Matthew and Ben report on their day of scrambling and hiking and scrambling up and along the Carn Mor Dearg arête to the top of Ben Nevis…

From the very start, we knew we were in for a challenge, as we were immediately faced with a steep climb which seemed to go on forever. Luckily it did not, so we were soon greeted with a nice lochan in the mountain and a nice downhill walk. Sadly, the downhill only lasted about 5 minutes, and after that it was a continuos climb. As we were going so high up we got to see some really great views of the mountains, especially when going through a huge valley between two peaks.

Fortunately the group we had for this hike was entirely made up of strong, independent white men (Omar was white during this walk) who don’t need no men or no paths to follow, so we made our own. On one of our many scrambles we climbed the height of the shard in London in one solid push (which is the tallest building in Europe).

After some scrambling up a mountain face on all fours, we gained the top of the CMD arête, and had to make it along the knife-edge ridge which was at some places only about a meter across, so falling would have serious consequences. Luckily, nobody fell off, so we just had to do a bit more scrambling up the mountain side until we finally made it to the summit, where the views were mostly just a white mist because we were in a cloud.

During our time at the peak I got to be the highest person in the UK (forgetting aeroplanes and I doubt there’s a mountain taller than Ben Nevis in the Falklands, Gibraltar, Bermuda or South Georgia) for a bit, so there’s that.

Ben Haslam and Matthew Kee