Читать книгу Between the Sunset and the Sea: A View of 16 British Mountains - Simon Ingram - Страница 15

At around 3 p.m. on Saturday 2 April 1960, three sixteen-year-old army cadets vanished on the slopes of Snowdon. They were part of a group of five who had left Pen-y-Pass earlier that afternoon for the summit of Wales’ highest peak during their much-anticipated ten-day adventure-training holiday.

The weather was a mix of rain and low cloud – reasonably gruesome by sea-level standards, but nothing odd for this part of North Wales. Snowdon’s high elevation and proximity to the coast meant waiting for perfect conditions hereabouts was hardly the done thing, and certainly wasn’t character building – at the time a prerequisite for most forms of youthful outdoor endeavour. Besides, these boys had been assured that the route they were taking up the 1,085-metre peak wasn’t anything worth fretting over; according to their instructor, the ridge that would be the outing’s highlight ‘had been walked by women in high heels’.

Initially, the headlines that began to creep into the national press were coyly optimistic. The Daily Mail began its story of Monday 4 April with the comforting image that the three boys had ‘settled down to spend their second night in mist and drizzle’, clearly confident that nothing more malign than a twisted ankle or disorientation could be preventing the boys from reappearing, weary but chipper, when the mist finally cleared.

But at 8.30 a.m. on Monday 4th, hope was abandoned. Two members of a rescue team came across three bodies with severe head injuries lying amongst rocks at the base of a 100-metre drop, in an area known as Square Gully. The boys – John Brenchley, John Itches and Tony Evans – were roped together. The rescuers’ report delicately implied that their injuries were such that death would have been instantaneous. It had taken a team of 100 nearly two days to find them.

Piecing together what had happened wasn’t difficult. The three boys, separated from their instructor in rain and sudden Snowdonia mist, had taken a wrong turn on the ridge. Becoming lost in a catacomb of tall rocks and terrain that coaxed them towards dangerous ground, amidst tiredness and fear one had stumbled and fallen; the others, tied together, had been pulled down with him. According to one seasoned rescuer, what befell the boys that day was ‘sheer bad luck’.

Even in 1960 it wasn’t uncommon for people to lose their lives climbing British mountains. But the story of the three teenaged boys lost on Snowdon touched something sensitive in the national consciousness – and with the final, tragic outcome, something snapped.

Over the next few days, the stern faces of Search and Rescue personnel, teachers, police officers and mountaineers filled the pages of the national press, all proposing competing theories as to how this tragedy could possibly have occurred – not just on a mountain, but on a mountain damningly described as ‘safe’. The papers had a thorough chew of the case, announcing the tragedy with predictably hysterical headlines such as ‘The Ridge of Death Row’ (Daily Mail) and ‘Peril on a Peak’ (Daily Mirror). Both stories featured grim photographs from the mountainside – grubby and speckled in the way only 1960s news pictures can be – of rescuers manhandling stretchers down sharp rock, and each came loaded with blame cross-haired in various directions: chiefly towards mist, bad luck and, inevitably, the boys’ instructor, an experienced and ‘highly competent’ 28-year-old mountaineer named Peter Sutcliffe.

Many of Sutcliffe’s critics claimed that the young instructor’s charge of five boys was far too much for him alone to herd safely to Snowdon’s summit, and that the deteriorating weather should have prompted him to turn the group back. Others focused on details, highlighting the inherent flaws in the ‘roping-together’ technique the boys were using – an arrangement common in the Alps that relies on the principle that if one person takes a tumble, the others are required to quickly and deftly fling the slack over a handy spike of rock to arrest the fall (the problem here being, of course, that if no spike immediately presents itself the rest of the party is yanked towards whatever doom awaits). But most extraordinary in all of this was the disagreement amongst practically everybody as to exactly how serious the route the group took up Snowdon – that ‘Ridge of Death Row’ so subtly christened by the Daily Mail – really was.

Surely this was straightforward: it was either a route from which you could easily fall to your death or it wasn’t. Even in the tragedy’s aftermath, Sutcliffe stuck to his assertion that the ridge was ‘not a climb, but a walk’, along with his aforementioned reference to untroubled women in high heels. Reportedly, the reason the boys were using a rope was for training purposes, not for any concerns over safety.

An inquest was held in a tiny stone chapel in Llanberis, during which Arthur Bell, the guardian of John Brenchley, repeatedly pilloried Sutcliffe on this seemingly very complicated point. One exchange began with Bell levelling: ‘Am I right that in places this ridge is just a narrow pathway with a drop on either side?’ Sutcliffe responded that yes, this was correct. Bell then countered: ‘Yet you say you don’t think this is dangerous?’ Sutcliffe simply replied that no, he didn’t. Then a senior member of mountain rescue gave Sutcliffe’s defence some much-needed solidity. When asked if he considered the route dangerous for inexperienced people, he responded with: ‘No, sir – I’ve seen young children up there.’

A verdict of ‘misadventure’ followed, with coroner E. Lloyd-Jones citing mist as the principal cause. But Bell remained adamant that the route itself – and the decision to tackle it – was to blame. In a statement he said: ‘I have been told that the ledge from which they fell is only two foot wide. I think this walk was dangerous, and I don’t think the boys should have faced such risks.’

Lloyd-Jones delivered a statement in acknowledgement, worth noting for a simplicity that verges on the profound: ‘Of course there is danger. It is one of the objects of the course.’

Over 50 years later, people continue to argue over the severity of the route that those boys took on Snowdon. In fact, people argue about Snowdon as a whole all the time. The muscular, four-peaked mountain that dominates North Wales’ arrestingly contoured uplands is a superstar, drawing upwards of half a million visitors each year. It’s not only Britain’s most-climbed mountain; it’s probably the most-climbed mountain in the world. Some come looking for a pleasant walk, some for a challenge, some for thrills – and few are disappointed. But there’s danger here, too, and nowhere are arguments about mountain safety found in sharper relief.

What isn’t in dispute is this: at a rate of about two a year, people still die on the ridge that claimed those three lives in 1960. This upsetting tally has steadily made the ragged arête – bitten into Snowdon’s east flank 600 metres above the Pass of Llanberis – the most notorious mountain route in Britain. Its name is Crib Goch.

Empty, foam-streaked glasses and the living remains of a funeral party were spread around the lounge of the Douglas Hotel in Bethesda when I arrived just after 6 p.m. and took a seat in the corner to wait for Mal Creasey.

Mal is a mountain guide and a veteran of the Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team – volunteers whose self-imposed duty is to locate those who find themselves in trouble high on the Snowdon massif. It’s one of the busiest teams in Britain, having the dubious honour of working a patch that’s the very definition of a black spot. It’s been known for the team and its neighbouring units to attend call-outs from people in distress on the slopes of Snowdon 170 times in a single year. For one Welsh mountain, that’s pretty exceptional.

Ten minutes after I arrived the door opened and I heard the clip of crutches from the lobby. Seconds later Mal swung into the lounge, looking out of breath. He nodded a hangdog hello, before scowling at his crutches. ‘Arthroscopy. Both knees.’

I gave him a blank look.

‘Where they go into the joint and scrape off all the crap.’ He shrugged. ‘Hey – live a sedentary life and you could die of a heart attack at 50. Or live a long life outdoors and expect a few squeaks.’

There’s no longer really any debate about whether Crib Goch is a walk or a rock climb. Today it’s considered neither, occupying a grey area between the two that’s actually more dangerous than both: scrambling. Any route above a potentially damaging drop that demands the use of your hands to negotiate it is considered a scramble. It would seem the activity is addictive, too: given the proximity to vertical danger and the monkey-business it demands, devotees will tell you that it’s the most thrilling thing you can do in the mountains. Routes are given grades, going from 1 to 3 in ascending order of difficulty.* These grades were originally established by guidebook writers as a general indication of a route’s toughness when combined with how far you could fall if you screwed up, but the system has proliferated into a more-or-less universally adopted yardstick of overall difficulty.

At Grade 1, Crib Goch is considered amongst the easiest of scrambles from a difficulty point of view. But there’s a catch. What Showell Styles called a ‘special quality’ was also noted by Irvine Butterfield in The High Mountains of Britain and Ireland: ‘The ridge is magnificently precarious for about 400 feet and whilst technically easy, commands respect – with a sensationally sharp summit ridge above a steep precipice.’ These evidently awesome drops mean that exactly how anyone will fare on Crib Goch is still fiercely and unpredictably subjective. Some inexperienced walkers can skip across with nary a care, yet there are bedded-in mountaineers who blanch at the thought of going anywhere near it. In mountains this seems to be the thing; you can describe how difficult you found it and why, but how anyone else will get on is down to them.

Perhaps because of this, your Crib Goch status – more than any other mountain route in Britain, it seems – says something about you. After its many years of notoriety, today the ridge inevitably presents something of a rite of passage; a mountain-shaped question mark that only a firm constitution, a certain element of skill and a generous endowment of sheer balls can answer. Nail it, and you can proudly attest to hitting the top of the thrill curve for what a gutsy mountain walker could be reasonably expected to achieve. Miss it out, and you’re missing out. You’re below the watermark. You’re a wimp. Right?

‘Dangerous way to think,’ said Mal, as we sat down at a corner table away from the increasingly horizontal mourners. ‘With that kind of attitude, all that happens after you’ve beaten it – if you beat it – is you end up sizing up something even scarier. Some climbers feel that way if they haven’t climbed the Matterhorn. Everest, even. Can you believe that?’ He considered this for a moment, before chuckling. ‘Anyway. Crib Goch.’

There are harder, more overtly threatening mountains in Britain – in this book, even – but in terms of a personification of all that is deviously hazardous about the British hills, no shadows fall on the staircase of Crib Goch and the pile of sharp contradictions that is Snowdon itself. The slightest glance at incident reports reveals that the mountain is a high-volume cautionary anthem for what can and does go wrong in the British hills.

All this aside, on a more personal level I knew exactly why I was scared of Crib Goch. An enthusiasm for mountains and the ability to be at ease with horrible drops are not necessarily easy bedfellows – heights hate me, and I hate them back. Some people can keep their head and enjoy the thrill of tightroping along ridgelines; me, I stay back from cliff edges, avoid tall buildings and take the aisle seat on an aeroplane. Inability to focus on objective difficulties when faced with ‘exposure’ – the mountain name for a drop that will pretty much definitely kill you – meant I struggled with any terrain that wasn’t wide enough for me to sprawl messily over it should the need arise.

From reading up I knew that the crest of Crib Goch certainly did not possess much width. Five hundred metres of bony, severely angled rock over drops many times the height of Big Ben, this thing was sheer, sharp, long – and didn’t have much patience for the acrophobic.* As many claimed after the tragic accident in 1960, from a point of view of actual physical difficulty the ridge isn’t really that hard at all; like climbing a stepladder, or boulder-hopping on a beach. But raise these little exercises to a platform the thick end of 300 metres above spiky ground, and – whilst from a coldly technical point of view it shouldn’t make a difference – psychologically the consequences of a slip suddenly become harder to ignore.

I needed to talk to someone who knew the ridge in forensic detail. Someone who could tell me, with nothing in the way of macho marinade, exactly how much trouble I would be in. That’s why I’d called Mal. You can use a map to traverse the rump of any mountain, but on something as hefty as Snowdon you needed someone like Mal to really get you under its skin. A sturdy 60-something with an air of permanent bemusement, I knew him to be straight-talking, likeably mischievous and peerlessly experienced. If anyone could reassure me – or at least give me a couple of pointers – it was Mal.

‘Well, I don’t want to worry you,’ Mal began, ‘but if you got rid of Crib Goch … I’d say rescue call-outs would drop by 80 per cent.’ He sipped his pint. ‘Give or take.’

‘Falls?’

‘Yeah, some. A few get lost. But most people just get cragfast.’

This is a term you come across regularly in association with Crib Goch, and steep mountains in general. ‘Cragfast’ means, quite simply, stuck – stuck in a trap of your own making, when you’ve climbed up something you can’t climb down, and then freeze, barnacle-like, to whatever you’re clinging to. This could be because of physical difficulty; more often it’s because every way looks precarious and you’re too scared to move.

‘So where on the ridge does it happen?’

‘The Pinnacles, usually,’ Mal said, taking another sip. ‘And the beginning, the first big rock step. And sometimes descending into that first steepening.’ He frowned. ‘Oh, and don’t go left or right off the crest – all that does is take you onto a load of loose rock. Hit everything straight on,’ he said, blading a hand in my direction for emphasis. ‘It’s steep and exposed and it looks horrible, but the rock’s solid. And it’s better than the alternatives.’ I saw the look on his face and I didn’t like it: a kind of bouncy-eyebrowed I’ve-got-a-story-you-don’t want-to-hear look. Mal probably had a lot of stories I didn’t want to hear – as well as a whole bunch he probably didn’t want to tell.

Loosely, mountain rescue teams are the emergency services for the British mountains – only they aren’t, certainly not in the conventional sense. Nobody gets paid; few teams are even funded beyond the odd bit of clothing or radio gear, and they scratch sustenance from donations and tax breaks to keep volunteers equipped and trained. Beyond a doubt they’re heroes – but the cost can be steep. A mountain fall is not a pleasant way to go; it’s violent, tearing, shocking. Those dispatched to accidents where they sometimes literally have to pick up the pieces often suffer lasting psychological trauma. Some volunteers harden to encountering death in the mountains. Many, somewhat understandably, can’t.

If the fact that our mountain rescue personnel are local volunteers like Mal rather than paid-up professionals who ride around in helicopters all day is a surprise to many, the idea that Britain’s mountains are dangerous enough to need rescue personnel at all might come as another. In terms of their physical attributes, our mountains are laughable in comparison with those found in many other mountainous countries in the world. We’ve no glaciers filled with bottomless crevasses; no oxygen-drained high-altitude death zones in which pulmonary or cerebral oedema can stealthily kill you; no bears or mountain lions to keep an ear awake for in a quiet mountainside camp. But what we do have are hundreds – thousands – of steep, storied and striking mountains, and a lot of people interested in climbing them for amusement or thrill. The urge to climb mountains has complex, but largely pointless, sources – and often the feeling of danger is cited as justification in itself. The swaggery adage of ‘feeling more alive the closer you are to death’ often crops up at this point. But sometimes, for reasons often beyond control, close gets too close.

Before you even insert humans into the equation, mountains are in any case pretty hairy places. Avalanches and rockfalls are difficult to predict, and impossible to control. Freak weather gets freakier and more frequent the higher you go, and even the most benign gland of a hill can rapidly turn malignant given inclement conditions. Pieces of mountains fall down from time to time. Temperatures fall by around 6°C per 1,000 metres, a phenomenon known as the lapse rate – which, on a British mountain in spring, can mean the difference between dewy grass at sea level and solid ice at the summit, with damaging consequences for the unprepared. Lightning can strike without warning and with impunity, sometimes out of a clear blue sky, and wind can blow you off an exposed mountaintop in an unexpected gust. In the UK alone, all of these account for victims in double digits each year.

Sometimes when it comes to death or injury the mountains are merely aggravating bystanders. Heart attacks, strokes and the occasional suicide (including some extraordinarily odd cases in the Highlands of Scotland*) aren’t at all uncommon.

But most accidents in the mountains occur as the result of the smallest human error. Misjudgement, poor timing, inadequate clothing, distraction, panic, inexperience, over-ambition, under-preparedness, over-reliance – then the most simple and common of all: a split second of physical failing. A slip in a dangerous place. A trip. A tired stumble. Even something as innocuous as a broken shoelace or a dropped compass can be the spark that ignites a crisis. Head for a dangerous mountain and you need your head screwed on – a second can be all it takes.

Between 2002 and 2011 mountain-rescue teams in England, Wales and Scotland responded to 11,558 incidents in the hills. Of these, 6,862 yielded injuries, of which 564 were fatalities – almost exactly 10 per cent. The pattern of these statistics is unnervingly consistent but makes perfect sense when you think about it. ‘Slip, trip or stumble’ is the number one rescue-triggering mishap, year on year. ‘Falls or tumbles’ come a close second, with ‘lost’ as the number three cause of reported distress in the mountains. What’s interesting about these otherwise unsurprising figures is the nature of the wounding activity when broken down by region. In terms of objective dangers, Scotland has by far the most severe ground and weather, but their hills feel comparatively fewer feet – and the ones they do tend to be more experienced. Thus, Scotland has a much lower overall rate of incident when total area and potential high places in which to come unstuck are taken into account.* The Lake District has by far the most incidents for hillwalking, largely injuries to the lower legs befitting an ugly slip or a fracturing step. But Snowdonia’s principal cause of damage is rock scrambling – almost to the point of exclusivity. If you’re going to fall off a ridge, chances are you’ll do it in Snowdonia. And with one or two exceptions, you’ll very likely do it on Crib Goch. Which is why I wanted to talk to Mal.

‘So,’ he said after a while. ‘What’s your plan?’

I explained that later tonight – preferably after a splendid and unhealthy pub meal – I intended to drive up to Pen-y-Pass, wander into a secluded valley beneath Crib Goch and wild camp for the night. Then, come the dawn, I’d hit the ridge. Mal pulled a face.

‘Bad idea?’

‘Have you seen the forecast?’

I confessed that I had, but only the general forecast. Everything had seemed so meteorologically settled I hadn’t gotten round to it yet.

‘Well, the proper* forecast shows a front arriving early tomorrow morning. Gales, rain … Can’t say I’d want to be up there.’

‘Oh.’ Balls. This I should have checked.

‘May I suggest a compromise?’ said Mal. ‘Do the first section – the, ah, exciting section – tonight. Then you can slip down into the little valley beneath the gap in the middle of the ridge, camp, relax – and do the rest in the morning. You’ve got the nasty bits over with whilst it’s dry, then.’

‘Nasty bits?’

He bobbed his eyebrows again. ‘Exciting bits.’

I looked at my watch. ‘It’s gone seven.’

‘Well then,’ Mal drained the rest of his drink, ‘best get your skates on.’

***

The fast road to Snowdon from Bethesda takes you first through the broad half-pipe of the Ogwen valley. Here, ancient mountains spill slate to the roadside, lining the grand valley like a colonnade of towering, crumbling gargoyles. You pass Tryfan, a freestanding 918-metre arrowhead crowned with two tiny pinnacles: Adam and Eve. It’s a popular picture on the postcard racks; positioned just far enough apart to allow an uncomfortably nervy leap from one to the other, performing this summiteer’s tradition is said to gain you the ‘freedom’ of the peak.

Then the road bends and you brush the village of Capel Curig, before entering quaggy open ground, scudding along the shore of Llynnau Mymbyr towards the dark mass of Snowdon. From here, the triangular sweep of Crib Goch guards its parent peak in a protective curl, like a drawn cloak. The building overgrown with vegetation that appears to the right is the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel, marking the corner turn into the Pass of Llanberis – the road that wiggles up to the foot of Snowdon like a dropped cable.

Crags tower either side as you ascend, including some of the most storied in Britain. Find similar outcrops in Spain or Switzerland and, chances are, they’re just crags – unremarkable, unexplored and unexploited. But in Britain, being the confined menagerie of interested parties and interesting terrain it is, almost every significant cut of rock in Snowdonia will have been looked at with a devious eye and quickening pulse at some point. The crags on the Pass in particular have made history, home to climbing routes teased from the dark North Wales rock and given bleak, strikingly alliterate titles: Cenotaph Corner, Cemetery Gates, Cobweb Crack. Snowdonia has a certain darkness to it: the rain-streaked remnants of dead industry and hard, Welsh nomenclature lend the region something of a sinister air, which – combined with the region’s abrasive mountains and frequently tough weather – makes for an atmosphere so thick you could punch it.

Architecturally, the mountains hereabouts are sharp and broken. The clichéd postcards of this place consist of high summits studded with flakes of rock in silhouette, bristling at angles, like the radial spikes of a medieval torture machine. Occasionally these contain a climber, gazing out to a bruised sky, or swinging off a frozen seesaw of rock. Snowdon itself is extremely ancient, composed of some of the oldest exposed rock in Britain – a mixture of pressure-hoisted sea-floor sedimentaries and volcanics brutalised by pressure and glaciation into a sharp, arrestingly fractured massif. It’s an angrier landscape than the Lake District, and more claustrophobic than the Scottish Highlands, one of geological menace and home to a more chilling breed of outdoor adventure than the Lake District’s cuddly persona. It seems to say that if you want to find small animals wearing floral dresses and drinking tea, go to the Lakes. If you want dark, cold rock that hates you, go to Snowdonia.

I reached the corner turn on to the Pass of Llanberis a little before 8 p.m. A quick supply run in Bethesda had yielded a few comforts for a night out on the hill – sugary snacks, crisps, noodles, hot chocolate and some whisky to liven it up. It seemed a little unreal and adventurous that I was going to be approaching this dreaded ridge in little over an hour. It was the sensible choice, given the forecast – but tackling the ridge with darkness coming seemed even more intimidating than doing it in bad weather. Even in rain, there might possibly be someone else crazy enough to be up there with me – probably wearing shorts – who would be able to pat me on the back and gee me up. But at this hour, I’d almost certainly be very alone up there.

Slowing the car, I rounded the corner onto the Pass and entered the cloud, brightening to a dappled gold as I climbed. A building sharpened to the right as the Pass levelled, a few vehicles and a hut to the left. This was it: Pen-y-Pass, the place from which to wave a handkerchief in the direction of most who head for Snowdon. For those three boys in 1960, this was their last glimpse of civilisation.

The car park was practically empty when I pulled in, turned off my engine and sat, listening to the gentle whumps of the wind against the car and the ticks of its cooling engine. Cloud was clawing the Pass frantically, one moment allowing glimpses of lofty context down its rain-glistened length, the next snatching it away. I left the car and laced up my boots, wondering what I should leave behind.

I imagined the worst happening, and somebody coming across the car days from now. They’d find discarded Twix wrappers on the back seat, filthy loafers in the passenger footwell, a warm jacket in the boot, batteries – trivial comforts awaiting someone never coming back, and now the object of post-mortem scrutiny. Could that spare jacket have prevented the hypothermia that killed him? Could that Twix have saved his life? Spare batteries – surely they could have done something?

Ridiculous, yes. But this particular hill was giving me dreadful feelings. Part of me thought it couldn’t possibly be that bad. I’d seen the shrugs and heard the ‘No big deal’ bravado from people who had done Crib Goch, but I also had a suspicion that, no matter how convincing the patter, most of them had felt a little shake on the ridge at some point. Now, with the act of leaving the car having been laboured over and over in my head, I was analysing every act for that critical choice: the moment when I’d make a decision from which I couldn’t come back.

Locking the car and taking a last look – wondering, ever so briefly, if the next person to acknowledge it would be from a search and rescue team – I set off onto the path known as the Pyg Track, which leaves the corner of the car park at a forgivingly gentle incline. Constructed from huge boulders, it has the effect of appearing to have been made for a giant, ascending grandly but gently to a narrow pass called the Bwlch y Moch. Continue over the pass and you enter the basin of the smashed cauldron of peaks comprising what is known as the Snowdon horseshoe,* invisible from this angle. Or, on arrival at the pass, you bear right and take the much steeper route onto the cauldron’s broken rim, and eventually onto Crib Goch. Here, the scenery inhales grandly. Muscular hills, glistening water, and everywhere the dark, lichened Snowdonian rock, cracked and fractured in fragile-looking blades, like ancient, natural porcelain.

The air was warm, becoming slightly chilly only when enlivened by the wind. It was the sort of temperature that suggested a thunderstorm, but the atmosphere was thin and the cloud – whilst prolific – looked weightless, certainly for the time being. I passed two walkers on their way down, a couple who looked knackered enough to have been to the summit. I lifted my head and smiled with the kind of eye-roll, aren’t-we-mad, this-weather-eh? kind of look walkers often give each other, hoping that they might engage for a moment. I wanted to ask whether or not they knew of anybody else still on the mountain, but they didn’t look like they wanted to chat – they were on their last stretch, and obviously weren’t in the mood. All I got was a murmur of acknowledgement and the sound of their stiff breathing as they passed. Alone, I continued, the path steepening until after about half an hour I reached the pass, out of breath. Ahead the Pyg Track descended into a steep, broad depression before arcing right over a stile and barrelling into a huge basin beneath a ring of mountains that peered down upon it like a circle of faces. From here the distant summit of Snowdon nudged out from behind creased cliffs to my right. It looked far above, and far away.

Part of the reason so many people get to the summit of Snowdon is because there’s a train running up it, a café on the top and paths from every direction that resemble small roads for most of their length. Unsurprisingly, these do little for the mountain’s credibility as an objective for adventurers. After hours of walking, arriving at the top to stand in the same place as a festival of day-trippers clad in the meagre clothing of sea level who haven’t shuffled more than 100 metres – not to mention a natty building and a puffer train – must be a disquieting experience, and one I was curious to have the following day after my night camping alone on the uncivilised mountainside. The railway is an enormously popular draw, and doubtless a wonderful day out for people who can’t, or won’t, walk up Snowdon. But the walking routes see their fair share of bizarre traffic, too – cursed with the status of ‘highest’, the mountain attracts all sorts of feats that lay claim to an ascent with a particular, quirky caveat. Over the years a number of extraordinary sights have lumbered out of the mist on Snowdon’s slopes – from groups clad in pyjamas, dressed as gorillas or, on one memorable occasion, driving a car.*

That this perception has caused Wales’ highest hill to be viewed as something of a sacrificial lamb to tourism is a shame, because as a mountain Snowdon is absolutely bloody stupendous.

The four peaks that form the massif aren’t arranged in a neat, linear manner like a child’s drawing; from above, the range looks like a slender starfish with its limbs mid-flail. Those limbs are sharp ridges that themselves rise to summits – including Crib Goch, and its more genteel mirror across the cwm, Y Lliwedd – and the gaps between them are chasms, floored with lakes and walled with bitten cliffs. Snowdon itself, seen from within the embrace of its eastern arms, is a black, fantastically sheer pyramid that, when not wearing its hat of cloud, rises to a pleasingly sharp point. It’s a drastic spectacle, and entirely unexpected by those imagining something blousy and accommodating. Unsurprisingly, this dichotomy between the mountain’s public persona as something of a tame kick-about and its very real qualities as a ‘proper’ mountain has caused big problems. The briefest scan over incident records unquestionably reveals that Snowdon’s popularity has prompted a serious lack of respect.

In 2008 two walkers came across some rubbish poking out of the snow heaped in the doorway of the summit café at around 7.45 a.m. Closer inspection revealed it wasn’t rubbish, it was a man – an unconscious 40-year-old who had climbed the mountain in trainers and a shirt, with not much else besides. Pinned to the mountain by bad weather, he had been forced to spend the night on the summit at −5°C and in 60 mph winds – which in combination reduced the effective temperature to a brass-monkey-killing −18°C. The walkers briskly placed him in all of their spare clothes and a survival bag, then scrambled the Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team. The man was taken down the mountain by the train, then to hospital by helicopter, where he was found to be suffering with hypothermia and severe frostbite to his feet. Without doubt the swift action of his rescuers saved his life. It was October.*

The Principality’s highest peak certainly hasn’t always been viewed as such a soft touch. Before the railway made its debut in 1896, Snowdon was considered a rather scary mountain. In Wild Wales, George Borrow’s dandyish 1862 meditation on the country, he quotes an old Welsh proverb: ‘“It’s easy to say yonder is Snowdon; but not so easy to ascend it.” Therefore I’d advise you to brace up your nerves and sinews for the attempt.’

And if Snowdon’s conditions are difficult to predict year-round, in winter they become hell for the unprepared, occasionally and unpredictably reaching near-Himalayan severity between November and February. Yet for some, even this has its perks. In the winter of 1952 the strange spectacle of a party of tall, rangy climbers could frequently be observed setting off up the slopes of Snowdon and the nearby Glyders whenever a poor forecast was issued, adorned with severe-looking equipment and long lengths of rope. Months later, in May 1953, members of the same team would make the historic first ascent of Mount Everest. For these men – which included John Hunt, Edmund Hillary and George Band – Snowdon galvanised preparations for the world’s highest peak, worthily testing their storm-gear and ice-climbing skills during some of the mountain’s shriller moments. It was a good choice: in winter snow and wind, Snowdon’s angles and ridges weren’t so far removed from the slopes of Everest as you might expect in terms of physicality, although obviously lacking the freezing, asphyxiating altitude. So attached were the team to the region, and so instrumental were the small but fierce peaks of Snowdonia in cementing the convivial bond of teamwork gained through shared hardship, that their annual reunion was held at the team’s old haunt, the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel – less than a mile from where I now stood on the Bwlch y Moch. By 2003, however, the group’s numbers had dwindled to such a point that there was nobody in robust enough health to attend.

But even amidst such freezing peril, people think of the café and the train, and set off under-prepared up Snowdon’s slopes right into the bones of winter. Expecting good cheer, a cup of tea and an easy way off at the top, the unwary expend all their energy on the ascent and fail to realise that the summit is only half the effort. For your mind, the top is the finish line – the apex towards which all your concentration is directed. But for your body, it’s merely the halfway point. The physical and emotional crash of summiting, coupled with the underestimation of what a descent demands as your wits slowly unravel, are the reason why – on all mountains, everywhere, and by a considerable margin – most accidents occur on descent.

The light was softening, and cloud was quietly filling the valleys around me by the time I reached the path split beyond Bwlch y Moch. Onward: the Pyg Track, marked by a smart stile emblazoned with the path’s name in English and Welsh on sympathetic blue plastic. Right: a rough, steep path that ascended towards a tall, knobbly bulk. Immediately my pace dropped as the ground tilted and I felt the first pulls of grassy steepness beneath my boots. Within minutes, my choice of route had begun to assert its personality, the path zigzagging up the prow of increasingly defined mountainside. The next stile bore the words ‘Crib Goch’. This sign was signal red.

Around twenty minutes later, the ground started to steepen again. Then came the first naked rock on the ridge. It was aggressive-looking – many small flakes, angled skyward, like the spines of a balled hedgehog. I took hold of it. It was abrasive and eel-slick. Where the rock had weathered and crumbled to grout the spines it was a weak pink, a clue to the source of the translation of Crib Goch: literally ‘red ridge’. The path – such as it was – slinked vaguely amongst the outcrops, their ledges and flakes offering grab handles for balance where the path was too steep. Modest drops began to open to the left and right, until – about ten minutes from the stile – I could go no further.

In front of me was a large rock buttress, 40 or 50 metres wide. To carry straight on looked woundingly steep, but there were signs of a path on both sides of the obstacle – a thin, pink ribbon of scree draped over the rock. I took the one on the right, which vanished after a few metres at a series of mean-looking slabs. Traversing back beneath the buttress onto the left path, it began to wind beneath large, increasingly precarious overhangs that swiftly became awkward – like trying to limbo-dance under an eave. A potential way through lay up a narrow gully, but as I took hold of the rock and pulled, it became clear this was a move I wasn’t going to be able to reverse should it turn out to be a dead end. My right leg, jammed into a crack for purchase, began to shake.

This was ridiculous. Barely onto the ridge, I was already in trouble. Maybe it was my nerves making me indecisive. Maybe I’d taken a wrong turn and was on a path to nowhere. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this at all.

Mal had told me to take the ridge on the nose at the first rock step; I hoped this wasn’t what he was talking about. I pulled out my phone and called up the map, zooming right in and peering at the little blue arrow that represented me, frantically changing direction, mirroring my movements. According to this the path climbed Crib Goch just to the right of the ridge’s crest – a few metres from where I was now standing. I’d tried that, and it hadn’t felt right. Clicking the map off, I looked around my little ledge. On a ridge like this, it was pointless trying to follow the map with microscopic faith. I needed to feel my way up.

Gingerly, I began to descend the way I’d come. Reaching a broad, grassy bower below the buttress, I took a step back and studied the rock face. Head on, it certainly appeared possible. Big holds, large cracks to wedge parts of my body into – there were plenty of things to grab onto and hang off, but I still didn’t like it. From the looks of things, that was pretty much how this ridge was going to go: physically doable, but requiring a certain mental commitment. I leaned against the cold, briny-smelling rock. Standing there, running through the consequences of a mishandled traverse in my head, thinking of home and headlines, family messily sobbing unanswerable ‘why’ questions … this wasn’t doing anything. What the hell was stopping me here: the intimidation of the route itself, or my own horror-story-driven fear?

Using a flake of rock, I pulled myself off my feet as if peeping over a wall. The rock ahead ascended steeply, but it was broken, full of holds. I could climb that. Could probably climb down it, too. All it took was a decision.

A breath, then I pulled myself onto the step. A surge of adrenaline hit my legs as I lumbered up the first six feet of the rock. Don’t fall. Stay confident. This was it: I was on Crib Goch. Up or bust.

It felt good to have made a decision. Right or wrong, it didn’t matter now. As I climbed, my hands and feet finding holds easily, a tentative confidence grew – a kind of pragmatic resignation to the simple job in hand, which now simply had to be done. I could sense a drop opening to the right; I ignored it, keeping my movements as smooth as possible. I kept waiting to get stopped for long enough for my senses to realise the trouble I was getting myself into, but it never came. It wasn’t easy – I wouldn’t tackle it in high heels, that’s for damn sure – but after the initial rock step my uncertainty began to subside. For the time being I could breathe.

Ahead was a long and tapering ramp of stubby rock. It was broad in comparison with the claustrophobic cracks of just a few moments earlier, high enough to be exhilarating, yet secure-feeling. The surroundings were beginning to take on the jaunty perspective of great height, but I was still very much on the mountain’s flanks.

It didn’t last. A finger of rock tilting out over a drop marked the beginning of the stretch known as the Pinnacles, collectively comprising the knife-edged part of the ridge that Crib Goch was famous for. This rocky frill was the second of Mal’s ‘exciting’ bits. Again, two choices: the technically easier climb over the top, no doubt accompanied by the sort of airy, hit-the-deck-and-hold-on panic of great height on both sides; or an awkward, slip-friendly traverse beneath it to the left over one long drop to the right. I could see that the extent of the exposure was going to be hidden until I’d made my choice, so any ideas about just ‘having a look’ before committing to a move wouldn’t work.

Another moment of pause. The light was fading rapidly, and here I was at another uncertain commitment. Scraping a solid foothold from the loose scree beneath my feet, I took a breath to steady my knees, then – taking option one – hauled myself untidily onto the top. And there it was: the crest of Crib Goch, flat and straight, an upturned comb of rock spines as wide as a park bench. At its centre, the ridge was cut by a monstrous vein of white quartz, from a distance resembling a tangled parachute draped over the bristles – minus a dangling, panicking sky diver. Beyond, a thickening and jumbling of the rock suggested the end of the Pinnacles and a descent into the Bwlch Coch, the grassy notch at which I’d be over the worst of the bad ground, and in search of my camp for the night. All I had to do was get there. It looked a long way off.

The first pinnacle was tall and comfortingly huggable. Inching round to the left of it, I stepped out onto the crest in a low stoop, arms spread in a wide triangle in front of me, as if trying to ward off jumping terriers. A draught of air came from below as voids opened to both sides and I inched beyond grab-distance of the pinnacle. A few steps along the crest and I’d reach a small cluster of pointy rocks I could crouch against. All it took was four or five steps, and the means to link them together. One step, two, don’t look down, three, four … there. I spotted a gearstick-sized needle of rock; I lunged and grabbed it. It moved. I froze.

Heights, as far as your body is concerned, are the enemy. Look over a drop and you trigger a sequence of chemical events between your brain and your limbs – a kind of biological Mexican wave – that begins with a massive dump of epinephrine (otherwise known as adrenaline) from your adrenal glands. This hormone quickens your pulse rate, increases respiration, re-routes energy from your digestive system to more pressing physical applications, and releases nutrients and sugar flow to the limbs for a bit of short-term muscular zing. Hang out over a huge drop and you might describe such feelings as a hollow belly, a fluttery heart and a feeling of jittery, almost narcotic energy in your extremities that you could mistake for the irrational urge to ‘jump over the edge’. You don’t want to jump over the edge, of course. What you’re experiencing is a primal biological reaction from your body that you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be. A reaction that says, hey – if you feel like escaping whatever peril into which you’ve gone and landed yourself, here’s an evolution-crafted helping hand designed to channel all your available energy into doing just that.

This response is commonly referred to as ‘fight-or-flight’, though a more contemporary – and apt – term is ‘fight-or-flight-or-freeze’. It’s probably what has led to all those cases of people becoming cragfast on Crib Goch: a realisation of sudden, frightening vulnerability followed by a mutinous physiological rush, which, in delicate situations demanding calm and considered movements, might actually add to your problems. Not moving is therefore a fairly logical, if temporary, tactic – especially when you’re in an environment where gravity is against you and simply ‘letting go’ will be the end of you.

My knees were shaking. I was hoping I’d be bolder than this and not succumb to fear this early, but I’d seen the drop – and now couldn’t ignore it. The moving shard of rock had something rather more solid adjacent to it; I now clung to this and considered my next move. Ahead, the ridge was taking on an eerie quality in the thickening dusk. The light had softened, and the landscape was beginning to lose its contrasts. Fighting to keep confidence – and therefore decisiveness – under my control, I stepped up onto the crest again, and focused on my feet. Just like walking along a pavement. A very tall pavement.

The crest itself is fairly linear, maybe a foot wide, made of crenellated, fractured rock that’s broken up into halved-brick-sized blocks – small enough to step over, but the perfect size to trip the boots of the cocky or complacent. It’s given a certain potency by the ever-present drop to the right. The bedding planes of the rock are tilted in such a way that the north face is cut at a severe angle, meaning that the ground is shallower to the left – a long, loose slope at an angle of about 70 degrees. If you took a slip this way you still wouldn’t stop, but psychologically the drop was easier to deal with, and as I continued to inch along the chewed crest I could see the polished rock where thousands of feet had found passage a few feet down on this slope using the very apex as a handrail. This wasn’t hard to understand, because a fall to the right would be comprehensively fatal – hundreds of feet of air, terminating far below with a deep ramp of pink scree. The sense of dread isn’t relentless, however, as several grassy platforms and accommodatingly flat slabs of rock punctuate the ridge’s narrow first stretch – good spots to stop, breathe, have a chocolate bar and a little cry if you want, before reviewing your progress and looking further along the ridge to what’s coming.

A level block the size of a car bonnet appears a few feet beyond the big quartz vein – up close, it no longer resembles a stranded parachute but a rock sprayed with whitewash – and I chose this as a place to take a moment’s rest. From here, the architecture of the ridge is awesome, and your position – dare I say – incredibly exhilarating. Snowdon itself squares up to you now; a massive pyramid, slightly offset, its face acres of grey, deep-wrinkled rock punching skyward from its glacial valley, where the black waters of Glaslyn stare blankly upwards like a dead eye. It’s beautiful, and brutally so.

Beyond this point Crib Goch begins to undulate like a sine wave, rearing up into impressive rock turrets then dropping down again into slacks of narrow crest. It also begins to slink, snake-like, from side to side, creating tall, semicircular buttresses that bulge from the cliff and accentuate the long drops. From this promontory I caught a glimpse of the way ahead. It was a sight to raise blisters.

The ridge rose into two blade-like towers of shocked-looking rock, one after the other. I followed the line of travel with my eyes over the first, and felt sick; its crest tilted over the biggest chasm on the ridge, an overhang. It looked horrible – the prospect of climbing it like shimmying up an angled flagpole on the roof of a skyscraper.

Reaching the first of these towers, the rock underfoot became grander – shed-sized pieces of cracked rock replacing the fidgety, crenellated crest. Looking for polished rock that would suggest a line of travel, I began to ascend, the rock closing in around me for the first time in a while. This was not an unwelcome feeling, but, as I climbed, an uncomfortable thought began to creep in to my head amidst the echoing scratches of my steps. I couldn’t see the drop any more. Where was it? Was I over it? Was I suddenly going to pop my head above the skyline and be confronted with it?

Feeling suddenly vulnerable – perhaps because the end was in sight – I steered clumsily around the block on the very top and I found a truncated staircase of boulders that led down into the slack between the two towers with a deep gully opening in between. The next tower pushed me off the left – a labyrinth of cracks and slabs above Crib Goch’s steep southern slopes. Traversing around led me to a few scrubby descents and a messy scramble over abrasive rock, but then a gap appeared round the rocks to my left, broad and tufty. Two more moves, then a fizz of relief that shivered through my body.

Crib Goch was done and I allowed myself a little whoop of elation. The platform I was on felt huge, luxuriously so. If I so wished, I could even fall over and not die. I felt like doing it just because I could. And the rest was within reach: an easy descent to my right led into Mal’s valley, and somewhere to put up my tent.

Enjoying the silence, the feeling, and the surge of my heartbeat in my ears, it began to dawn on me where I was standing. Ahead was the Clogwyn y Person arête; the place where, in 1960, John Brenchley, John Itches and Tony Evans became lost in the mist, and fell to their deaths. Right there.

I traced a plumb line from a point on the arête to the valley floor, then another. Any fall from there looked a chilling prospect; even in the comely weather of the evening it was easy to see there wasn’t a thing the boys could have done to save themselves.

After rewarding myself with a biscuit, I pulled my phone out to send a text message to Mal before beginning my descent into the valley for the night.

I had an unread message that I must have missed whilst high on Crib Goch: ‘Forecast poor tomorrow, but rain isn’t due until 3 to 4 a.m. Might be worth heading for the summit tonight. Mal.’

Oh, hell. Really? It was now 10.30 p.m. The legacy of a diffused sunset still faintly lit the sky, but it was weakening. I read the message again, my heart heavy. I could ignore it. I was tired and looking forward to my sleeping bag; and now here was the prospect of another couple of hours’ walk to a much more exposed, rockier place. An ascent into the gathering darkness with a forecast of bad weather wasn’t in my plan – but Mal was right. The last thing I needed was to be clobbered by bad weather in the night, then be faced with either a wild climb to the summit in the rain or a dejected descent back to Pen-y-Pass. I looked down from the col into Cwm Glas, my intended campsite. Immediately I could see two or three accommodating spots a few hundred metres down the valley; one by a stream, another by a small lake. Cups of whisky-spiked cocoa, good, natural shelter, a reprieve from strength-sapped nerves … splendid. I could be there, tent up, in twenty minutes. A hard image to resist.

I looked over to the south-west and balked. A bank of cloud had spilled over Y Lliwedd on the opposite side of the horseshoe – the first wave of an advancing charge of bad weather. Visibility would be the first to go, and much sooner than dawn. If Mal’s forecast was right, rain wouldn’t be far behind. I had no real urge to experience the weather rife within Snowdon’s accident statistics, nor did I have any real urge to become one. One thing was inescapable: the narrow window of stable weather that had remained open for me on Crib Goch was now rapidly closing. If I wanted to get to the top with any degree of decorum I’d have to summit tonight, and quickly.

Pulling out my drink bottle, I peered into it. Half a litre left, at most. Snowdon’s top was a bare cap of rock; no streams, no little lakes with outflows from which to scoop water. I had 300 metres of ascent to go and my throat was already dry as a stick. Rationing my water would be miserable, but possible. After a longing look down the valley towards the campsite that wasn’t to be, I started up the other side of the ridge – the Crib y Ddysgl – this time in haste. The ground was easier, less steep, but still complex. I might even have enjoyed it had I not been eager to beat the weather to the summit.

I can’t tell you when it happened, but at some point I lost the path.

Although the ground beneath my feet no longer had any definition, I could still see. Without the sensory bludgeon of artificial light, darkness quietly creeps up on you. You’ll walk and walk, and then eventually you’ll stop to adjust your clothing or have a wee and realise that at some point, whilst your back was turned, it’s gone and gotten properly dark on you.

I’d been avoiding getting out my head torch, partly to enjoy the primal oddness of climbing a mountain in the cool, grey-blue tones of dusk, and partly because my night vision – slowly matured over the last hour of failing light – would be instantly buggered the second I looked at something bright. My phone map was bright, so I didn’t give it due attention, and before long I was groping up a black slope following my nose. I could see the angled skyline of the mountain above me against the sky – but any sense of scale had long disappeared, along with the detail of the ground. Surely I was almost up by now.

A noise caught me as I stepped over a small gully. It was the giggle of running water. With a cry of happiness, I downed what I had left in the bottle, then found a fast-flowing part of the burrowed-in stream and refilled. Now at least I had something I could cook with.

I continued to freelance along the slope, which was covered in dinner plates of loose scree. Perhaps the darkness was a blessing, as I now had no idea of the consequences of a slip. If it descended smoothly to the valley floor – unlikely, given the considerable height I’d quickly gained – little more than bruises and scuffs. Or perhaps I was on a scree fan draped atop a vertical cliff – in which case, a mis-step, an untidy fall, a roll and a swift acceleration down the loose ground towards an edge …

I shuddered, and focused on my feet and balance. Some of the most dangerous spots on this mountain weren’t knife-edges; they were slopes like this, which didn’t present the same kind of instant, shake-you-by-the-lapels danger that makes your movements delicate, like on Crib Goch. Up there, the peril you’re in is hardly subtle and you can react – if not exactly in a way that will expedite your escape – in a manner that will at least make you pause for considerable thought and a re-check of your movements. But on a slope like this – darkness notwithstanding – it’s quite possible to swagger onto dangerous terrain with your hands practically in your pockets, ignorant of just how lethally steep the ground you’re on is until a slip sends you tumbling down it. This sort of scenario appeared to account for many accidents on Snowdon, particularly in the winter, when snow hid the subtle shifts of the ground. I’d heard a story of a rescue team who were dispatched to find a casualty below a notorious steepening next to the Snowdon railway, which – in winter – becomes a hardened ice slope above the lip of a cliff. The team found a man dead at the base of the cliff, but it was only when descriptions of clothing and timings were compared that the team realised that these didn’t quite match – this person was another victim, as yet unreported. The man they’d been called to assist was found later, also dead.

Amber lights appeared below like the view from an aircraft when I pulled myself over the lip of the ridge and stood up on the broad shoulder that arced towards the peak of Yr Wyddfa* – Snowdon’s summit. The views from here in daylight are said to be some of Britain’s most expansive; in optimum clarity four countries – England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland – can be seen, as well as the Isle of Man. Although almost hypnotised by the odd sense of seeing this view at night and in only a gentle breeze, I spotted the path and joined it, grateful for the opportunity to relax and enjoy the feeling of approaching the highest point in England and Wales in exhilarating darkness.

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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* In 2011, Scotland saw 415 incidents and 21 fatalities; England and Wales, 1,078 incidents and 33 fatalities.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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’.

* 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.