, but it might be a fun feeling and would certainly fit the modus operandi of being on the mountain at its quietest, most changeable time: of all the 56 million people in England and Wales tonight, I’d be the highest. And more importantly, I had the grand podium of Snowdon entirely to myself, with the warm feeling of having done Crib Goch. Normally this place would be heaving with all manner of traffic, even in ropey weather. And yet here was I, feet from the summit, all alone – the mountain equivalent to finding the keys to the Louvre and sneaking in after closing time. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

I reached the summit shortly after midnight, the low hum of a generator and the strange, mysterious-from-a-distance glow of a vending machine inside the crouched café a surreal greeting, and reminders of this mountaintop’s queer civility. Keeping the long, grey building and the railway behind me, I climbed the steps to the concrete pillar that marked the very top, trying hard to imagine the summit without them, as indeed has everyone seeking wildness here since the first building went up here in the 1820s.

It was colder up here. The wind was kicking up too, and very quickly. From Snowdon’s brass summit plate, I stared out into an opaque, squally blackness. The dark shapes of the horseshoe’s limbs were gone. In fact, there was nothing – no lights in the distance, no twinkles in the sky – just depthless gunmetal. It took a moment to realise why: I was looking into a wall of cloud, barrelling onto the mountain from the south-west and pouring into the deep valley beneath the summit like floodwater breaking a levee. Pretty soon the expanse of lights that had held my attention on the last stretch to the summit would be gone, too. Good timing, in that the bad weather had held off for the tricky stuff; bad timing in that it had arrived just as I reached the highest, most exposed point of the country. Nothing to do now but hunker down, batten up and hold on.

Crouching in the stony lee of the café’s wall, I threw down my pack and started to pull out the rudiments of a camp – less a place to sleep and relax, more somewhere to keep out of the weather for a few hours. Pulling out my little tent, I quickly bowed the poles into position. The summit ground was solid rock; tossing a few helmet-sized boulders into the tent to weigh it down, I wrangled the flysheet over the frame, the wind doing its best to mischief any attempts to secure it. Within a few minutes – after some guy-rope fiddling and a lot of swearing – the tent approached some sort of solidity and I was able to dive inside.

The night was uncomfortable. After some inflatable noodles and hot chocolate, I attempted to sleep as the weather continued to break against the summit. The wind went from unnervingly persistent to worryingly determined, gusting severely enough on occasion to prompt a moon-eyed, sit-up-and-brace-the-walls position, all the whilst accompanied by the sound of heavy rain hitting the nylon in sharp, radio-static crackles. Constructed to complement the mountain’s natural lines, the café offered little shelter and if anything seemed to give the wind a more aerodynamic trajectory towards my camp.

I spent the rest of the dark hours in a state of twitchy half-doze. A streak of torchlight went across the tent at 3.30 a.m., accompanied by men’s voices. In a soundscape you so want to be comfortingly silent, voices on a mountain are an alarming addition – like lying in your bed at night and hearing a creak you can’t place. Concerned as to who could possibly be up on this summit in these conditions in the deep hours and not be inside a tent, I almost investigated – but the wild weather and the darkness of the situation convinced me otherwise, and whoever they were departed as quickly as they came.

At 5 a.m. the flysheet pulled free and began flapping wildly, allowing daybreak’s watery light to leak into the tent. Packing up my sleeping bag, mat, stove and sweet wrappers, I waited for a lull in the wind and left the tent into the dawn. The gale didn’t seem so bad out of the tent. The landscape, soft in the half-light, was covered in a burst duvet of cloud enlivened by the still-robust wind, and a steadying rain had established itself on the mountain. Occasional peaks on the horseshoe popped out of the fluff now and then as I watched – Y Lliwedd, the summit of Crib Goch – but the cloud was thickening in the warming air and soon visibility would be lost in grey sludge. Brewing up some coffee in the shuttered doorway of the café – the very spot where that unfortunate frostbite victim had lain unconscious in a snowdrift whilst his digits slowly hardened – I tried to shift the fuzzy, detached feeling of being up in a chilly dawn after a night of little sleep.

Amongst its summit buildings and straight-cut concrete, it was hard not to view Snowdon as vexed, torn between its status as an elemental, dangerous environment and the crowd-pleasing persona it had been forced to adopt. You can’t knock its primal qualities: this thing is a crocodile. But with its station and concrete and shuttered, platitude-engraved summit building, it’s a crocodile forced to wear a party hat.

But whatever has become of Snowdon’s very top in its recent history, crossing Crib Goch hadn’t disappointed. Exhilarating and worthy, besides the thrilling experience the route had given me something else – confidence. This was good, as higher, wilder peaks were coming.

Cooling the stove in a puddle, I waited for the hiss of steam to subside. Then, securing my rucksack and zipping up my jacket, I walked out of the sheltered doorway and set off down the Pyg Track, into the rain.

* (#ulink_5bf62648-e302-570b-97bf-5ba09da8d289) Few people use ropes on the lower scrambling grades, which is what makes them so dangerous. Rock climbs, whilst technically more difficult, are usually protected by ropes and so are generally safer, although there are the lunatic few who tackle the toughest rock climbs in the world unroped – a pursuit known as free soloing.

* (#ulink_ad332e5d-8676-5eda-bd6b-169799be5950) Acrophobia is the fear of heights – not, as is often claimed, vertigo. Vertigo is a physical condition related to dizziness, balance and equilibrium. Obviously for this reason, heights and vertigo still aren’t the best combination.

* (#ulink_9162c89e-11fa-5b3a-86e3-b121e5094031) The oddest of these is without doubt that of Emmanuel Caillet, the Frenchman whose body was found at a lonely spot near the summit of Ben Alder in 1996, having lain there for months. All the labels were missing from his clothing, he wore slip-on shoes and carried no identification. He had apparently shot himself in the heart with an antique replica Remington revolver, which lay nearby.

* (#ulink_fb957446-0310-56bb-905e-6738ef5b0e3b) In 2011, Scotland saw 415 incidents and 21 fatalities; England and Wales, 1,078 incidents and 33 fatalities.

* (#ulink_457acc03-b5a8-5895-9e17-6b14f5f3b2a1) General sea level forecasts don’t really cut it in the hills. Ironically, given the might of the Met Office, the bespoke upland forecasts 99 per cent of mountaineers rely on are the MWIS reports produced seven days a week by an extremely clever man called Geoff from his house in Scotland’s Southern Uplands. SportScotland give him some money for it; but the forecasts he provides for England and Wales are, at the time of going to press, unfunded.

* (#ulink_c8a09b64-2b75-51f3-b509-d35c64d3e023) The Snowdon horseshoe takes in the four peaks of Snowdon in a circular route from Pen-y-Pass. The peaks – Crib Goch, Garnedd Ugain, Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon summit) and Y Lliwedd – are colloquially referred to as the ‘nails’ in the horseshoe.

* (#ulink_65fbc597-64d0-572e-9555-5bf69bcee35a) This one occasion was actually two. A Vauxhall Frontera was discovered near the summit of Snowdon in September 2011. The driver had followed the railway line in the car and abandoned it near the top. Arrested and bailed after the car’s recovery, he promptly drove it to the summit again.

* (#ulink_0115e6f8-356f-5424-a586-255a72cec649) The same man was rescued five months later after a 15-metre slip lower down on the same mountain. Though he remained unnamed in the ever-respectful protocol of such things, a spokesperson for Llanberis Mountain Rescue drily confirmed the twice-unlucky – or, indeed, twice-lucky – man had been identified as ‘a previous client’.

* (#ulink_bd39936f-42f8-5bd6-9f52-6f321a5daa83) Meaning, literally, ‘the grave’. It’s thought this title relates to Arthurian legend – King Arthur is reputed to have died on the mountain, having tossed his sword Excalibur into Llyn Llydaw. Nearby Bwlch y Saethau means ‘Pass of the Arrows’, where Arthur’s knights did battle. After Arthur’s death it’s said they crawled into the cracks of Y Lliwedd to await his return. This is one bizarre sight that hasn’t as yet been seen on Snowdon.

5 PLUNDER (#udee40a0e-8cb7-58c9-997d-92b4924499db)

From a ceiling beam in the bar of the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel a row of walking boots hang by their laces like dangling feet from a line of gallows. Some are very old: the hobnail type, collapsed and discoloured, their soles stiff with age.

This place is part hotel, part museum, part tomb. The walls are panelled with dark wood, and many are hung heavy with mountaineering memorabilia. Facing you as you sit sipping a pint of dark beer in the lounge is a cabinet filled with yellow tanks the size of marrows, each emblazoned with a Union flag. To the first men who climbed Kangchenjunga – third-highest mountain in the world – in 1955, these prevented them succumbing to sickness in the thin air, filled with life-bearing oxygen to top up the deficit burgled by altitude. Behind you hangs a photograph of Mount Everest’s first ascenders Edmund Hillary and his friend Tenzing Norgay. Tenzing’s skin is crisped and blackened by sun and dirt, and both of them sit drinking lemonade from tin mugs. One of those mugs is displayed in a cabinet in the next room, alongside the white rope that tied the pair together on their ascent of the mountain and fragments of rock carried from the highest place on earth. Also present are the many signatures of mountaineers old and new who have made a solemn stop at the isolated hotel – crouched on the corner of the Pass of Llanberis in Snowdon’s north-east shadow – to be in the presence of the ghosts who made that remarkable journey to the highest point on the world.

Legend has it that when news of the successful ascent of 29 May finally reached the hotel at 1 a.m. on 2 June 1953, the owner announced that any guest not in the bar with a glass of champagne in their hand in ten minutes would be thrown out the following morning. It describes itself as a ‘mountaineers’ hotel … which is a haven from the relentless grind of modernity’. You can well believe it.

A line of pictures runs along the northern wall of the ‘smoke room’; a group, pictured in the same place year after year – outside the door, just there. A sudden lurch into colour in the mid-sixties is followed by increasingly modern clothes, shrinking hair and steadily diminishing numbers. They were all here, that first summit team; they trained on the mountains nearby for the expedition that would carve itself into mountaineering history like no other. And year after year, back they came. The tall, wild-looking one with the big grin; his name would be the one people would remember most, although it was the summit photograph of his partner – diminutive, smiling – that people would see, axe aloft, flags straightened by the jet stream, the harsh tones of snow and space, and him, bridging them with his iconic pose. It was a long way for Tenzing to come back to Snowdonia from Darjeeling. But he still came back when he could.

They’re all gone now, this climbing team. The last one, George Lowe, died in 2013. It’s over 60 years since those vital young mountaineers first gathered here at the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel, warming themselves from the savage air of the Snowdonian winter, to eat and be merry before tramping off to the frigid climbing huts where they slept.

Some would say the mountain they climbed has gone, too – or at the very least plundered beyond recognition. In 1953 Mount Everest was the Third Pole, the realm of elite, trusted, specially selected adventurers. Today it can be had for money. Base Camp is now a small town, people step over the dead and the dying as they climb for the summit on fixed ropes, children have climbed it, and all have witnessed its troubling mix of horror and glory. It’s perhaps understandable the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel does its best to cling to the atmosphere of a seemingly more honourable time when such things remained an inconceivable dystopia. Then mountaineering was truly steps upwards into the unknown, and all you had or needed were those you were with, and the collective will to try.