The Three Peaks Challenge for those that do not know what it is, is to climb Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon one after another within 24 hours, including the 500 mile drive between them!

Thats three countries, three mountains of 1344m, 978m and 1085m in 24 hours.

Its a bit of a mission, one that Vince, Lewis and Dave thought they could do, eventually I got involved to do the driving to make things marginally more safe. So after some texts and phone calls we decided on the time to bomb up to Scotland and the date, April 9th.

For some reason which we would regretted almost instantly when we woke up, we decided to leave Grimston at 5am. So I drove round the corner to pick Vince and Lewis up and then we hit the first hurdle, space in the car. Parcel shelf was removed almost instantly as there was no way it would stay in. We had a bit more gear than first planned as we were going climbing for a day after we had finished and a tent to stay in. Nevertheless we jammed it all in, banged in Daves House on the TomTom (thanks to Ollie for that) and set off into the darkness.

We arrived in Burbage just after daybreak, it was no warmer than when we left. So we tried to stuff all his stuff into the car in some sort of fashion and once again pumped in the destination into TomTom. Fort William, Scotland. It said we’d get there at 2:30pm which we thought was pretty early, then realised it was actually only about 7am…. Four and a bit hours later we arrived in Carlisle for a bit of a break at my house there. Tucked into some croissants nabbed from Tesco’s and watched the weather forecast, sunny and hot for all of the UK. Great. TomTom now said it would be 4 hours to Fort William which sounded about right so we set off again. The road from Carlisle to Glasgow is really boring, nothing to look at. Driving through Glasgow isn’t much better.

Got to Fort William and decided to get some petrol and have a look round, nothing to see so went to the base of Ben Nevis and had some food. As you can see the car is pretty jammed and the weatherman lied.

After we had our lovely pasta and sauce, we still had about 4 hours to kill before our predetermined start time of 8pm, so we had a bit of a drive and went for a walk. Some cows were in the road and would not budge and on the way back had to actually slalom through them.

At 2000 on the dot they sprinted off into the darkness leaving me 4 hours or so to try and get some sleep. It is very hard to sleep in a Clio with sport seats which is also damp, cramped and smelly. So I had the sunroof open but there was a lot of a noise outside not to mention the rain. You may notice how dark it is..

In the end I probably got no more than half an hour drifting on and off. Got a text from Lewis at 2255 saying they were at the summit, that was a lot longer than I expected and as it turned out Nevis had about 2m of ice and snow on top. Crampons would have been good for that, not normal walking boots. They battled down and I could see the three headlights glowing in the distance as they descended down, at 0100 Vince came flying across the bridge rather sweaty and soaked, 5 minutes later Lewis and Dave came bounding across. Within minutes we were off and thrashing it down the Scottish Highlands to the Lake District.

This is where the SatNav became extremely useful, without it I think we would have had to crawl round some of those corners as I would have had no idea how sharp they were. The SatNav gave me a 3D view and on the drive up it had got every one bang on. So on the way back I managed to go full tilt round each and every one and we saw I think two cars from Fort William to Glasgow and they were going the other way! From Glasgow to Carlisle was the toughest drive I’ve ever done. I’d done about 700 miles so far and with about 30 mins of sleep it was tough. The plan was for the others to have 2 hour “turns” at keeping me awake, Dave fell asleep after about 10 minutes into his watch, Lewis was out of it soon after in the back and when it came to Vinces turn he was so tired he could not see the road signs. Luckily after a swig of Kick! and a Snickers I felt much much better and turned off through Carlisle and around the coast, arriving at Scafell at 0615.

I did manage to get some sleep this time, however the rain had gotten a lot worse and was also pretty foggy. Vince said it would take 3.5 hours to do this, so when the 4 hour mark came up things started to get tight time wise. At this point we had already used about 14 hours up and when Lewis came flying over a style to the car saying Dave was pretty ill and wasn’t going to do Snowdon and that they could not go any further without hot food, things really got tight. So out came the cooker again and some more pasta and sauce, Vince had also split his waterproof trousers and his waterproof jacket was about as useful as a chocolate ashtray on a motorbike.

To add to the problem TomTom then seemed to point us down a very narrow and dodgy road when the signpost clearly pointed the other direction, so we ignored TomTom and drove down the larger road. For about half an hour we were stuck on single tracks with no sign of a main road or civilisation, when we finally got back to the A595 we had about 9 hours left to drive to Wales and climb Snowdon . We were also pretty short of petrol thanks to the detour and with no petrol station in sight we had to drive pretty slowly to conserve petrol. Luckily we bundled into a small town and found the worlds smallest petrol station selling petrol at 99.9p a litre, pumped by the attendant! I used up all the cash I had on me as asking “do you accept debit cards” seemed like a stupid question. This was shortly followed by the worlds steepest road and at the top of it was a T-Junction. The car was on the verge of stalling, pulling away in first gear with my foot nearly pushing the pedal out the bottom of the car. Somehow it pulled up and over and off we went.

I plugged into TomTom to get to Llanberris at 1600, giving 4 hours Snowdon. I was greeted with it saying I needed to have set off 25 minutes ago. This would be a proper mission to make up 25 minutes including an inevitable toilet stop somewhere around Preston. We set off and the minutes very very slowly came off, I had 2 hours of driving to get there and when we stopped for a toilet break we were 12 minutes behind, when we started it had gone back up to 15 minutes and no matter how fast I seemed to drive the time was not coming off, I reckon I would have needed to gone about 140mph down the M6 to make that time up. However when we hit the A roads in Wales, TomTom was obviously expecting me to do about 50mph down them, not realising they were dual carriageway and the minutes flew off. When we got to the car park I was 2 minutes behind schedule which was great, because Llanberris was 5 minutes drive down the road so I was infact ahead of time, we got out the car at 1555 and they started bang on 1600. Job done.

With Dave not feeling physically able to do it, Lewis and Vince had 4 hours to get up and down Snowdon. The boards around the car park said the route usually takes 4-6 hours to do a round trip. Things would be very tight I felt, but I knew they’d give it everything to get under 24 hours as much as possible. They took no extra clothing and only water, map and GPS.

Dave and I then went to find a Campsite and set up the tent and have some more food and a bit of a rest. We picked the nearest one Vince marked on the map and after nearly driving off a cliff edge trying to get round the corner into the campsite (that must’ve been easily been a 160 degree turn on a 20 degree downwards angle) we got there and set up shop. The inside of my car was pretty mucky, not to mention the outside.

There was also a rather promising looking rock outcrop overlooking the campsite which we reckoned would be ideal for some climbing the next day. Dave and I then had some noodles and peanut sauce and had a bit of a cleanout of the car. At this point it was 18:45 and we thought we’d just go along Snowdon and have a wander up the mountain and meet them on the way down, so off we went. We parked the car, got out and was greeted by the sight of Lewis and Vince strolling out of the buildings. They had ran up and down Snowdon in two hours ten minutes and had been sitting inside for about half an hour, thanks to that we had completed the Three Peaks Challenge in 22 hours and 10 minutes.

Woo.

We got back to the campsite and cracked open the celebratory beers, had a rest, some food and found out Vince was on the verge of Trench Foot.

Suffice to say we were knackered, so we went to bed at 9pm and slept like logs. We then woke up at about 9am, slowly moved and had breakfast of sausages, beans and bacon/potato thing. The sausages were Tesco Value and the only way you could actually differentiate between the bread and the sausage was the sausage was hot and the bread was not, the taste was identical. The bacon in the potato and bacon thing was also dubious. After that we set off for that rock in the distance and when we reached the base decided we would have to be insane to climb it as it looked about E3 grade. So we went to the top round the sides, fooled around and abseiled 60m down off it.

The last 30m you can see there I pretty much ended up spinning around dangling away from rockface and went straight through that tree ripping the legs up. Then went back to the tent for some lunch, bumbled into Llanberris to look for food and a cash machine and was shocked by the amount of people speaking Welsh. Found a massive pack of unsliced bacon for £1.50, lots of Castlemaine XXXX for £9 and some Ragu sauce. Then drove off round the roads to a new place to climb.

Just a short 400m odd scramble where I managed to find a Petzl helmet worth £53 brand new hidden in the bushes, keenly spotted by Dave. Certainly needed that with all the rocks flying down the hill. You may have also noticed that bizarrely unlike everywhere else Wales was very hot (18-22c) and sunny which is an amazing thing for Wales. Then at 6pm we set off on this 96m VDiff climb, 5 pitches worth. Vince and Lewis went up on one rope, myself and Dave on the other. It was pretty nippy in places in the shade and was glad to get to the top, then had to descend in rock shoes which was painful at best.

Then we scrambled back down as quick as we could to the base, jumped in the car, nearly trashed the bottom of it getting back onto the road and got back to the campsite for our mega meal. Two mess tins full of bacon chunks were cooked on the Hexamine cooker and open fire, then two 2 litre pots of pasta was made, a tin of sauce and a mess tin of bacon was then added to each, mixed and served. It was finished off with the rest of the bread and XXXX.

We then slept again at around 11pm and woke up feeling like death warmed up, the tiredness and pains had caught up with us. The tent stank of smoke, sweat, wet feet and heat. We felt horrible and almost certainly looked it. We then packed everything up back into the car (strangely after eating 5 carrier bags worth of food there was not really any more space) and set off, worryingly with TomTom not working for a while, causing me to think it may have died in the heat of the car. Luckily it came back on.

Not much to say about the drive to Liverpool to drop off, reading road signs in Wales is a pain as they cant decide which language goes above the other and keep alternating it. Also SatNav is useless in the city, it is far to slow, by the time its updated its position and tells you to turn left, your about 10m past the junction. It also has Carlisle’s one way system in reverse. Also when it says “Make a U-turn” when you’re bombing down a dual carriageway is a problem. Once Lewis was dropped off “somewhere” in Liverpool we drove back to Burbage to drop Dave off and got stuck in traffic on the M5 for ages, not to mention a crazy Escort drive. He pottered about in the outside lane at around 55-70mph even when other lanes had no cars in for miles. Whenever someone came up behind him, he slammed on the brakes or swerved around if they went to go inside him.

Idiot.

Myself and Vince finally got back around half seven, 4 days, 128 litres of petrol and 1386 miles after we left, with a very dirty Renault Clio.

From this, we learnt a few lessons:

• Don’t do a 537 mile drive before starting the challenge, its just insane. Sleep at Fort William or nearby the night before.


• Don’t do Ben Nevis in the dark, outside of Winter. We really could have done with crampons and ice axes, it just takes up extra time and knackers you.


• SatNav is very handy for the highlands when driving at night, its like being able to see an extra 2 miles ahead in daylight.


• A non walking driver is very very very handy, two would be better but not essential.


• As would be a slightly larger car, the Clio coped fine, but something with a bit more oomph when loaded up would be much easier. Nothing too large though as some of those roads in Scotland and Wales will crack it in half. Megane Renault Sport 225 please.


• Driving at stupid speeds doesn’t do much, stick to the speed limit and make them walk up the hills faster! Any time gained by driving fast will be lost in a toilet break.


• Have plenty of food to snack on and plenty of drink in the car, get some hot food in at any chance you can.


• The only training for this that works is to actually climb mountains and big hills reguarly

Original Photos @ Flickr – John

Original Photos @ Flickr – Vince