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Yesterday I decided it was time to do Ben Nevis, which I was doing for charity. I'm not a crowd lover, or fond of it getting too hot so it was an early start leaving my house at 2am to get to the visitor centre carpark and starting our walk at 5am - but it paid off as the early start meant that the ascent was in the shade until we reached the plateau, where there was enough of a wind to keep things nice and cool! We only met a handful of people who overtook us on the way up, but partway down we started to meet larger groups and crowds. Would not like to try this on the weekend! The views were amazing and I was so pleased that we got such good views and had the time to enjoy them as well.
There were rumbles of thunder when we were about and hour away from getting back to the visitor centre and the last bit of the descent was uncomfortably hot, but we were back in the car by 1.20pm and on our way before the thunder really kicked off. I'm guessing a lot of people that were just heading up as we were nearly down wouldn't have been so lucky though!
My pal Dottie on the way up, she writes fortnightly newsletters to seriously ill children as a part of the charity Post Pals and it was this we were raising money for. She will soon have a newsletter going out about her Ben Nevis Challenge!:
Amazing views, really lucky to get such nice clear weather:
Fortunately there was one other person at the summit to take this lovely photo of us all together at the top! I was really amazed that we actually had time at the top where we were the only ones there as I really wasn't expecting that at all! If the lady is on WH - thank you so much for taking this photo!
Millie was very happy to see the snow at the top, she tried leaving her own mark at the top but much to her annoyance I picked it up! There were only two small stretches of soft snow to walk across and it was pretty soft.
All in all, it was a great walk that I really enjoyed though I think the early start had a lot to do with that, I doubt I'd have enjoyed it so much starting later in the day when there were a lot of other people going up so it was well worth the early start.