Ben Nevis

Wednesday 30th May 2012

As a result of my excessive fatigue at the start of this holiday I had been taking things a bit easy while at the same time the weather was slightly poorer than it had been. The grey, overcast weather of the previous day was continuing so I decided that I would do another simple, easy walk. I’d done the final stage of the West Highland Way the day before so for the next day I thought I would do the walk that is usually done straight after the West Highland Way: Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain. The path up the Ben starts from near the youth hostel that I was staying at and is just a constant unrelenting slog all the way up, but at least you do feel like you’re climbing a mountain. I first climbed Ben Nevis in 2004 following the West Highland Way and I had rather poor weather on that occasion, now the weather was not much better. I started the walk rather late in the morning as I’d spent the previous evening listening to folk music at the nearby Ben Nevis Inn, and I was still not in a hurry to start as I first visited the Ben Nevis Visitor Centre.

I wanted to feel like I was climbing the Ben from the bottom, and the traditional start of the path is at Achintee Farm, which is next door to the Ben Nevis Inn. After a quick look around the Visitor Centre I walked up to the start of the Ben Nevis Mountain Track, beside Achintee Farm, and began the climb. On my previous ascents of the Ben I have started from the alternative starting point of the youth hostel, but this involves a very steep climb in order to reach the mountain track that is more than 150 metres up the side of the hill. The gradient is never particularly steep on the mountain track that was originally built to service the weather observatory at the summit, and was the route that a Model T Ford used to get up Ben Nevis a hundred years ago. However, a car wouldn’t be able to get up there now as the path is in serious need of repair. I spent most of the early stages noticing the things that needed to be done to the path to repair it. Water drainage is the main problem as the constructed gutters beside the path are useless. Maybe I should volunteer my services?

Near the top of Red Burn the path has been diverted from its original course and now takes a much wider route and this new path is better able to withstand the thousands of feet that climb the Ben every year. After crossing the Red Burn the path climbs up interminable scree slopes all the way up to the summit, but although it is once again a mess, there is not much that can be done about the constantly shifting stones underfoot. Since the condition of the path was no longer able to distract my attention from the tedium of the climb I started looking around at the other people going up Ben Nevis, and there was a lot, as always. Some of the people were clearly not serious walkers and were going up the Ben simply because it’s the highest mountain in Britain (and the path isn’t too difficult for them), but many of them were unprepared for the increasingly cold weather that they encountered as they climbed. There were people just wearing jeans and t-shirt, whereas I was wearing a hat, scarf and gloves. They must have been frozen!

This was the third time I’d been up Ben Nevis. The second time, in 2006, was in excellent weather, but both of those previous occasions were in July, and this year there had been heavy falls of snow just a couple of weeks before my climb. After negotiating the many zigzags on the mountain track, the gradient eased with the path becoming very indistinct on the bleak stony terrain. Blocking my path was a wide expanse of snow that I had no alternative but to try and walk or slide my way through. I kept wishing that I had my walking poles with me as these would have made things a lot easier. Elegantly constructed cairns guided me across the featureless, stony terrain until near the top I entered another snow field around the tops of the treacherous gullies of Tower and Gardyloo. The path turns left at the edge of Gardyloo Gully and a final one hundred fifty metre trek across the snow took me to the summit of Ben Nevis. 

On previous visits to the summit I was disgusted by the litter of personal mementoes left around the peace memorial, but when I got there on this occasion I found that these have largely been removed, which is a credit to the John Muir Trust for cleaning up the summit. While sitting beneath the ruins of the weather observatory, now an emergency refuge, I had my lunch, but it wasn’t long before I set off back down again as it was very cold. This was not a great walk as I don’t consider Ben Nevis a great mountain, or at least not on the path that I took. Ben Nevis does have some dramatic cliffs on its north-eastern side but you never see any of them from the ascent that I took up its dreary western slopes. The mountain track is just an unrelenting slog along a stony track past unchanging terrain.

For an alternative route down, after reaching the Red Burn and before the (shall we say) poorly maintained section, I diverted along the Coire Leis path that leads towards the dramatic cliffs that lie unseen below the summit. But soon after joining the track I branched left onto another path that I had seen being constructed in 2006. I have wondered where that path went so I decided that I would follow it and found that this path turns towards the north to the mouth of the Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe, and then stops. This may have seemed like a bit of a disappointment as this was a path to nowhere, but instead it led to a fabulous, gradual descent across heather slopes beside the Allt Coire an Lochain into the valley of the Allt a’ Mhuilinn. I was aided in my descent by the recent lack of rain and a faint path that led me all the way down to a track on the other side of the Allt a’ Mhuilinn. A steep descent through woodland took me past the aluminium works and into Fort William. This alternative route down was really refreshing after the dreary mountain track that I had been on for most of the day and greatly improved the walk for me.