Ben Nevis - Part 1

I made it up the mountain!

On Saturday, 6 of us: Matthew, Steven, Maude, Patrick, Hakim and I left Glasgow for Fort William. We planned to stay the night and hit Ben Nevis the next morning. We got a little bored that night...

Here's us after dinner. We had the one dish that no one can screw up - spaghetti bolognese...

Can you believe it? Daylight saving was good for something. We actually got an extra hour of sleep that night, as we turned our clocks back an hour. October 25 marks the last day of British summer - which was slightly ominous for us.

Apparently it's not safe for novice hikers (ie me) to go up Ben Nevis from November onwards. Hence why we went on the last weekend of October =). While Saturday was a day of absolutely wild weather, the forecast for Sunday was relatively better:

The sun was out as we hit the trail at 9am. Note: that isn't Ben Nevis in the background. It's actually to the right of the picture, but the bridge was on the left. Don't ask why...

My housemates and their friends... easily identifiable by their blue waterproofs

Matthew still in a good mood =)

The Ben Nevis Inn, and that night's dinner.

View from the walking path:
Maude and Steven
Glen Nevis is incredibly scenic. These ppl were on a morning walk...

Took about an hour of solid walking to get to this point. Models: Matthew and Patrick


Patrick and moi
Maude and Hakim - those sticks became very useful later on...
I was enjoying the walk thus far - weather was great =)

And then I turned around...

It was 1 hr 30 mins into the hike...I actually can't remember whether I was looking at the rain slowly coming to us (see below), or just gasping for breath. Or maybe I'd realised something: we still hadn't got to the saddle by the Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe. The Lochan's only 570m above sea level. The mountain's 1344m high...

In some countries, you get the four seasons. In Scotland, you can get four seasons in a day, localised on the same mountain... this was the wet season coming in.
On a sidenote, the wonderful thing about Scotland is that you'll never die of thirst. The saying "water, water everywhere" comes to mind.

Once we rounded a bend in Glen Nevis, we could start seeing the slopes of Ben Nevis. The summit was obscured by clouds (the cloud line's 800m up)

1 hour and 50 mins into the climb, we finally reached the Lochan (570m). I was happy. It was sweltering actually, as I had 4 layers on. In hindsight, that was a good problem to have.

Anyways, this was the easy part of the ascent... I'll leave the part where I thought I was going to die for the next post =)

Nic