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My friend Tom and his wife were at our house for something to eat last weekend. I’d had a few glasses of wine when I suggested that Ben Hope might be a good excursion the following weekend. “But it will be freezing cold”, he said. “Where will we stay?” I boldly suggested that sleeping in the back of our cars would be sensible. How wrong I would turn out to be…
My ‘car’ is a Trigger’s broom Defender with no insulation, while Tom’s car is a Transit van with removable seats. I’m not sure who was colder that night, but as it was minus 8 when we arrived at the car park after nightfall, I’m guessing it dropped a bit further overnight. My sleeping system consisted of two ground mats, double layered clothing and two duvets. Tom opted for the quadruple sleeping bag effect. Both vehicles were frozen solid - mine on the inside as well as the outside. Making tea in the morning involved thawing the ice block left over from the hot chocolate water the previous night:
We’d aimed to set off at 7.30am but by the time we’d managed to get enough layers on it was more like 8am. We met a fellow walker in the car park (who introduced herself later as a French woman living in Edinburgh) but it would turn out that we were the only three up Ben Hope that day. To be fair, the forecast had been pretty ropey mid-week but we had high hopes that the XCweather forecast of sun and zero wind would hold out. As it turned out, it was pretty accurate. Our French friend asked if we’d seen the Northern Lights during the night. We had to confess that we were so cold that getting out of bed would have meant hypothermia so neither of us had ventured out.
We set off in lovely (cold) conditions with enthusiasm but the verglas on most of the rock meant that I took a few tumbles on the way up before we decided that crampons would make life much easier. At the point of stopping and putting them on, our fellow walker caught up with us wearing wellies! We felt fairly well-equipped at that point, but we were later to eat our hats… I had forgotten how to put my crampons on so after some faffing about we set off in what felt like four wheel drive compared to the boot sole version.
As we ascended the views opened up with near perfect clarity, interrupted only by my heavy breathing and grunting. I must keep going with that diet.
As we continued the chat got worse but the ice crystals started to twinkle in the sunlight and the sheer luck of the timing and the weather truly dawned on us. The only footprints we could see were those of mountain hares, and we could see Ben Klibreck, Ben More Assynt and the glorious looking Foinavon with its spikey summit and amazing ridge formations.
The snow was quite heavy going but we made it up to the summit by midday and were rewarded with 360 views as far away as Orkney. Loch Eriboll was laid out before us and we could see fog in the glens way over to the south. Having taken loads of photos we looked for a sunny spot where we could munch on some Crieff bakers’ sausage rolls and congratulate ourselves on being mad enough to drive miles from our respective homes on the slim hope of weather like this. I always like a new desktop photo for my work laptop!
And so we returned to the cars, only beating our walking companion by about two minutes. Which meant, slightly embarrassingly, that wellies are faster than winter boots and crampons.
