Once upon a time, I went on a little road trip around England. One of the things I was wanting to do was to climb Scafell Pike. I ended up not doing so. For a few reasons.
1. It is really big and I am generally quite lazy.
2. I was on my own and thought I might navigate myself to certain doom.
3. The weather was supposed to be bad for climbing mountains.
So instead I did other things. However, climbing the mountain got put on my bucket list as a result of not climbing it. I resolved to do so when I wasn’t so lazy, had someone to navigate me away from doom and when it wasn’t so windy.
Therefore, I gathered a band of intrepid adventures and we made our way to the Lake District on holiday (having previously done a similar thing in Snowdonia at the same time last year) to complete this feat. Due to amazing planning, we were there the week that the wettest place in the country had its summer and all managed to get a little bit of a sunburn.
The mountain is 980 metres high. This doesn’t sound like much until you try to go that high. Then it sounds a lot harder. When you have been climbing an hour and still can’t see the summit, it appears infinite.
Compared to Snowdon, it is actually smaller, however as a climb it is a lot more intense. Snowdown has more scrambly bits (I learnt that the technical term is scree) but also more flat bits. Scafell Pike is basically a 980 metre staircase. With big rocky stairs. I thought I knew what to expect having done Snowdon but this was a lot more intense. But we all managed it, see! Go team!
Several years ago, I always got confused by people who went up mountains because they were there. Now I am that kind of person, and I can recommend it. You get a great sense of achievement, and you feel like you are on top of the world (both literally and metaphorically) and that you can achieve anything. I would definitely recommend it, as long as you have some idea what you are letting yourself in for and prepare adequately in advance.
There has already been talk about doing Ben Nevis next year to complete what is one of the slowest Three Peaks challenges, I am just giving my body a little time to recover before telling it about this.