Ben Nevis Exhausted, Sleep deprived & freezing cold

I expected this Ben Nevis trip to be straightforward: drive up, camp, summit, drive home.

Instead, it turned into 50 hours of freezing temperatures, no sleep, forgotten water, 70mph storms and one of the hardest mental tests I’ve experienced.

However, 2 days out reports began to pop up of a orange weather warning storm due to hit the day we were climbing the mountain, the only thing we were able to do was leave the next day, 1 day in advance.

With a 2am wake up and beginning the 8 and a half hour drive to Fort William begun we were all in good spirits with the prospect of a camp on the summit a possibility.

Oh how wrong would we be!

it was all looking good, we were less then 1 hour from Fort William where we had planned to stop of to rent some crampons for my friend who was embarking on his first winter mountain climb. This is where we ran into to some traffic, it set the ETA back 20 minutes so not to bad, however this ended up being an over 2 hour delay.

Arriving in Fort William over an hour later then we had planned to start climbing we began looking around for crampons to rent for my friend.

We found a shop and went to rent a pair to which we were told no as the mountain is to dangerous with a storm due and medium risk of avalanches they wouldn't provide crampons, this was our fist sign of how the next 36 hours would go.

this meant my mate had to spend a rediculouse amount of money on a pair.

With this in the back of our mind we checked the weather again, the storm was due to hit the mountain at 2pm the next day.

We knew this meant it was go time, we got to the carpark at the bottom of the climb at 4:30pm and set of, we made good progress and were able to find a great camp spot for the night, however this was at the edge of the lake next to Ben Nevis, this means the summit was still a 3 hour climb the next day.

We Agreed that we would set wake up at 4 am the next day and begin our hike as soon as we got up, this was a good idea in hind site.

Turns out that the weather prediction of -3 was massively of and as we went to sleep at 8pm it was meant to drop to -8 where we had set up camp.

this would have been fine however i had made a mistake when packing and not put my sleeping bag in a water proof bag. This lead to me spending the whole night awake and to cold to sleep. i laid there waiting for the alarm to go off, knowing when it does i was going to have to climb a mountain in the freezing cold with no sleep and colmpletely exhausted.

Finally, the alarm goes off. With what felt like the longest night of my life now behind me i was in good spirits and was excited to begin.

The first challenge i had was just putting my boots on, i had made a rookie error and left my laces done up.

In these condition the laces had completely frozen over. i spent 20 minutes just defrosting them so i could put my boots on.

We set off, leaving our stuff at our tents so we could make for a quick summit.

Little did we know due to a major lack of communications we had left all our water at the tents. All of us were under the impression one of the others were carrying the water.

We made good progress to begin with, and we expected to summit at roughly 7:30am, however we were about to realise we had no water.

Now on the average day in the mountains this is a massive no go however with the weather window we had we decided to keep going as we had no time to go back.

We are roughly 40% of the way from our tents to the summit and I'm starting to really struggle with weakness and nausea. This meant my pace drastically dropped, out of the 3 of which i was the most experienced, i was now slowing us down drastically.

For every 10 steps they took I took 3!

At this point i knew i should stop and go back, however that was not the mentality i had at that time. i started to eat snow to stop myself from throwing up and it sort of worked, for the rest of the way up the mountain to the summit i had t ohave a handful of snow in my hand to eat.

We made it!

With our prediction of a 7:30 summit, we arrived close to 8:30.

mentally this was the hardest thing i had to do. to keep pushing when i simply could of turned around. i learned a lot about myself in those moments.

at the summit we experienced -18 degrees, it was getting pretty serious now. in those temperatures stopping to enjoy the summit wasnt an option. As we began our decent the winds began to pick up.

Gusts of roughly 30-35mph.

Ice began to form on our eyelashes and and lips, our clothes were now coated in ice.

Fortunately we were able to get through this and made good progress back to our tents, we were able to get to our tents in great time and were able to pack up. and get back to the car at roughly 12pm. we stopped of at the local pub for lunch and warmed ourselves up with.

With a bit of food down me i immediately felt better and was ready for the long drive home.

We set off at 2pm, not long before the storm hit, our estimated time to get home being 10:30pm which would be closer to midnight with stops.

This was not to bad, long day but manageable.

setting off we were immediately caught in traffic for 30 minutes.

After getting through this we began to make good progress getting to Glasgow wit hno issues...until i took a wrong turn and ended up in the city centre.

Again adding top the journey.

back on the motorway, this is when the storm hit, and my god did it hit, winds of 70mph and rain so heavy you could barely see the end of the cars bonnet.

we were crawling along the motorway at 15mph, making barely any progress.

Staring at the map waiting to get off this road onto the A66.

Typically once we were 5 mins away the A66 turnoff got closed.

So we made the decision to take the next exit and work our way onto the A66 a bit further down.

We took this time to have a fuel stop and as we got back in the car the A66 had been completely shut. we looked at maps and we either had to back track or cross the Yorkshire Moors. Now this in hindsight we made the wrong choice.

We decided to cross the moors. Our EAT was now 2am and climbing.

The road across the moors seemed fine and we made quick progress for the first few miles or so.

That was until we turned onto the mountain roads. These took us over the top of the mountains (Tan Hill Road) into the strongest winds of the entire journey. we made incredibly slow progress passing Britain highest pub in the process. We didnt stop for this one.

Finally... the biggest relief, we joined the A1, after what felt an eternity.

we made steady progress taking frequent stops along the way.

our ETA now at 5 am.

Bare in mind this is 25 hours after waking up to climb the mountain.

only 40 mins away i decided i needed to stop and have a nap for the first time. i sat there in my car and i wasnt able to sleep at all.

I decided top get a coffee and carry on.

Dropping my friends of at there homes at 5:20am

I made it to my place at close to 6in the morning, the sun beginning to rise.

climbed into bed and was then wide awake from the coffee, typical!