Mark took to the wheel of the Discovery, George in the
passenger seat and me in the back, in spite of it only being
8 p.m.
I stretched out across the back seats to try and get some
sleep. I don’t think I really managed to get any sleep, could be something to
do with the severe sugar rush resulting from all the crap food eaten within 10
minutes of getting back to the car, (mental note: try to eat more savoury stuff
after Sca Fell, pasta etc.).
As on the drive up we made good time with Mark at
the wheel, he was starting to get a reputation as a bit of a nutter (but a
nutter that was going to serve us well). We came back down via
Stirling
, to avoid the windy roads that can get very congested. As it
was now dark, George made a great suggestion to stop at a service station and
prep our kit under their floodlights, so that when we arrived at Wasdale Head we
could jump out and get going with the minimum of faffing.
The car park at
Wasdale camp site was closed, it doesn’t open till
7:30 a.m.
, but there were still a few spots in the lay-by on the road,
so we took one of these. We were soon under way and the GPS showed a time of
2:02 a.m.
!!!!
During this ascent the GPS was to prove invaluable, at
one point I told Paddy that there was a bridge we had to cross approximately 15m
over to the left, I looked up and pointed my head torch in the direction, low
and behold there it was illuminated by the beam. We made good progress steering
by GPS without the need to stop for checking maps and compasses. In spite of it
being the early hours of the morning most of us were walking in tee shirts for
the early stages. Once we reached the plateau at Hollow Stones we beared to the
left and took the now obvious path top the summit. The temperature steadily
dropped and the wind picked up.
Eventually we were relived to see a large cairn
at the summit and all sheltered on the leeward side, readying cameras and mobile
phones (“I don’t care if it’s
4 a.m.
I’m still going to ring my girlfriend”). At this point I
went through my routine of checking how close my GPS summit waypoint was to the
actual one, only to see that it was 130 meters off. This struck me as to be too
big an error, and so I uttered the following “I don’t know if I should
really says this guys, but I don’t think this is the summit”. We discussed
this for a few moments and Jim observer that there was no Trig point, so we
reluctantly packed up and set off for the final 130 meters. We arrived at the
summit at
4:04 a.m.
BST, 2 hours and 2 minutes after setting off, and 12 hours 4
minutes into the 24 hours, to be greeted by a biting wind and temperatures that
must have been minus 10 after wind chill. There were very quick photos, phone
calls and video, a quick chat with the other team of 6 Three Peakers that were
there as well.
Then set off on descent at
4:10 a.m.
A fairly uneventful descent resulted in us arriving back to
the car at
5:40 a.m.
, 1 hour 30 minutes for the descent. Whilst I say it was
fairly uneventful, I personally was starting to struggle with the idea of still
having Sca Fell descent and the whole of
Snowdon
to come. With hindsight this was more mental than physical.
To relieve angst I broke the descent down into blocks of altitude, trying to
guess each time when another 100m had passed, then getting out the GPS to see
how close I was, surprisingly I was generally within 10m each time. It was then
just a matter of counting down from 900, 800, 700, …… 200, 100 and at last
we were there, knocking on the car window to wake Joff up and telling him to get
driving. Another quick change into comfortable driving clothes and we were ready
for the off.
