In the spring of 2019 my partner and I had just finished work on our van and decided to test living/vacationing in it by going up to Scotland for two weeks. We would also finally get to climb the mountain we both wanted to go up: Ben Nevis!
There she is in the distance, isn't she a beauty!?
So the plan was to do the arete of Ben Nevis, as we didn't want to do the touristic route and we wanted to do a bit of a scramble (we are both climbers and confident with heights).
The arete means that instead of going up the usual path on the mountain, which is not that difficult, you go for the difficult path on the other side. The main difficulty is that it is, well, steep and has a sharp drop on both sides.
This is the arete route
We started off well and made pretty good time, as you can see in this happy smiley picture here:
But as you can maybe tell by my hair, the wind was picking up and when we checked the forecast again, we saw that we needed to change our plans right there and then.
So our beautiful plan in ruins, as you cannot walk an arete in wind, for the danger of being blown off the small ridge you are walking on. So we decided to walk around the mountain and walk the regular path instead. This did mean adding about 10km to the trip.
As we walked on we realized we had made the right decision as the weather turned worse quickly. The wind picked up to 30 mph and there were some snowy clouds drifting in...
We had prepared for bad weather so we had good boots, multiple jackets, hats, gloves and sticks for walking in snow, but we saw lots of unprepared people in shorts and sandals. Which was a bit silly, since Scotland in April is not usually very nice! When we got near to the summit we found lots of snow, but also poor visibility and we had to navigate on the compass.
This picture shows how much I love my North Face jacket because it is keeping me warm and alive! When we got to the summit we had no view to take a picture of so we decided to take one of ourselves instead!
We were very happy with our decision to go the regular path as that was difficult enough. We started heading back down and popped under the cloud at the summit to find the sun was still there. We still had about 10 km to get back to the campsite where the van was, making it a long day of about 30 km in total, but the last bit was wonderful as we walked downhill in the sunshine.
On this picture you can see the north face of Ben Nevis, and in the background in the clouds the route we were supposed to take. It was a wonderful path down, although the last 4km my feet got a bit sore and I wanted to be back in the van to heat up some instant noodles haha. You always get weird cravings when on mountains I find.
We crossed a stream, walked past several little streams and made it back to camp pretty tired. Though our original plan hadn't worked I was happy we still managed to go up, despite pretty bad weather conditions. It is one of the nicest walks I have done in Scotland!
Have you ever been on a nice mountain trip?
