‘Fawr’ as many of you know, is the Welsh word for ‘Big’. Hill walkers will be well familiar with it; many Welsh mountains come in pairs, with a Fawr (big) and a Fach (little). The Rhinog Hills, a coastal range in southern Snowdonia, has two such peaks and four main peaks in total. This trip report covers an ascent of three of them, including the most rugged, Rhinog Fawr.

That’s almost as far as my Welsh goes. In the spirit of learning, I therefore typed the word ‘rhinog’ into Google Translate. It came back with ‘rhinoceros’. With eyebrow raised, I tried ‘Rhinog’ with a capital. This time it returned the answer ‘Horned’. Well, at least there was a connection. This can mean one of two things: (a) in the distant past, giant horned ungulates strode the Welsh mountains, terrorising sheep, or (b) Google Translate uses AI, which famously just guesses when it doesn’t know the answer.

It turns out that the answer is (b). In the Collins Rambler’s Guide to North Wales, Richard Sale explains that ‘rhinog’ means ‘doorpost’. The name refers to the position of the two most northerly peaks, Rhinog Fawr and Rhinog Fach, rising either side of the Drws Ardudwy, the most obvious pass through the range (‘drws’ itself means ‘door’). This seems more plausible. Rhinog Fawr (720m) and Rhinog Fach (712m) are not actually the highest peaks in the range; both Y Llethr (756m) and Diffwys (750m) to the south, are higher.

Talking of height, the Rhinogs are not the most lofty peaks in Britain. They don’t even make it into my guidebook The High Peaks of England & Wales, which lists all the peaks over 2,500ft (762m). What they lack in height, however, they make up for in toughness. Paths are faint, steep and rough, often disappearing into rocky shelves. The peaks feel wild and remote (even though they are not that remote); they provide a strong sense of being off the beaten path.

They had me staggering in exhaustion on my only previous visit fifteen years ago. I drove up from London for two days of backpacking on a sweltering weekend in June. I had already drunk my only two litres of water when I arrived on the summit of Rhinog Fach at 2.30pm. Expecting a nice easy ridge between Rhinog Fach and Rhinog Fawr before dropping down to my campsite for the night, I was surprised to find a deep cleft of nearly 400m.

I staggered down to the bottom, collapsed in the grass and slept for half an hour, before the sound of running water brought me to my senses. I found myself sleeping in a mossy boggy. Fortunately the water looked fresh and I was able to refill my bottles. Unfortunately, I had lost the path, and my climb back up to the summit of Rhinog Fawr over rough boulder fields was almost certainly a new line, still unrepeated. It was 8.30pm before I reached my campsite.

I returned to my car the following day over foothills on the west side of the range. The proximity to the coast meant that the Irish Sea was ever present and there were fine views west across Cardigan Bay to the Lleyn Peninsula.

I fancied a change of scene on my second visit. This time I plotted a route up Rhinog Fawr, Rhinog Fach and Y Llethr from forests on the east side of the range.

In the Cicerone guidebook Ridges of Snowdonia, Steve Ashton describes seeing these three peaks from the A470, the main north-to-south route across the spine of Wales, which passes to the east of the Rhinogs.

What an uninspiring sight it is: grass on grass, the distant humps of little hills. Hump, hump, hump.

I guess we’re all different. I had only passed along this road once before, and I remember being quite taken with the Rhinogs rising up to the west. It was one of the reasons I decided to go backpacking there. Perhaps I’m more keen on humps than he is.

Arriving there for a second time after a long drive up from the Cotswolds, I couldn’t help but agree with my earlier impression. The peaks stand in a line about 5km from the road, and rise abruptly across gently sloping grassland. This grassland deceived the pilot of a private helicopter, who flew across it in thick fog in 2017, missed the doorway and slammed into the east face of Rhinog Fawr, killing everyone on board.

All three of our peaks had their own distinct character. Y Llethr appeared as a prominent triangle, though I remembered it as a broad grassy plateau. Rhinog Fach occupied more of the skyline, from that angle it was a long ridge with no distinct summit. By contrast to its right, Rhinog Fawr rose alone, a single, standalone wall of rock rising abruptly above the grassland.

We had passed through a blanket of fog on the drive up. Although the fog had lifted, the sky was still quite hazy as we turned off the A470 and passed through a pair of gates to arrive at a forestry plantation. A small parking space on the edge of the forest was marked on the Ordnance Survey map as Graigddu-Isaf.

It felt like a gloriously sunny day as we ascended gradually through the forest on a good trail. It was, but there was to be a sting in its tail. The path left the forest and started rising on a series of moorland terraces, heading for a col on the northern side of Rhinog Fawr. Before reaching the col, the path turned south abruptly to contour up the face of the mountain

We reached a small lake, Llyn Du (Black Lake) at about 500m. The summit of Rhinog Fawr reared up in a wall of sloping grey slabs. There appeared to be no obvious route up, and it looked forbidding. My OS map indicated a route, though, and sure enough, a very faint one took us between the slabs in a series of zigzags. Although it was steep and tiring, there was no scrambling.

We arrived at the summit shortly before midday. I had promised Edita a fine view of the Irish Sea, but I was dismayed to find that although the sun was bright, the sky was so hazy that we could barely see it. Although the coast was only 8km away, the view beyond it was grey; if I didn’t know better then I could easily have mistaken the coastline for the horizon. There was no chance of seeing the Lleyn Peninsula 25km beyond that, or the Snowdon peaks to the north.

We could, however, see Rhinog Fach and Y Llethr to the south, rising as two long plateaus divided by a V-shaped gap. Between us and them was the doorway of Drws Ardudwy, which I now knew lay beneath a huge drop of nearly 400m. Having rested on the grass down there 15 years ago, I also knew that there was no direct route down: we would have to descend Rhinog Fawr’s east side on the Cambrian Way, before traversing around to the pass.

Neither of us were hungry, so we continued across the summit and started descending. We passed an older couple on their way up, who were eager to know our plans, so we stopped for a chat. The man had craggy features and a neat grey beard. Edita tried to draw him into a conversation by repeating the story of my backpacking trip to the Rhinogs, which I had described on the walk up.

‘I recognise him. He’s a famous mountaineer,’ she said after they left.

I know who you mean,’ I replied. ‘Steve Berry.’ (One of the founders of the trekking agency Himalayan Kingdoms, whom we had met at a talk a few years ago.) ‘It’s not him though.’

But it turned out that she meant Joe Brown.

‘That would be a surprise,’ I said, ‘given that he died a few years ago and would now be about 100.’

We became separated on the way down after I lost the faint trail during a conversation. I started crossing rough banks of heather to rejoin the trail further down, but Edita set off on a more direct route towards Rhinog Fach. I heard her calling as I regained the trail and waved frantically until she spotted me.

It was a lucky escape. On the south side of Rhinog Fawr the terrain is steep and craggy, and it’s not a place to get lost. Somewhere on these slopes was the wreckage of a helicopter whose occupants were not so lucky. We said nothing as we reunited.

Just above the doorway of Drws Ardudwy, we reached a stone wall with no stile across its top, only a small opening in the base just big enough for a sheep. Edita threw her pack in front of her and crawled through. For my part, I was doubtful I would be able to fit. I had visions of getting stuck halfway; Edita would end up having to call mountain rescue after trying unsuccessfully to haul me out by the trousers. I didn’t want to be that prize idiot everyone is talking about on social media, ‘… and you know what, he wasn’t even wearing any trousers. These people should carry a map and compass and know how to use them.’

I decided to climb over the wall instead.

There was a large slab on the other side that looked like a good place to stop for our first lunch. As we ate, we looked down and saw a good trail passing through the gap between Rhinogs Fawr and Fach. But our route went straight across it and up the other side. From where we were sitting, there appeared to be no obvious way up.

In Ridges of Snowdonia, Steve Ashton said that ‘whoever designed the path up Rhinog Fach from here must need his head examined’. This time I was minded to agree with him. The way was steep and direct. I could see that the trail on the map went straight up what appeared to be a stone chute. It looked so improbable that Edita didn’t believe me when I said it was the trail.

But appearances can be deceiving. When we got there, we found that the stone chute was actually just a steep, rocky track. Edita raced up it. I plodded slowly behind. I had picked up a ticklish cough and I realised that – just like on my previous visit to the Rhinogs – I hadn’t packed enough water. The air had become unseasonably hot I was becoming dehydrated. But I knew that we still had a long way to go and I would have to save some water for later.

After 200m of steep ascent, the trail took a kinder, more sensible route off to the left and back again on a gentle arc. There was a final steep haul to reach Rhinog Fach’s long summit ridge that we had seen from the road. The summit itself was at the far end. We reached it at 2pm.

It was still too hazy to see the sea. We stopped for selfies and moved on. On the other side of the summit we paused above cliffs to look across the silver waters of Llyn Hywel nestling 100m beneath us on the col between Rhinog Fach and Y Llethr. The sun glinted on the surface of the lake, creating a shimmer like ice. It was an amazing view, but we wouldn’t be able to get down that way without flying. We reversed our tracks and found a less severe route down to its shores from the east.

I remembered Y Llethr to be a much easier peak than either Rhinog Fawr or Rhinog Fach, but I had descended it in the opposite direction. I was therefore surprised by the steepness of the ascent on an eroded earth track like a speedway arena tilted on its side. It was only 150m of ascent, but I puffed and panted my way up as Edita raced ahead. I couldn’t help thinking that the Rhinogs had knocked me out for a second time. Is it possible to climb these hills without getting completely knackered?

Another hiker was waiting for me as I reached the top. He tried to strike up a conversation, but I was sparing my energy for walking. I grunted an acknowledgement and continued onwards.

In contrast to its jagged neighbours, Y Llethr’s summit is a grassy field with a stone wall across its top. We arrived beside the summit cairn at 3pm. After a couple of quick selfies, we sat on the grass a few metres to the west and had our second lunch. We squinted through the haze and tried to make out the sea. I was baffled to be so close on such a sunny day and still be quite unable to see its big blue vastness.

Edita was due to fly back to Haiti for work the following week, but she received a text message suggesting that her flight was in doubt. Our moment of rest and solitude was somewhat marred as she made phone calls to find out what was going on. I ate all my food then rested my head on my pack as I waited for her to finish.

It was 3.45 by the time we were ready to move on. We still had a long descent to return to the car. There was plenty of time, but I did worry about those damn gates across the road. There are lots of stories about such gates getting locked at dusk to discourage people with camper vans from staying overnight. Of course, there’s no better way of getting people to stay overnight than locking their cars inside so that they can’t get out. But not everybody who puts two and two together comes up with four. It’s rather like stopping drunk drivers by giving them free beer.

We followed the path for 50m down the south side of Y Llethr to a col. The fourth peak, Diffwys, lay an hour’s walk away along a curling grassy ridge, but it would have to wait for another day. We crossed the wall over a stile and left the ridge. A narrow path, more like a sheep track, doubled back and contoured down Y Llethr’s east side. It was an easy and picturesque trail; we descended rapidly until we reached another lake, Llyn y Bi, at the base of the mountain.

Then things became decidedly sticky. The forest where we’d parked the car lay hidden behind featureless foothills, and the terrain was confusing. It took us another hour to cross 2km of wearisome bog. It was relatively dry bog, but the ground was rough and it was hard going.

The path was far from obvious and demanded concentration. I was tiring and needed to focus my attention on putting one foot in front of the other. I was glad when Edita took over the lead. She set a good pace and I followed behind. For much of the crossing we had no idea where we were heading, but I could follow a line on my OS app to confirm that we were on the right route.

It was a big relief when we crested a rise and saw the forest to our left. We knew that our car was parked somewhere on its fringes. We reached the firmer ground of a farm track and followed it north for half an hour to reach the forest. From there, it was another half hour along forest trails.

By then we were moving rapidly again. We reached the car, exhilarated, at 6pm after eight hours of some of the toughest hiking in Britain.

There was a tense moment as we were driving away, when Edita got out of the car to open the second gate, and decided to play the clown by pretending it was locked. My heart was starting to sink when she magically swung it open.

We drove south for 20 minutes and enjoyed a memorable evening at the George III Inn, overlooking the Afon Mawddach estuary at Penmaenpool.

You can see all photos from our walk in my Rhinogs and Arenigs Flickr album.

Route map

Rhinogs from Graigddu-Isaf
Total distance: 20.47km. Total ascent/descent: 1,254m.
View route map and download GPX

“In the mountaineering literature of the 1970s, bruised feelings and simmering resentments were beginning to replace frostbite and hypoxia as the signature ailments of high-altitude mountaineering.” Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver, Fallen Giants

In the early 1970s, the slopes of K2 were still relatively untouched. Since the first attempt by a British team in 1902, the number of expeditions to climb it could still be counted on fingers and toes, and only two men, Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli in 1954, had reached the top.

Although Italians had first set foot on the summit, two heroic and ultimately tragic expeditions in 1939 and 1953 meant that American climbers still considered it to be their mountain. After a German-American expedition made an unsuccessful attempt in 1960, no one attempted K2 again for fifteen years.

In 1974, when the Pakistan government reopened the Karakoram for climbing after a period of closure, Americans were among the first to return. A reconnaissance team identified the Northwest Ridge as a possible route to the summit, and in 1975 a full assault was launched.

In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods by Galen Rowell

In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, Galen Rowell’s classic account of the 1975 American expedition to K2 had been sitting on my shelf for 17 years. The book had a reputation as a tale of strife, failure and endless bickering and I never quite felt in the mood for reading it. I finally summoned up the courage in December last year.

The 1975 American K2 expedition was led by Jim Whittaker, who was invited to lead it by Jim Wickwire, the brains and driving force behind the project. Whittaker was an American mountaineering icon, a 6’5″ giant of a man who had made the first US ascent of Everest in 1963.

By most standards, the expedition can reasonably be described as a complete failure from start to finish, although kinder people might argue that discovering the Northwest Ridge to be unclimbable was an achievement of sorts. Realising that an account of the expedition on its own would be less than inspiring, Galen Rowell weaved K2’s mountaineering history into the narrative. He alternates chapters about the 1975 expedition with accounts of the expeditions of Conway (1892), Eckenstein (1902), the Duke of Abruzzi (1909), Houston (1938), Wiessner (1939), Houston again (1953) and Desio (1954). This has the effect of making the early history seem like a subplot without which the 1975 expedition could never have happened.

Much of the failure was self-inflicted. Before they even left American shores, there were arguments between team members. One member was fired because some of others suspected that they might not get along with him on the mountain. Whittaker invited his wife Dianne Roberts as expedition photographer, and then his twin brother Lou, hoping the expedition will heal a long-lasting rift between them. Lou responded by immediately questioning Dianne’s competence to be a member of the climbing team.

Jim Whittaker’s heavy-handed and secretive decision making was partly responsible for some of the issues. In Skardu, Pakistan, three team members were put on the naughty step for going off on a sightseeing trip while others spent the day packing supplies. Schisms opened, tempers flew, and Dianne became isolated, not only as the only woman on the team, but as a relatively novice climber among seasoned pros. The team divided into two groups: the ‘Big Four’ of the two Jims, Lou and Dianne, who appeared to make all the decisions without consulting the others, and the rest.

Their trek along the Baltoro Glacier to base camp was constantly delayed by porter strikes. These strikes still plague expeditions in the present day. In 1975 they were so severe that it took the team weeks longer than they’d planned to reach base camp. There was a moment of theatre when Jim Whittaker burned a handful of rupees to convince the porters that if they didn’t move then they wouldn’t be paid.

Competition between team members arose on the trek in. They vied to carry the heaviest load and move quickest between camps. This wasn’t only due to the well-known climbers’ trait of one-upmanship but because they suspected (correctly, as it turned out) that Jim Whittaker was already deciding who should be in the summit party.

As the expedition progressed, this schism between the Big Four and the rest became wider and wider. The ‘Two Freds’ (Fred Stanley and Fred Dunham) suspected from the start that they had been recruited as foot soldiers in the Whittakers’ and Jim Wickwire’s quest for glory. They became so alienated from the leadership that they refused to take any further part in the expedition.

The pantomime villain of In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods is Lou Whittaker, who comes across as a playground bully. There is a photograph of him wrestling Fred Dunham. After Lou threatened to ‘deck’ him for taking too long to get up, Dunham recorded in his diary that ‘there is only one way to handle a guy like Lou who shoves his weight and size around… he should end up with an ice axe in the back of his head or a bullet between the eyes. There is no other way for a smaller person to get vengeance or justice.’

By contrast, when faced with mutinous team members, Jim Whittaker mellowed and showed more kindness than his brother. Galen was mocked by Lou for pulling out of a load carry on the Northwest Ridge because he felt feverish. ‘If you wanted to climb K2 as much as we do, you wouldn’t stay back for every little thing,’ Lou told him. By that stage in the expedition, several team members had already been diagnosed with bronchitis. When Jim Whittaker arrived later in the day and found Galen still in his sleeping bag, he ordered him to descend immediately for rest.

There were times when the drama felt surreal. The climb was eventually abandoned at the modest altitude 6,700m, after they crested a pinnacle only to find that the rest of the Northwest Ridge was impassable. They left base camp in a hurry when one of their high-altitude porters, Akbar, became seriously ill with peritonitis. As Akbar awaited death or evacuation by helicopter at Concordia, Galen received an unusual package from one of the mail runners. He had learned of his father’s death by mail earlier in the expedition, many days after it had happened. Then, as they were leaving, he received a box containing his father’s ashes to scatter on the slopes of K2.

The arguments and recriminations continued on the trek out. Galen admitted that they were not friends by the time the expedition ended. But there was one further twist. A few months after returning to America, rumours emerged that the whole expedition had been arranged as a front for the CIA. They’d had no intention of climbing the mountain; the sole purpose of the expedition had been to plant a listening device on the Chinese border. The rumours were nonsense and they had the effect of reuniting the team in defiance.

The Last Step by Rick Ridgeway

When I reached the end of In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, I realised that the story wasn’t complete. It wasn’t the end at all; merely, as Churchill would have said, the end of the beginning.

The Americans returned to K2 in 1978 to complete the job they had only finished beginning in 1975. Moreover, there is a companion tale of strife, failure and endless bickering, containing all the acrimony of the first volume and more.

The book in this case is The Last Step by Rick Ridgeway. As soon as I finished reading In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, I ordered a copy, and I read it as soon as it arrived. While the first book feels incomplete, The Last Step can be read as a standalone story. It’s significantly enhanced, however, if you read Galen Rowell’s book first, which becomes an introductory volume to set the scene.

The Last Step is a much better story than In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, not only because of the success of the expedition and its dramatic conclusion, but because Rick Ridgeway is a master storyteller who knows how to build tension and weave the different threads into a coherent tale.

Once again, the 1978 expedition was led by Jim Whittaker, but he had become a wiser leader who had learned from three years earlier. Jim Wickwire and Dianne Roberts also returned from the 1975 team. Dianne was a changed person too. She was a more experienced climber, and this time she knew that her role was that of a support climber rather than a potential summiteer. She was no longer the only woman on the team. To provide balance, Jim had invited husband and wife Terry and Cherie Bech as members of the climbing team, and Diana Jagersky as base camp manager.

The 1978 team had more Himalayan experience than their predecessors. Rick Ridgeway and Chris Chandler had both been on Everest, where Chris had reached the summit. Lou Reichardt and John Roskelley had both summited Dhaulagiri. Despite these qualifications, Jim Whittaker insisted that he would not be selecting summit teams until much later in the expedition, and he promised all team members a share of the leading. He hoped this would prevent the distrust that had occurred three years earlier.

The objective in 1978 was the Northeast Ridge. It was still unclimbed but a strong Polish team had attempted it in 1976 and narrowly failed to reach the summit. It was a known quantity that was much more feasible than the pinnacled Northwest Ridge of 1975, and the Poles had provided the Americans with a lot of useful information about its difficulties.

To begin with, things worked like clockwork, in marked contrast to 1975. The Pakistan government made all the porters sign contracts in the hope of preventing the strikes that had beset the ‘75 expedition. The team’s liaison officer Saleem gave rousing speeches every morning to imbue the porters with pride in their work. It seemed effective. There were no major porter issues and the team arrived in base camp far more quickly than they had in ‘75.

In the initial stages, there was no disharmony as the team established camps and made good progress to Camp 3. Rick’s evocative writing sets the scene. Specific, carefully worded passages help to provide a feel for expedition life. These include a tense and detailed description of crossing a crevasse, during which two team members on separate ropes fell in simultaneously and saw each other dangling upside-down over a gaping chasm. They include more mundane matters, such as slowly waking up and readying oneself inside a tent, goggles fogging up in a freezing snow storm and rendering you blind, wrapping cold fingers around a mug of hot chocolate that a teammate hands you back in camp, and forcing down freeze dried food that reminds Rick of Charlie Chaplin eating his shoe. More poetically, there is a passage where Rick and John Roskelley fix ropes along the knife-edge crest of the Northeast Ridge. As he gazes down into China from a world of snow, Rick is enchanted to see butterflies flutter over and perch on his rope.

But, as inevitably as disputes about oxygen, cracks started to emerge. Ironically, given what happened in ‘75, Jim’s more democratic leadership style led to problems of their own. An ‘A’ team emerged (Ridgeway, Roskelley, Reichardt and Wickwire), who were clearly much stronger and more determined than the others. Yet the ‘B’ team (who decided that the ‘A’ stood for ‘assholes’) still believed they should be given an equal share of the leading. Once again, team members started questioning the abilities of one of the women climbers, Cherie.

There was another potential pantomime villain in the form of John Roskelley, an old-school misogynist with no time for the weaker team members. He is described at least three times in the book as a ‘redneck’, including by Roskelley himself. But he is portrayed more sympathetically by Rick, who appreciated his strength and determination and became his climbing partner.

Instead, the book’s pantomime villain is Chris Chandler, a long-haired hippie who smoked weed and was Roskelley’s diametric opposite in terms of values and personality. Chandler was the most promising member of the ‘B’ team and became their figurehead. He was a vocal supporter of Cherie’s fitness to be on the summit team, but his relationship with her became a source of gossip and tension. With husband Terry’s blessing (who was confident their relationship was purely platonic), Cherie and Chris shared a tent for much of the expedition. Only when Chandler withdrew from the expedition, did the tensions between ‘A’ and ‘B’ teams melt away as the ‘B’ team accepted their fate as support climbers.

In any case, the mountain was the final judge. Of the ‘B’ team, only Terry Bech made it above Camp 5 as a support climber. With time running out, it took one final Herculean effort for the ‘A’ team to put themselves in position for a summit attempt.

Wickwire and Reichardt traversed across from the Northeast Ridge to the Abruzzi Spur to follow the classic route to the summit. They became the first Americans and only the third party ever to summit K2, but Wickwire was delayed on descent and was forced into an overnight bivouac that he barely survived. Meanwhile, after making an aborted attempt to finish the direct route up the Northeast Ridge, Roskelley and Ridgeway followed their partners around to the Abruzzi Spur and reached the summit the day after.

The expedition ultimately had a happy ending, but these bare details tell only part of the story. There was no shortage of tension as the ‘A’ team battled time and the weather to put themselves in position for the summit.

There was drama for the team at base camp as they trained their binoculars on the mountaintop and watched two tiny figures reach the summit. The celebrations lasted only a few minutes as they watched only one figure return. Reichardt had climbed without oxygen, and he realised that he would need to descend rapidly. Wickwire lingered on the summit to take photos, unaware that his teammates at base camp believed that he must have fallen and his climbing partner was racing for help. There was relief when his figure emerged again, but this didn’t last long. Darkness fell while he was still high on the mountain and they doubted if he could survive the night.

As eyewitness to the some of the expedition’s most dramatic moments, Ridgeway is the perfect narrator. His gift for storytelling has turned this true account of an ultimately successful expedition into one of the great mountaineering books.

The candid nature of his reporting came at a cost. Such a warts-and-all account is less likely to be written today, in an era when people are more sensitive to matters of privacy. Prior to the K2 expedition, Chris Chandler had been Rick’s climbing partner on many expeditions and one of his closest friends. Rick may have survived K2, but his friendship with Chris did not. When they met after the expedition, Chris entreated Rick not to mention his relationship with Cherie in the book; Rick refused, arguing that it was central to the story. It was certainly central to The Last Step, but whether it was central to the story of the first American ascent of K2 is more questionable.

The two men were never reconciled. Chris Chandler died on Kangchenjunga seven years later. His partner on that fateful climb was Cherie Bech.

You can also pick your level. For the extreme adventurers, there are the Seven Summits and the Explorer’s Grand Slam. To complete these challenges, you have to be willing to man-haul a sledge, brave extreme cold and extreme altitude, and endure long days of physical activity and – worse – freeze-dried food. At the opposite end of the scale are the County Tops: the highest mountains in each British county. I say ‘mountains’, but they include, most notably, the appropriately named Boring Field, which at 80m is the highest point in Huntingdonshire.

A few weekends ago, Edita and I stood in cold drizzle while I took a selfie in front of a metal fence beside a sewage farm, just because it happened to be the highest point in Nottinghamshire; last weekend we stood beside a junkyard atop the highest hill in Kent. These were examples of those ticks that wouldn’t be worth ticking if they weren’t tickable. But the weekend after our Nottinghamshire excursion there was a good-weather window and we were able to sample one of the gems, Aran Fawddwy, the highest point in Merionethshire.

Merionethshire is the historic Welsh county that embraces the southern half of Snowdonia, with its smaller massifs of the Arenigs, Arans, Rhinogs and Cadair Idris. The county is roughly triangular in shape and bounded by the Irish Sea to the west, the River Dovey (or Dyfi) to the south-east, and the Ffestiniog slate quarries to the north.

The Aran Hills form a north-south ridge extending 14km from the shores of Bala Lake to the sleepy village of Dinas Mawddwy, nestling between hills at a confluence of the River Dovey. The central part of the ridge remains above 800m for more than 2km and reaches up to 905m on Aran Fawddwy, the highest mountain in southern Snowdonia. Rolling bogland on the western side contrasts with steep cliffs to the east. The lake of Creiglyn Dyfi, at the foot of the cliffs beneath Aran Fawddwy, is the source of the River Dovey, which flows for 50km into the Irish Sea north of Aberystwyth.

Legend has it that the Arans were the site of a great battle between King Arthur and an evil giant called Rita Gawr, who sported a cloak made from the beards of all the kings he had slain. Arthur’s chin curtain was the last one the giant needed to complete his collar, and a dual was fought beneath Aran Fawddwy. The legendary king triumphed and instructed each of his knights to lay a stone on Rita Gawr’s body as they passed. The resulting cairn became Aran Benllyn, Aran Fawddwy’s sister peak.

Some versions of this legend place the battle on top of Snowdon instead of the Arans, and claim that the giant’s burial cairn was built on the summit of the peak now known as Yr Wyddfa. Which version you believe is neither here nor there, since the legend is quite clearly horseshit. To build a cairn the size of Aran Benllyn would require around two million knights. Also, if you were an evil giant then I doubt you would put up with the name ‘Rita’. It seems to me that Rita Gawr was no more real than the black knight who defended the bridge in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

More truthfully, there was a time not too long ago when the Arans were subject to severe access restrictions. Permitted footpaths were delicately negotiated between the national park authorities and local landowners. Guidebooks were filled with warnings about where you could and couldn’t go.

Indeed, one of my guidebooks from 1999, The High Peaks of England & Wales by Paul Hannon, had this to say:

This very unsatisfactory business does raise an anomaly: as most hill farmers seem to receive grants and subsidies to enable them to survive (and reasonably so, if they are looking after the countryside), then we taxpayers are paying them to keep us off the hills!

This unsatisfactory business also became irrelevant in 2000, when Tony Blair’s Labour government passed the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, also known as the ‘Right to Roam Act’. Two million acres of open countryside (mountain, moorland, heath and downs) were designated ‘access land’ and the public had immediate right to ramble across it.

My only previous visit to the Arans was a mid-week backpacking trip when I was between jobs in 2015. It was a scorcher of a summer, yet I saw only one other hiker in two days. I enjoyed a peaceful wild camp beside the lake on the summit of Glasgwm, the main peak on the southern part of the ridge. But the part of that trip that remains most vividly in my mind was when I narrowly avoided splitting my trousers as I leapt a barbed-wire fence while trying to flee from a heard of angry cows.

Eleven years later, I hoped that a return visit to the hills would help me to recover from the trauma of that day, as well as enabling Edita to tick another box. Aran Fawddwy can be climbed on the south side from the secluded valley of Cwm Cywarch. Access is gained up a narrow farm road hemmed in by hedges. I drove for 3km and was grateful not to meet any traffic coming the other way, which would meant having to reverse 3km all the way back again. Despite the uninviting approach, there is a substantial car park beside a farm at the top end of the valley.

We had wondered about snow conditions. It had been freezing and wet overnight, so I expected fresh snow cover. The Snowdon ground-conditions internet feed had reported fresh snow from 400m. I hurriedly packed ice axe and crampons before we left the Cotswolds at 6am that morning.

The 685m satellite peak of Pen Main rose above us, hiding Aran Fawddwy’s summit from view. Its top was drizzled in snow like a giant birthday cake. To its right, the Drysgol ridge that we would be following to the summit was a white wall. I wore my big boots, packed my crampons and strapped my ice axe to my pack. But Edita couldn’t bear stomping up in big boots. She packed microspikes in case of icy conditions and also took her axe.

As things transpired, neither axe nor crampons were needed, but the deep snow and boggy conditions higher up meant that I was glad of my big boots. I chose to take a circular route up to the summit, starting out in an anticlockwise direction by taking a path that slanted above the south side of the valley of Cwm Hengwm. The path was very steep lower down, but became more gradual. At the head of the combe, a little over a kilometre away, we could see that our path swung round to the left to reach the ridge of Drysgol on the opposite side. This was the white rampart that we could see from the car park. Our route up to the summit of Aran Fawddwy followed the crest of this ridge, which looked fairly horizontal.

We started in shade at 9.30am, but the sky was clear and the forecast was for sunshine. Edita wore magic glasses that tinted as the sky brightened. Up ahead of us, we could see that we left the shady south side of the valley at more or less exactly the snow line. It would be bright, and we discussed whether I should have brought my sunglasses.

‘I guess if I get snow blind then you’ll have to drive home,’ I said.

I reassured Edita that I had never heard of anyone getting snow blindness in winter conditions in the UK. The altitude is low, the air is thicker, the sun never gets very high in the sky, and there is still plenty of green around.

‘If anyone got snow blind, then I’m sure it would be all over social media,’ I said. ‘It would be like “these idiots shouldn’t be allowed on the hills. They should carry a map and compass and know how to use them!”’

We reached the snow line at 450m, shortly before arriving on the 571m ‘bwlch’ beneath Waun Goch – this is the Welsh word for ‘col’, and is mostly easily pronounced by trying to bring up phlegm from the back of your throat. 

The col was more of a boggy plateau than a true col, and was carpeted with a couple of inches of fresh snow. The view to the east over rolling hills was magical. None of those hills were especially high, but today they were basked in snow and looked remote and mountainous.

From Waun Goch the ascent became more of a slog. We followed the tracks of a lone hiker with size 11 feet, who can have made those prints no more than an hour earlier. The snow was a few inches deep, which made for harder work. I dropped a little behind Edita as we walked beside a fence up to the ridge of Drysgol. 

Just below the crest we crossed a ladder stile over another fence and had our first view of Aran Fawddwy. The highest point in Merionethshire peeped above the ridge across another combe. With runnels of snow trickling in cracks down its east face, it looked like a slice of Christmas pudding lying on its side.

It didn’t look so far away, but I was out of breath from the slog and asked Edita if we could stop for a sandwich. We walked for a short distance along Drysgol’s broad, snowy crest. To our left we could look across Cwm Hengwm, whose opposite side we had slanted up a short while earlier. On the right I spied the black pool of Creiglyn Dyli nestling in the combe beneath Aran Fawddwy’s east face. Eleven years ago I staggered more than 200m down Drysgol’s northern side carrying a large pack, and collapsed on the shores of this lake, which is the source of the River Dovey.

Today we stopped on the crest and looked west as we sat down for an early lunch. It was 11am. Ahead of us the ridge rose a little more steeply to a small summit marked on the map as Drws Bach. There appeared to be a figure standing motionless on its top, but after it continued to be motionless while I ate a whole sandwich, I realised that it must be a cairn.

Beneath Drws Bach, the snow had drifted into a thick layer and our walk had a true winter feel. The sizeable cairn was erected in 1960 in memory of a mountain rescue volunteer who had been struck by lightning in the Arans (there are more painful places to be struck by lightning). The plaque was encrusted in ice and unreadable, but I had taken a photo of it on my previous visit.

On a normal day, the section from Drws Bach to the summit would doubtless be a piece of cake, with a clear trail marking the remaining ascent of 150m to the top. But the trail was now hidden beneath snow that was several inches deep. We made the mistake of following the lone hiker’s footprints, which followed a zigzagging fence up difficult terrain. When I left his steps to take a more direct route over rocks, the going became much easier. Edita had been a long way in front of me at the time, and when I popped over a brow ahead of her, she accused me of cheating.

We hadn’t met a single human since leaving the car, but when we reached the summit at 12.30, we found that it was crawling with people, as though they had been magically dropped there.

It had been a tiring final haul to the top. After taking some summit selfies, we sat against a rock on the east side, away from the other people, to eat our lunch. Our view was across the hills beyond Creiglyn Dyli, but the lake was too close beneath the cliffs on which we perched for us to see it. What should have been a peaceful moment enjoying the beauty of the mountains was marred by one of those noisy groups who can’t stop talking.

We intended to continue along the ridge to Aran Benllyn, the Arans’ second summit, but it still looked a long way off. My OS app suggested that it would take 45 minutes to get there and another 45 to come back. But if conditions were like those we had just endured then it would be another slog.

‘We’ve made it to the county top now,’ I said to Edita. ‘We don’t have to go there. We can go down to the pub and watch the rugby.’

But by the time we’d finished eating, we had agreed that to skip the other summit would be a bit lame. In fact, it turned out to be the most enjoyable part of the day. Although we didn’t meet anyone, the path had been well trodden, so the going was a little less strenuous than we had expected.

After dropping down off a rocky summit, we lost sight of Aran Benllyn for much of the traverse from Aran Fawddwy. We crested a long rising brow, following the line of a fence. Once over the brow, Aran Benllyn reappeared in the form of a rocky promontory. We descended to a col and climbed to its summit, reaching the 885m top at 1.30.

It was much quieter up there than it had been on Aran Fawddwy. This gave us more opportunity to appreciate the remoteness and the view. We could see all of Snowdonia’s main massifs: Cadair Idris to the south, the Rhinogs shielding the Irish Sea to the west, the smaller plateau of the Arenigs to the north, and the rolling ridge of the Berwyns to the east. Beyond the Arenigs, the more substantial snowcap of the Snowdon massif rose into cloud.

We traced our steps back to the rocky pile of Aran Fawddwy and skirted its summit. The next part of the walk was a tedious descent, crossing a bog for over 3km as we followed another fence. The first part of the descent involved trudging steeply down drifts of snow that turned the bottom of our trouser legs into white ski boots.

Ladder stiles crossed the fence at regular intervals, causing me to wonder whether we were on the correct side of the fence. Eventually we decided to cross over to the left side, where the trail seemed more obvious. Slippery planks had been laid across the deeper sections of bog. In other parts the track had been paved with gravel, which might have been appreciated on another day. Today these sections were covered with treacherous icy sheets. Edita had chosen to wear approach shoes instead of big boots. Her feet had become soaking wet from the deep snow in the morning and the squelching bog in the afternoon.

For the entire 3km we could see the gully beneath Glasgwm that led down into Cwm Cywarch. This was our exit point from the mountain. It never seemed very far away, but every time I looked on my OS app, thinking we must be nearly there, I could see that we had only come a fraction of the way.

‘Oh, we’ve still got miles to go,’ I said each time, which started to annoy Edita.

Once I realised that we had to cross the bog all the way to the base of Glasgwm before turning down the gully, I stopped looking at my app and became more relaxed. 

It was a relief to exit the bog. After turning down the gully, the trail became much firmer underfoot and we descended rapidly. The gully had looked narrow and precipitous from down below, wedged between two steep cliffs; but the trail was clear and nowhere difficult.

We emerged onto the farm track through Cwm Cywarch beside a pair of cylindrical glamping pods. From here it was a short walk back to our car.

We arrived back at 4pm. This was perfect. The Six Nations match between England and Scotland kicked off at 4.40. We were able to drive to the Brigands Inn and check into our room in time for the national anthems. Those of you who watched the match will know that the result was far from perfect for England fans, but it was an entertaining game, and we enjoyed an excellent dinner in the pub afterwards.

All in all, it was a great mini holiday, and another county top had been ticked.

You can see all photos from our walk in my 2026 Flickr album.

Route map

Aran Fawddwy and Aran Benllyn
Total distance: 16.93km. Total ascent/descent: 1,070m.
View route map and download GPX

No, not that. I mean I’ve finally finished narrating all of my diaries and released them as audiobooks. I completed the very last one, The Baruntse Adventure, last month. I no longer need to spend hours on end locked in the padded room at the back of the house talking into a microphone (although my wife thinks I should spend more time there). It means that you can now enjoy all of my books at the same time as chasing a seven-pound Double Gloucester cheese down a hillside (or any other physical activity for that matter).

I’ve also been able to confirm that my latest audiobook is the only audiobook available anywhere in the world entirely about climbing Baruntse, the 7,129m peak just south of Mount Everest. This means that if you’re interested in climbing Baruntse, it’s a must listen. It’s also a pretty good listen if you’re not remotely interested in climbing Baruntse, but just like listening to an entertaining adventure while you do the ironing.

Back in 2010, I embarked on a five-week trek across the Makalu region of Nepal with my friend and erstwhile climbing partner, the very same Mark Dickson for whom the Dickson Step takes its name.

Mark managed to injure himself in bizarre fashion before we’d even started the adventure. As we returned to our hotel in Kathmandu after an evening in Sam’s Bar, our rickshaw driver pedalled too fast over a speed bump and lurched to a halt, causing Mark to fly out of the front of the rickshaw. Luckily Mark’s injury wasn’t too serious, but things could have been much worse for me when I nearly died laughing.

From that moment, things just got better. Our trek followed in the footsteps of the great New Zealand mountaineer, Sir Edmund Hillary. From the Arun Valley in the far east of Nepal, we crossed Shipton’s Pass and trekked up the picturesque Barun Valley past Makalu, crossed Sherpani Col and continued across the glaciated Barun Plateau to Baruntse. We completed our journey by trekking down the Hongu and Hinku Valleys over two more high passes, the Mera La and Zatr La, to finish in Lukla.

Hillary had an obsession with Makalu that was to lead to his downfall. He was famous for being the first man to reach the highest point on the planet, but in later life he was such a poor acclimatiser that his body struggled at the comparatively low altitude of 3,000m. A serious case of altitude sickness on Makalu was the cause of his troubles.

Hillary’s team from the New Zealand Alpine Club did make the first ascent of Baruntse, however. It was an ascent not without problems; and as we arrived in Baruntse Base Camp more than 50 years later, we were to learn of an incident with chilling parallels.

The Baruntse Adventure contains my usual blend of humour, mountaineering history and tales of expedition life. It may be the last audiobook I ever narrate, so for that reason alone you can’t miss it.

Click on the big green button for a list of retailers.

We saved the best walk for the best day. Edita and I had spied Ben Cruachan’s airy summit and hair-raising summit ridge from the top of Ben O’Cockle two days earlier. I could also see from the map that the walk across its top and that of its companion Munro Stob Daimh featured an enormous ridge. This was what had been missing the previous day when I found Ben Lui not all it’s cracked up to be.

IMO, much the most enjoyable walks are those along ridges, high above the surrounding landscape with long views to distant horizons. You get those from summits, of course, but then you move on, back down again on knee-jarring descents. That had been the case with Ben Lui and Ben of Cleeves, two peaks linked by a col rather than a ridge: up to a summit, down to a col, up to another summit, back down to the same col and eventually, back down the same ascent path. Apart from an enjoyable lunch atop Ben Lui, it had been hard slog most of the way. Ben Cruachan promised a different style of walk: a circular jaunt round a corrie with some delicious ridges. Or so I hoped.

It was going to be a longer day than the previous one. The Walkhighlanda guidebook estimated an 8 to 9 hour day in summer conditions, with nearly 1,400m of ascent and descent. In fact, the altitude gain turned out to be even greater than this. The conditions were more favourable, though. We knew there would be no snow on the summits. Moreover, the frozen ground promised firm terrain underfoot. I decided to wear my approach shoes rather than the big boots that I’d worn on the two previous days. My feet might get a little colder, but they would be much more comfortable, and I would be a lot quicker.

The route up Ben Cruachan is accessed from a small lay-by on the A85 beside Falls of Cruachan station, one of those tiny branch-line stations where you have to stick your thumb out to flag down a passing train. We had previously noticed that this lay-by gets very busy, and there were already several hikers parked there and getting ready when we arrived in darkness just before 8 o’clock.

We set off walking bang on 8am. I wore my head torch as we walked under the railway line, up some steps and into woodland. For the second day in a row the start of our walk was full on. There was no wading through icy water this time, just a monstrously steep ascent through the woods, with some big steps and plenty of scrambling over tree roots, using the roots as handholds.

I was able to turn my head torch off when we left the woods. The sky was still dim and there was a soft tangerine glow above the shining silver waters of Loch Awe. We were now high above the lake, having been close to its shoreline just a few minutes earlier. Daylight arrived as we ascended a frozen, boggy pathway above the treeline. Treading carefully to avoid puncturing the frosty surface and squidging our approach shoes into the muck, we ascended steeply for a few more minutes before arriving at the service road for the Cruachan Dam.

We were now in a high combe, Coire Cruachan, which was flooded in the 1960s to create the Cruachan Reservoir which feeds the Cruachan Power Station down by the roadside where we left our car. The dark grey walls of the 46m-high Cruachan Dam rose before us. We turned left along the service road to reach its base. A metal staircase led up onto the dam, and the path actually went along its wall for about 50m to reach the corner of the reservoir.

Our walk had been relentlessly steep from the moment we left our car, but we now had some respite as we followed a dirt track for over a kilometre along the left shore of the lake. We didn’t know it yet, but we could actually see almost the whole of the day’s walk along the rim of the skyline surrounding the lake. The triangular summit in the far left corner was the summit of Ben Cruachan itself; the sloping skyline which fell to a modest col high above the far shore was the ridge from Ben Cruachan over the summit of Drochaid Ghlas; and the two small bumps on the ridge above the opposite shoreline were the Munro of Stob Daimh and its sister summit Stob Garbh.

By 9.30 we had reached the end of the road and turned left on a narrow trail that followed the right bank of a small stream up into Coire Dearg. The trail was good, with just a few sections of ice to avoid. Somewhere on the way up we even found ourselves in bright sunshine. The path became steeper and more eroded as we approached the col of Bealach an Lochain, which formed the skyline above us.

We reached the bealach shortly after 10am and sat down beside a small lochan for fifteen minutes to enjoy a sandwich in the sun. We were already at over 800m and had the majority of the ascent behind us. The food gave me the energy to complete the remainder with no great difficulty.

We had our first view of the summit a short distance above the col, a triangular pile of boulders about 250m above. The good path became increasingly rocky and the final section was over a boulder field. From the summit of Ben O’Cockle two days earlier, the summit of Ben Cruachan had seemed an improbable pinnacle, but apart from a bit of rough scrambling over boulders towards the top, it wasn’t difficult. Ben Cruachan means Conical Hill, and while it may have looked like a traffic cone from the opposite side, it was now more like the rough shell of a giant tortoise (which, as usual, was what I had felt like lagging behind Edita most of the way to the summit).

We reached the 1,126m summit at 11am and had much the best view of the week, a 360° panorama which had something different to offer in each direction. I’m not going to describe all 360 of them, but I will provide four. To the north we looked beyond the oblique navy sliver of Loch Etive, across the lightly dusted top of Bidean nam Bian to an unmistakeable shape on the far horizon. Ben Nevis was the only peak with substantial snow cover. It lorded over everything, its profile rising slightly from left to right then dropping suddenly away like a graph of the UK economy after Liz Truss had taken the reins of power.

Looking west, the triangular top of Stob Dearg, also known as Taynuilt Peak, was close at hand. Beyond it, the land was flat all the way to the Firth of Lorn. We could clearly see the islands of Kerrera and Lismore just offshore, but beyond that the view was hazy.

To the south we could see lakes and forests shining in the glare of the sun among a low-lying, crumpled landscape. But by far the most enticing view was to the east. An inviting ridge, steep on its right side and sheer on its left, led over a series of tops to the summit of Stob Daimh over 2km away. We could see Sunday’s peaks (Ben O’Cockle and Ben Eunuch) over Stob Daimh’s left shoulder and Monday’s peaks (Ben Lui and Ben of Cleeves) on the skyline beyond. The ridge was rocky, and was clearly going to offer some rough terrain, but it was also going to provide unparalleled views for most of the afternoon.

Having eaten at the bealach, we didn’t linger on the summit for more food; instead we took our summit pics and sunk our teeth into the prospect before us. Some crab-like bum-surfing took us down the summit boulder heap to join the ridge. Looking back from the base of this section to the summit, I could see why it had looked such a knife-edge from Ben O’Cockle. I was standing in a direct line between the two peaks.

For the next hour and a half, we followed the ridge. We were in sun all the way and it wasn’t cold at all. As I had predicted, the stones underfoot meant that it wasn’t one of those ridges where you can hold your head up and admire the view. With every step, I had to concentrate on where I was putting my feet. At one point, we took a wide bypass path beneath some smooth slabs which looked hazardous. This was probably the wrong option. The path took us a long way down off the ridge and we had to cross some awkward terrain to climb back up to it.

I started to run out of energy as we approached the summit of Drochaid Ghlas. Beyond this smaller peak, the ridge dropped 150m to a col, beyond which the terrain looked much easier. We agreed to descend to the col and find a nice sunny spot for a second lunch before climbing back up to Stob Daimh. It was a steep, awkward descent, but by 12.30 we were sitting on a soft, mossy bank, tucking into a second sandwich.

The view from our lunch spot was deceptive. We could see two high points on the ridge above us. The one immediately above the col looked innocuous. This was 998m Stob Daimh, the second Munro. Standing next to it, south on the ridge, was 980m Stob Garbh, a much more prominent summit that also looked higher. It wasn’t.

As teenagers used to say, whatever. We crossed them both. The walking was easy, and from the summits we had great views back to Ben Cruachan, which now looked like a church, with a pitched roof topped by a spire. Stob Daimh, which means Stag Peak, is actually pronounced ‘Stop Dave’ which, incidentally, is what many people in Scotland wish they’d done to Dave Stewart before he formed the Eurythmics with Annie Lennox.

We had a long descent ahead of us, from the summit of Stob Garbh at 980m to our car at 50m. But it was easily the most gradual descent of all the peaks we’d climbed that week. We eased our way down to the 728m Lairig Torran, which was snowlined, and had a decidedly wintry feel as it nestled in the shadow of the bulky whaleback of Beinn a’ Bhuiridh. Then we descended a gentle hillside basking in sunshine, down to the shores of the Cruachan Reservoir at 450m. It felt like winter had become spring in the time that it took to sneeze.

The path contoured about 30m above the reservoir. This section was less pleasant. In the summer it would be a horrendous bog. The bog water had frozen into icy sheets. We had to slog our way up rough, grassy banks then lollop down again to rejoin the path, only to find another series of ice sheets a few metres further on.

We eventually reached the access road to the dam and followed it in a wide loop to rejoin our ascent route. The worst part of the descent was the steep scramble back through forest, hanging off tree roots with tired legs. But it had been a great day out. We arrived back at the car at 4pm, well satisfied with our three days and six Munros. It was a winter tally we could never have hoped for on any of our previous winter weeks.

The weather was more typical for the three remaining days of our holiday. For the most part it was wet and cloudy down below. When the black clouds parted briefly, we could see that snow had returned to the heights. They were marginal conditions for hill walking, and I was glad that we didn’t feel tempted to go up.

We completed our week with some low-level walks down to the shores of Loch Etive, along the woodland trails of Glen Nant Forest, and around a coastal headland near Oban. The highlight of those days was a sunset visit to Castle Stalker, famous as the Castle of Aaaaargh in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I was surprised to see that there’s a pub just 50m away from the shoreline where King Arthur’s armies had assembled for battle.

In the place where a police car screeched to a halt in front of the marauding hordes, there is now a cycle track.

You can see all photos from our walk in my Loch Etive and Glen Awe Flickr album.

Route map

Ben Cruachan and Stob Daimh
Total distance: 15.40km. Total ascent/descent: 1,556m.
View route map and download GPX

The forecast for the following day predicted higher winds on the summits. The panorama that Ben Cruachan had presented from the summit of Ben O’Cockle – of an airy knife blade of rock, perfect for splitting one’s trousers – had given me goose bumps. It didn’t look like the best place to be caught in a gale, so I decided to look for alternative options for our second day.

A short distance to the east along the road to Tyndrum, lay 1,130m Ben Lui, a mountain considered by many to be the finest peak in the Southern Highlands. Its position further inland meant that it was more sheltered from the south-westerly winds; its summit forecast was better than the one for Ben Cruachan.

Ben Lui’s sister peak, 916m Beinn a’ Chleibh (or Ben of Cleeves if you prefer), is also classed as a Munro, and there is a route from the A85 through Glen Lochy that provides access to both. However, the walk came with a hazard of its own right at the very start: a crossing of the River Lochy that the Walkhighlands guidebook warned would be impossible when the river is in full spate.

In recent years, I’ve taken to crossing rivers using the ‘Peter Salenieks’ method (named after an erstwhile trekking companion who specialises in it) of simply wading across without bothering to take my shoes off. Done quickly enough in big leather boots, you can actually avoid getting your feet wet. It’s not a trick I wanted to risk in winter though. In temperatures of zero degrees or less, there would be no chance of wet feet drying inside wet boots. They would simply become frozen cold.

We arrived at the car park in Glen Lochy at 8am, having driven in the dark from Taynuilt. The first few rays of sunlight were penetrating the gloom. A single overnight camper van was parked up and we were the first hikers there.

The river crossing came just 500m from the car. I spotted several feasible crossing points as we walked along the riverbank, and was dismayed to find that the official fording place was located at the widest part of the river. There were some stepping stones, but they were widely spaced and rimed with ice; they would have required giant strides – risky on an icy surface.

To make things more interesting, parts of the water were iced over, though not thickly enough to stand on. There was nothing for it but to take our boots off, roll up our trouser legs and get on with it. I was already prepared for this. I had packed a spare pair of socks so that I could wear them to buffer the jagged pebbles that I expected to line the riverbed. I had also packed a towel to dry and warm my feet when I got to the other side.

I didn’t hesitate. With boots in hand, I strode across, breaking the ice as I went. The water came to just below my knee and was as cold as I expected. Edita must have been right behind me, for she climbed onto the far bank at the same time as I did.

My feet were frozen. I removed my socks as quickly as possible and warmed my feet with the towel. The tootsies were still painfully cold by the time I’d rubbed them dry, put on fresh socks and laced up my boots; but they were dry, and I hoped they would warm up as I walked.

Our next hazard was to pass underneath the railway line in a tunnel designed for hobbits. I needed to take my pack off and crawl like a crab. A side stream lapped at the walkway; the guidebook had warned that this would also be impassable when the river was high, but today it was OK.

The fun wasn’t over. We ascended a firm, frosty path beside the stream for about 500m. My toes were just starting to warm up when we reached a second side stream that we would have to cross. It was narrower than the river and the stepping stones were closer together, but they were just as icy. I didn’t have the patience to go through the rigmarole of taking my boots off and putting the cold, wet socks back on again, so I risked the stepping stones. Somehow, we both managed to get across without ducking our feet or (the outcome I was expecting) sliding arse over tit.

The trail steepened to reach a pine plantation, then passed through it on a pathway that appeared to have been constructed entirely from frozen peat. This path would certainly be worse in summer, when you would have no option but to sprawl through midden. But frozen peat isn’t entirely harmless. While it generally held firm to our weight, this wasn’t guaranteed. We tiptoed up this hell-spawned walkway, conscious that any moment the surface might break and swallow a leg. It was here I discovered why my new trekking pole (see the previous post) had been priced at only £12.50. The locking mechanism didn’t cause the pole to instantly retract like my broken pole of the day before; it shrank gradually as I strode onwards. Little by little my posture regressed from homo erectus to australopithecus, and every so often, when I started smelling peat, I would have to stop and adjust the pole.

Towards the top of this section, the trail veered into the forest and we had to be careful not to get skewered on twiggy branches. I was glad to pass through a gate in a deer fence into open moorland.

To our left, the route to Ben Lui followed the fence along the forest boundary before striking off up grassy slopes. The summit looked just a stone’s throw away, the high point at the top of a matted hillside. To its right, the skyline dropped 300m to an inconspicuous col before rising just 100m more to the summit of Ben of Cleeves, a far less prominent mountain that extended towards the forest in the form of a broad shoulder.

Ben Lui may be considered the finest mountain in the Southern Highlands, but principally due to its north-eastern aspect, on which it is buffered by the well-fashioned corrie of Coire Gaothach. I have a photo that I took with a zoom lense from the summit of Bheinn Mhanach, 18km away, on a snowy March weekend in 2013. The peak rises majestically like a marble throne above arctic tundra, and ever since I took that shot I’ve wanted to climb it.

Mountains have many aspects, though. From the north side, Ben Lui is decidedly unmajestic. IMO, the word that best describes its northern ascent route is ‘slog’. Give me two words and it would be ‘bloody slog’, and that’s the polite version. And yet this is its most popular route. The reasons for this are twofold: it’s closer to the road, and – perhaps more importantly from a Munro-bagger’s point-of-view – Ben of Cleeves lies on this side. If you want to climb two Munros in a day, then this is the way to do it.

We were hiking up a grassy bog that had iced over in places. Frozen sheets the size of tennis courts peppered the hillside, prompting wide diversions. The trail was faint and we frequently lost it, plodding up rutted slopes until it re-emerged. On ascents like this, a trekking pole is useful, but I was quite unable to put any weight on mine without halving its size. A walking stick that you can’t put any weight on is rather like a wheelchair without a seat. It was no more useful for balance and propulsion than Fred Astaire’s cane. If only I’d worn a top hat, white tie and tails, then I could at least have looked the part.

I’d also had ‘stomach issues’ that morning and had packed toilet paper in case of an emergency. The roll wasn’t needed, but as I dropped further behind Edita, it became clear that I wasn’t performing with my usual virility (yes, virility). At around 800m, I started ‘bonking’, as they say across the pond. Four separate hikers overtook me. Edita continued to race ahead and I had to keep asking her to stop and wait. We were still a good 200m beneath the summit when I asked for a break. We sat down in the grass, and hot tea and a clif bar gave me a small energy boost.

This wasn’t a classic ascent. We lost the trail again, and ended up taking a more direct route up boulder-strewn slopes to reach the south ridge, which we joined only 100m short of the summit. Here the going became easier. There were some sections of easy scrambling to provide interest after the rotten slog.

We reached the top at 11.30 and found ourselves bathed in sunshine. There were two summits: a flat, indistinct one and a more prominent, jagged rock tower a little further away. I instinctively continued to the second one, where one of the hikers who had passed me earlier stood silhouetted against the sky. It was one of those deceptive peaks where whichever summit you stand on, the other looks slightly higher. The OS map unhelpfully placed the 1,130m label directly between both.

I believe that the rocky one is the true summit, but it was cold and windy up there, so we returned to the other summit to eat our lunch in a sheltered spot. A hungry raven kept us company as we gazed west to Ben of Cleeves, which was looking rather pathetic 200m below us, a grassy shoulder with no obvious peak.

We left Ben Lui’s summit at midday and followed a good path down to the col and back up the other side. We were standing on the lonely top of the 916m little chap less than an hour later. We looked across a crumpled landscape of low-lying frosted hills towards the western isles. Behind us, Ben Lui’s lampshade-like flat top stood high above. I was glad we had climbed that one first. By contrast Ben of Cleeves felt innocuous, the high point on a long, plateaued ridge. To be honest, I felt a bit embarrassed about ticking it off as a Munro.

Our descent was quick back to the col, but arduous beneath. There were places where the boggy trail had frozen solid. Torville and Dean would have loved it, but I wouldn’t have managed three steps before flying feet first down the hill like a recumbent long-jumper. We had to skirt above these sections on tufted grassy banks.

By now I was running on empty, staggering downwards by sheer force of gravity, unable to concentrate on anything more than putting one foot in front of the other. But I didn’t realise how tired I was until Edita started a conversation about heading down a bar for New Year’s Eve.

I stopped dead and focused my attention on the question.

‘Why do you have to mention that now?’ I said.

At that precise moment, the thought of going out partying punctured my head like an arrow, deflating my remaining energy bags.

‘Jesus, I’m knackered.’

I sat down on the grassy slope with my pack still on. I could easily have slept for a few minutes. Meanwhile, Edita continued onwards. When she looked back 100m further down the hill, I was still slumped there. She probably thought I was sulking.

‘Come on. Let’s go. It’s embarrassing,’ she shouted up at me.

I rose wearily to my feet and resumed my plodding. I caught up with Edita at the forest line and we stopped for a second lunch. The sandwich buoyed me up again, and I was able to complete the descent of the boggy forest trail without any further drama.

Back at the River Lochy, we decided to look for an easier crossing point than the official one. A well-trodden trail along the south bank revealed that we weren’t the first people to have this thought. At the bend opposite the car park, we found our spot. A pebble beach reduced the width of the river by half, and what remained looked shallow.

Since our car was just 50m away and I could warm my feet inside, I decided to do a Peter Salenieks. I strode across purposefully. The water came up to the top of my boots, but the crossing took only a few seconds. I was pleasantly surprised to reach the other side with my feet still dry. Edita was wearing approach shoes, so the technique was less effective for her, but she was soon able to dry her feet in the car.

I felt a faint glow of satisfaction as we drove back to Taynuilt with two more Munros under our belts. It had been a rewarding experience, all things considered. I may come across as a grumpy old duffer, but I had actually quite enjoyed it. But while I know that some people consider Ben Lui to be the finest peak in the Southern Highlands, I would need to drink a lot of whisky to count myself among them.

The story continues with our ascent of Ben Cruachan…

You can see all photos from our walk in my Loch Etive and Glen Awe Flickr album.

Route map

Ben Lui and Beinn a’ Chleibh
Total distance: 11.15km. Total ascent/descent: 1,174m.
View route map and download GPX

Warning: This blog post contains several bad puns.

‘How many Munros will you climb next week,’ my 84-year-old father asked me over Christmas dinner, ‘seven or eight?’

‘Haha,’ I replied, choking on a Brussels sprout. ‘Not in winter. We’ll be lucky to get up one.’

It was the fifth year in a row that Edita and I would be spending the Christmas period in Scotland trying to get up some hills, and our expectations weren’t high. Icy blizzards, deep snow, freezing fog and murderous summit winds had been our usual fare for the previous four.

At that time of year there are just seven or eight hours of daylight, depending on how far north you are, which means that only shorter routes are possible. Snow conditions can reduce this still further. Walk timings in guidebooks are estimated for summer conditions; fresh or deep snow means that a walk can take two or three hours longer.

Our Munro tally for the previous four Christmas trips was 2, 1, 2 and 3, respectively. We had little hope that this year would be any better, but you’ve just got to pack your big boots, crampons and ice axes and get on with it.

We booked a cottage at the delightful Bonawe House, nestling in woodland close to the shores of Loch Etive in the village of Taynuilt. It was a new area for us that I was looking forward to exploring.

Four Munros rise above Glen Awe, a wide valley spanned by the A85 from Crianlarich to Oban in the southern highlands. These are some of Scotland’s most southerly and accessible Munros, the highest and most dominant of which is Ben Cruachan. If four Munros would not be enough for us (unlikely but possible) then the Ben Lui group provided some additional peaks a short drive further west.

It was a beautiful crisp, clear Saturday as we took the road to Inveraray over the quaintly named Rest and Be Thankful pass. This is one of the most enjoyable roads in Britain, which not only crosses a pass but weaves along the shores of Loch Fyne, surrounded by forests and mountains. It was also quite a healthy road trip for Edita. We stopped for lunch at the Inveraray Inn, where she ordered a Strawberry and Lime Rekorderlig and was informed by the barman that it would cover ‘two of her five [fruit and veg] a day’. I was tempted to order three to go with my haggis and black pudding pizza, but I was driving.

The fun drive was tempered by the knowledge that this would have been a great day for hill walking and we weren’t likely to have many more that week.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I looked at the Met Office mountain forecast in Taynuilt that evening. On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday there would be clear skies, light winds and bright sunshine. Temperatures on the summits would be around -1 to -2°C, positively balmy for a Scottish winter. We had already noted as we drove down the hill from Inveraray that there was little if any snow on the mountaintops. This meant that we wouldn’t be slowed by the conditions.

Even so, we hadn’t yet acquired our hill legs. Edita had been in Haiti all year; aside from an ascent of the highest mountain in the Dominican Republic, neither of us had done much hill walking recently and we were likely to be out of condition. I wasn’t super keen to do a massive hill walk on our very first day, but we had no choice. In Scotland in winter, when opportunities come your way, you have to grasp them firmly with both hands.

Somewhat appropriately therefore, all of the Munros in that area of Scotland seem to come in pairs. I chose the shortest walk, up Beinn Eunaich (989m) and Beinn a’Chochuill (980m). The first of these name translates as Fowling Hill, suggesting that it was previously a venue for grouse hunting (and not because Vinnie Jones once climbed it). The derivation of Beinn a’Chochuill’s name is less clear. The name translates variously as Hill of the Shell and Hooded Peak. Neither of these seem to have much relevance, though the latter is more appropriate if you consider the mountain’s anglicised name, Ben O’Cockle. (It will come as no surprise to learn that Beinn Eunaich’s anglicised name is Ben Eunuch.)

The Walkhighlands website estimated it to be a 5½ to 6½ hour walk, which should give us plenty of time to amble up and down, even in the reduced daylight hours. Even if we didn’t have our hill legs yet, I thought to myself, we should at least make an attempt. Ben O’Cockle and Ben Eunuch on our first full day: what did I have to lose?

It was obvious that we wouldn’t be needing axes or crampons, but fear of cold toes led me to wear my big Hanwag B1 boots. These are the most flexible boots that are still rigid enough to take a crampon if needed. While a crampon wouldn’t be needed, the boots are warmer than my approach shoes. They would also remain watertight in the event of becoming immersed in peat bog. They are, however, heavier and less comfortable than approach shoes.

I wasn’t expecting the hills to be busy, and was surprised to see quite a few cars parked in the quiet back road at the base of the climb. I was fortunate to slide into the one remaining parking space as two more cars followed behind.

It was already light at 9am when we started walking. There wasn’t a wisp of cloud anywhere; no snow on the summits, but plenty of frost on the cold, hard ground. Soon after setting off, I discovered that the locking mechanism on my trekking pole, that I’d last used on Pico Duarte in August, was broken. The pole extended with every swing of my arm, and it felt like I was shaking a cane at a blackboard. I resigned myself to strapping it to my pack and climbing without it.

A clear track slanted up the side of Ben Eunuch in the direction of Ben O’Cockle, our first objective. We were able to follow this track at a brisk pace as it rose gently above the valley to our left. Across the valley a picturesque corrie nestled beneath another high peak. I discovered later that this was Stob Daimh, an outlying Munro on Ben Cruachan’s summit ridge.

The track passed through a paddock of highland cows, and we experienced a slight delay. These giant, hairy bovines have horns the size of bazookas and look absolutely terrifying. In fact they are placid animals who are no more likely to harm you than your granny. They also have very long hair that often covers their eyes; so in the unlikely event of getting chased by one, you can always drop a banana skin and they’d be unlikely to see it. Edita has an obsession with them, and is quite unable to pass a souvenir shop in Scotland without buying some highland cow memorabilia. We had to stop for a few minutes as she posed for photos, and I was concerned that she might attempt to detach a forelock.

The track rose gradually to an altitude 400m, then swung to the left to pass beneath Ben O’Cockle. We left it to climb more steeply up Ben O’Cockle’s unobtrusive southern ridge. An indistinct path zigzagged up a grassy hillside; it might have been boggy on another day, but the frost made it firm underfoot and we were able to ascend rapidly.

By 11am we had ascended to 900m and joined Ben O’Cockle’s main summit ridge. We turned to the left and walked for nearly 1km along its broad, grassy crest. The last time I walked along a summit ridge in Scotland, in Glen Coe last year, an icy wind hurled rain into my face and the view beneath me was a murky grey soup. This time the view was clear and we could see for miles. It was great to be back.

We reached our first summit, 980m Ben O’Cockle, at 11.30. We had been alone for the entire ascent, but we had seen other figures on the mountain, and on the summit several hikers converged. A father and daughter sat beside the summit cairn in Christmas hats, eating their lunch. We found a mossy, sheltered spot about 20m away to guzzle some food of our own. Just as I was about to sit down, a man emerged from another direction with a loose dog that came hurtling towards me. I hastily packed my food away.

A few minutes later I overheard the man having an argument with another hiker who had just arrived.

‘Don’t let him eat your sandwich,’ the man cried.

‘Get him away from my sandwich,’ the other one roared.

The view from our seat was somewhat unsettling. We looked west towards a long, jagged ridge which I knew must be the Ben Cruachan massif. I also knew that we would have to traverse it in the following days if the good weather held. I was alarmed to note that the highest point on the ridge appeared to be a needle-like pinnacle that wouldn’t have looked out of place inside a shark’s jaw. Its facing edge looked similarly sharp and exposed. With a certain inevitability, a glance at my map revealed that this was indeed the summit of Ben Cruachan, and the edge was the route we would need to descend to reach Stob Daimh. I felt an involuntary clenching of my buttocks as I munched on my sandwich.

For now, however, the walking was easy. We returned the way we had come, then continued along the ridge. We dropped to a 728m col, then climbed back up the other side to the summit of 989m Ben Eunuch. These easy ridge walks, gazing across glens to surrounding peaks, are my favourite places in Scotland. We enjoyed a second lunch on our second summit. Ben Cruachan was further away now, and looking more tame.

Our descent was less enjoyable, a 2km slog down Ben Eunuch’s south ridge. Silvery lochs glistened beneath us as the sun dropped towards the horizon. Towards the bottom of the ridge, the path veered off to the right for a toe-jarring descent on an eroded path back to the track that we’d ascended. This section was described in the guidebook as ‘unpleasantly steep’, which was somewhat understated. It wasn’t so easy without a stick and uncomfortable in big boots. When we finally reached the track, we collapsed on a bank for five minutes of rest.

My feet were hurting, but Edita’s were worse. We’d both had a surprise when we used the sophisticated laser-driven foot-measuring machine in our local Cotswold Outdoor shop a few days earlier. I had discovered for the very first time that one of my feet is a full size smaller than the other one. This may help to explain why I sometimes struggle to walk in a straight line, something I had previously put down to alcohol. On the positive side, I would presumably find it easier to complete a circular walk like this one, as long as I did it clockwise.

Edita’s discovery was more significant. She’d found out that her feet are disproportionately wide for her shoe size, causing her feet to be squashed laterally. I tried to console her by suggesting that she could have fun next time she trekked in the Himalayas if she walked barefoot in the snow and pretended that a baby yeti had been past. She didn’t find this suggestion helpful.

With our feet rested, we had an easy walk back down the track to our car. We arrived just before three o’clock. Conditions had been perfect. Not only had the ground been free of snow, but boggy sections had been frosty and firm. If anything, conditions were easier than they might have been in summer. One more task remained that day: I needed a replacement trekking pole.

We drove 30km down the road to the port of Oban. This town nestles in a sheltered harbour, enclosed by the island of Kerrera, which lies a kilometre offshore. It’s encircled on three sides by small hills, but the harbour creates a feeling of space. Its population is little more than 8,000, but it’s the major metropolis for southwest Scotland, with a store of some sort for every need. In the case of outdoor shops, however, the emphasis of the preceding sentence is very much on the ‘of some sort’. My most promising option for trekking poles was a ‘buy one, get one free’ pair for £24.99 in Mountain Warehouse, the Wetherspoons of technical equipment.

They say that you get what you pay for in life. A pair of Black Diamond trekking poles might set you back £100. I was about to find out why these were priced at just £12.50 each.

The story continues the following day on Ben Lui…

You can see all photos from our walk in my Loch Etive and Glen Awe Flickr album.

Route map

Beinn a’ Chochuill and Beinn Eunaich
Total distance: 14.49km. Total ascent/descent: 1,275m.
View route map and download GPX

The title needs all of those adjectives, for if I dropped any one of them, it would mean a different list.

A list of the 10 highest mountains ever climbed would simply be a list of the world’s 10 highest mountains because – yes – all 10 of them have been climbed.

What about a chronological list of the 10 highest mountains ever climbed? Well, there was a time in history when none of the world’s top 10 mountains had been climbed. What was the highest mountain ever climbed back in those days? And what was the one before that? If you’re intrigued to find out then read on. I’m actually going to make this list reverse chronological. The more you read of it, the further back in time we will go.

The further back in time that we go, however, the less that we know. There was a time in the dim and distant past when people climbed mountains and didn’t make a big song and dance about it. They reached a summit and didn’t appreciate the significance; it was just a point on their walk with a nice view; they didn’t know just how high they were; or their ascent was disputed, they claimed a summit but we can’t be sure. And further back in time, people simply didn’t write about or record their ascents – we simply have no way of knowing which summits were reached and when. By the time I get to the last mountain on this list, I have to confess, we can’t know for sure that at the time its summit was reached, it was the highest mountain ever climbed. Hence the qualifying adjective, highest confirmed mountain ever climbed.

The final adjective in the title, mountain, is more usually a noun, but here I’m using it as an adjective – mountain (adj.) summit (n.) – to make one final subtle distinction. In the 1920s and 1930s, British climbers such as Edward Norton and Frank Smythe were beavering about very high on the slopes of Everest without actually reaching the summit. In 1909 the Duke of Abruzzi and his party got to within touching distance of the top of Chogolisa in the Karakoram without stepping on the very top. All of these people were likely standing on points on the earth’s surface higher than anyone had ever stood before. But this post is about highest summits, so they are excluded from this list.

Clear as the sky on top of Ben Nevis? Splendid. So let’s get on with the list.

1 Everest, Nepal/Tibet (8,848m)

First ascent: 1953

It took eight British expeditions spanning the 1920s, 1930s and early 1950s, and one Swiss near-miss in 1952 before Tenzing Norgay of India and Edmund Hillary of New Zealand stood atop the highest point on earth on 29 May 1953.

Tenzing personally had been on seven Everest expeditions and no one was more deserving of being the first than he. All of the attempts in the 1920s and 1930s had been via the North Ridge on the Tibetan side. It wasn’t until Nepal opened its borders to tourism in 1950 that a key was found to a route up from the south via the Southeast Ridge. It was along this route that Tenzing and Hillary finally strode to the top.

2 Annapurna, Nepal (8,091m)

First ascent: 1950

The opening of Nepal in 1950 had also been the key to the first ever ascent of an 8,000m peak. With Nepal closed, countless expeditions had been launched to K2, Nanga Parbat and Kangchenjunga in what was then British India, all without success.

The French team that arrived in Nepal in 1950, didn’t even know which peak they were going to climb, let alone by which route. They explored Dhaulagiri and then the northwest spur of Annapurna before deciding to concentrate on the technically easier but more dangerous north face.

Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal reached the summit on 3 June 1950. Their frostbitten, snowblind descent has become the stuff of legend.

3 Nanda Devi, India (7,816m)

First ascent: 1936

India’s second highest mountain, Nanda Devi, was considered to be one of the most inaccessible mountains in the world. Surrounded by a ring of towering peaks, just finding a way to its base had eluded explorers for decades. The secret was unlocked in 1934 when the British mountaineers Bill Tilman and Eric Shipton discovered a route into the Nanda Devi Sanctuary by the precipitous Rishi Ganga gorge.

When a team of young American climbers invited Tilman to join them on an expedition to climb the peak two years later, he jumped at the chance. He led them into the sanctuary and reached the summit on 29 August 1936 with fellow Briton Noel Odell, who was better known as the man who watched George Mallory and Sandy Irvine disappear into the mist on Everest’s Northeast Ridge in 1924.

Tilman’s book about the expedition is believed to be the inspiration for The Ascent of Rum Doodle.

4 Kamet, India (7,756m)

First ascent: 1931

The British team who made the first ascent of Kamet in 1931 included the very same Eric Shipton who had discovered the route into the Nanda Devi Sanctuary with Bill Tilman in 1934.

Kamet lies just north of Nanda Devi, close to the Chinese border in the Garhwal region of northern India. The team was led by Frank Smythe. They followed a route from the south up the East Kamet Glacier, reconnoitred by Charles Meade in 1913.

Shipton, Smythe, R.L. Holdsworth and expedition sirdar Lewa Sherpa reached the summit on 21 June 1931. They were followed two days later by Raymond Greene (brother of the novelist Graham Greene), local porter Kesar Singh, and the delightfully named Capt. Eugene St. John Birnie.

5 Jongsong Peak, Nepal/India/Tibet (7,462m)

First ascent: 1930

Jongsong Peak has the rare distinction of being a mountain on a tripoint, or border of three countries. Its first ascent was the consolation prize of German Gunther Dyhrenfurth’s international expedition to climb Kangchenjunga, after their main objective was abandoned when one of their porters was killed in an avalanche.

Camped within Nepal on the north side of Kangchenjunga, Dyhrenfurth decided that his party would cross the border into Sikkim, northern India. From their base on the Jonsong La, the Austrian Erwin Schneider and German Hermann Hoerlin reached the summit on 3 June 1930. They were followed five days later by Dyhrenfurth, the German Uli Wieland, Swiss Marcel Kurz and the very same Frank Smythe that we met on Kamet (you will notice a pattern emerging).

6 Pik Lenin, Kyrgyzstan (7,132m)

First ascent: 1928

Prior to making the first ascent of Jongsong Peak, Erwin Schneider was just a 22-year-old student when he joined an German-Austrian expedition to the Soviet Pamirs, where he climbed eight peaks over 6,000m

He reached the summit of Pik Lenin with the Germans Karl Wien and Eugene Allwein on 25 September 1928. Nowadays, the standard route up Pik Lenin is from the northern Krygyz side. Although this route is technically easy, it is long and dangerous, and crosses a notorious snow slope that has been the site of many tragedies.

Schneider and co. started from the south side in Tajikistan. They climbed a more challenging route via the Greater Saukdara Glacier, Krylenko Pass, and the northeast ridge.

7 Pauhunri, India/Tibet (7,128m)

First ascent: 1911

When the Scottish physiologist Alexander Kellas reached the summit of Pauhunri on 14 June 1911, accompanied by two Sherpas known only as Sony and ‘Tuny’s brother’, he had no idea he was standing on the highest summit that had ever been climbed. Moreover, he remained ignorant of the fact for the rest of his life.

In fact, the whole world remained ignorant of the fact until historian Ian Mitchell started researching a biography of Kellas nearly 100 years later. When Kellas climbed Pauhunri, its height was believed to be 7,065m. It wasn’t until years later that the mountain was properly surveyed, and its true height measured at 7,128m.

8 Trisul, India (7,120m)

First ascent: 1907

Trisul, in the Garhwal region of northwest India, is one of the ring of peaks that circle Nanda Devi. It is actually a ridge of three peaks that is believed to resemble a trident, hence its name.

Its first ascent on 12 June 1907 by British doctor Tom Longstaff, Italian mountain guides Henri and Alexis Brocherel, and the Gurkha Karbir Burathoki, was notable not only because it was the highest summit that had ever been reached, but because of the speed of their ascent.

Starting out at 5.30am from 17,450 feet (or 5,319m) above the Trisul Glacier on the northeast flank of the mountain, they climbed roped for most of the ascent. They reached the summit at 4pm, having climbed 1,800 vertical metres of virgin snow slopes in a little over 10 hours, at an altitude that no one had ever climbed before.

Alexis Brocherel had led for most of the ascent, and Longstaff, at the back of the rope, had doubted whether he would be able to keep up. But Henri, in front of him, had offered to pull on the rope as much as he needed. If anyone considered this cheating, however, Longstaff made up for it by cutting steps up the final summit snow slopes, being the only member of the party who was wearing crampons.

9 Aconcagua, Argentina (6,959m)

First ascent: 1897

When the Swiss guide Matthias Zurbriggen stood on the highest point in South America on 14 January 1897, having climbed the mountain via what is now the standard route up the Canaleta from the Horcones Valley, he stood there alone.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. His British expedition leader Edward Fitzgerald had been the driving force and the expedition’s main financier. But Fitzgerald had a peculiar problem.

The expedition had been epic. The team had spent weeks at high altitude, and made numerous attempts to get higher still before retreating to the Horcones Valley and trying again. But every time the team climbed higher than 6,000m, Fitzgerald broke down. In despair, as leader of the expedition, he ordered Zurbriggen to continue to the summit without him. When team members Stuart Vines and Nicola Lanti repeated the ascent on 13 February, Fitzgerald was left behind again.

10 Chimborazo, Ecuador (6,310m)

First ascent: 1880

This is where things start to get hazy. Before Zurbriggen climbed Aconcagua, the highest summit that had ever been reached might well be Chimborazo, but we will never know for sure.

We do know for sure that British mountaineer Edward Whymper made the first ascent of Chimborazo on 4 January 1880 with the Italian guides Jean-Antoine and Louis Carrel. It’s something I’ve written a lot about in this blog and in my book Feet and Wheels to Chimborazo.

Despite taking a 10ft flag pole with them to plant on the summit, locals questioned their ascent. And so, to silence the doubters, the three men returned with local Ecuadorians David Beltrán and Francisco Campaña, and reached the summit for a second time on 3 July. They collected ash that had drifted to Chimborazo from the summit of nearby Cotopaxi, which happened to be erupting as they climbed.

So they definitely reached the summit, but was it the highest mountain ever climbed?

Other potential highest mountains ever climbed

We can keep going back in time, to 1872, when Wilhelm Reiss and Angel Escobar made the first ascent of 5,897m Cotopaxi, or to 1848, when an American team made the first recorded ascent of 5,611m Pico de Orizaba in Mexico.

But there are other possibilities…

In 1892, the British explorer Martin Conway, leader of an international expedition to the Karakoram, claimed to have made the first ascent of 6,888m Pioneer Peak, which would have made it the highest mountain ever climbed. But Pioneer Peak turned out to be merely a shoulder of 7,312m Baltoro Kangri (then known as Golden Throne). Even more disappointingly, a later survey of Pioneer Peak measured it at a comparatively flaccid 6,499m.

More impressively, Englishman William Graham, and Swiss Emil Boss and Ulrich Kauffman claimed to have climbed to within an ice axe of the summit of 7,338m Kabru East in the Indian Himalaya in 1883. But how far from the summit was that? Their ascent was disputed and dismissed by the mountaineering community, though it has been reassessed by modern historians, and in the course of their expedition they may well have climbed other summits that were higher than Chimborazo.

Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is Llullaillaco (6,739m), a dormant volcano in the Puna de Atacama, a desert region on the northern borderlands of Argentina and Chile. Its first recorded ascent took place in 1952, but in 1999 a team of archaeologists discovered the mummified remains of three Inca children close to the summit.

It is likely, therefore, that the summit of Llullaillaco was reached as early as the 15th century, when the Incas expanded their empire until it covered a 4,000km length from Colombia to Chile. But, alas, the Incas left no written record.

And if Llullaillaco then as we go further back into the mists of time, what other high mountains had been climbed?

The Rhigos Hills form an escarpment on the northern side of an area of Wales known simply as The Valleys, a string of heavily populated parallel rifts running north to south through the upland terrain north of Cardiff. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries the Valleys were a centre for coal mining and a breeding ground for radical politics. Labour politician Aneurin Bevan, remembered as the architect of the National Health Service, came from the area. People my age who grew up watching the vidiprinter on BBC’s Grandstand every Saturday afternoon will look at a map and recognise the names of many of the towns from the rugby scores: Neath, Maesteg, Pontypridd, Merthyr Tydfil, Ebbw Vale, Abertillery, Pontypool. The area has produced as many international rugby players as left-wing politicians.

The Rhigos Hills stand at the head of the Rhondda Valley, famous for its mining disasters and communism. The name Rhigos derives from the Welsh word grugos, meaning ‘heathery’. While there is heather on those moorlands, nowadays the hills are more foresty, not to mention bedecked in wind farms that can be see from far and wide.

Their highest point, 600m Craig y Llyn, whose name translates as ‘Cliff of the Lake’, shares a distinction with the better known Pen y Fan: both are county tops. Where Pen y Fan is the highest point in the old Welsh county of Brecknockshire, Craig y Llyn is the highest point in Glamorgan.

Edita and I have been gradually ticking off the county tops over the last few years. In England this has meant taking photographs of a lump of granite beside the road, but in Wales it has caused us to visit some interesting hill areas that we may not otherwise have explored (such as a yomp across the giant peat plateau of Great Rhos earlier this year).

Last month, Edita returned from Haiti for a few days’ R&R, so we decided to nip across the border to South Wales and bag the highest point in Glamorgan.

Craig y Llyn lies just off the Heads of the Valleys Road, a 4-lane highway sweeping between high mountains, that was finally completed this year after 23 years. The road cost around £2 billion to build. The near quarter-century of roadworks led locals to christen it the Road to Hell (except that ‘not even Chris Rea would come here’ as one wag put it). I’m sure those who haven’t died of old age during its construction will come to consider it worth every penny. For the time being, before it becomes clogged with traffic as all these fast routes eventually do, it’s certainly fun to drive along.

Leaving the Heads of the Valleys Road at the town of Hirwaun, we drove up to the Rhigos Viewpoint car park on the escarpment edge. To climb the escarpment, this side road took the sort of steep hairpins that attract cyclists like flies to a cow-pat.

It had been a memorable approach by road, but our attention was soon to be drawn to one rather more exhilarating transport route.

As we walked west along the crest of the escarpment, we could see a set of electricity cables descend from a prominent pylon at the top of the cliff. The cable passed above a lake (Llyn Fawr, the lake from which Craig y Llyn takes its name) to reach another pylon in forest far below.

From somewhere in this direction we heard some yells. I thought nothing of it, but Edita was paying more attention.

‘Whoa, look at that,’ she cried.

‘What, I can’t see anything?’

‘There were some people on the cable!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s a zip wire. That tower at the top of the cliff – people are jumping from there.’

I could now see that what I thought was a pylon and electricity cable was something more substantial. I know that zip wires are becoming popular in some mountain areas. Their construction is sometimes controversial because people believe that it destroys the natural environment (which it certainly does, in the same way as cars and roads and houses). I had no idea that I had chosen to climb a hill that was also the site of such a tourist attraction. We were heading directly towards it, and within five minutes we had decided that although it would mean our having to climb the hill twice, if it wasn’t too expensive then we would give the zip wire a go.

A good path passed through grassland dappled with young pine trees. The tower was about 100m off-route, but when we got there it was completely deserted. A locked wooden cage stood at the end of a short metal walkway. There was no evidence that this was a managed tourist attraction. Had Edita not seen the thrill seekers zooming down, then for all we knew it could have been a Welsh version of the The Wicker Man, ready to claim its next victim.

If I had been more observant, I would have noticed a feature some distance below the bottom of the cliff labelled on the Ordnance Survey map as Zip World. I might have wondered why a trouser fastener superstore was marked on a leisure map. Later that evening, I did a spot of googling and discovered that Craig y Llyn is home to The Phoenix, which is advertised as the world’s fastest seated zip line. It turns out that you have to book the ride in advance and meet your guide at the bottom, where you are given a briefing and some useful equipment before being driven up in a minibus.

Disappointed, we continued onwards into pine forest. The highest point in Glamorgan is marked by a white Ordnance Survey trig pillar beside a dirt track. The top of Craig y Llyn is a huge forested plateau, criss-crossed by service roads. A short distance beyond the summit, we emerged from the forest again to see a vast expanse of giant wind turbines stretching to the far horizon, like a scene from War of the Worlds.

Leaving the service roads behind, we found narrower walking trails on the north side of the hill. One path contoured through moorland halfway up the escarpment, with fine views out across the rolling hills of the Heads of the Valleys. Another, more treacherous path descended into the forest and weaved between the pine trees, whose broken branches threatened to skewer me at eye level. At one point I ducked beneath a dead pine that had fallen across the trail. I brought my head up too soon, right onto one of these lethal wooden spikes. I was wearing a baseball cap to protect my shiny pate, but blood was drawn and for the following week I had to attend Teams meetings bearing a scar that made me look like Mikhail Gorbachev.

At the bottom of the forest we reached another service road that provided sweeping views north to the Bannau Brycheiniog. I was easily able to identify the twin summits of Corn Du and Pen y Fan on a distant horizon. These two adjacent peaks seem to take the shape of elevated trapeziums from almost any direction, and certainly from the north, west, and now the south.

Before taking a rough trail across the hairpins back up to Rhigos Viewpoint, we had an opportunity to walk underneath the lower end of the zip wire, shortly before another group of screaming thrill riders whizzed past overhead.

If you fancy riding on a zip wire then I imagine this one must be one of the more picturesque. If you’re not busy gazing at the water beneath your feet then the view is extensive, and crowned with the Brecon Beacons if you look far enough.

For the crowded communities of South Wales, this place is within easy reach. For the rest of us it’s worth a short diversion on a trip to the Bannau Brycheiniog. I may come back one day. In some ways our walk felt incomplete; I guess we need to give the zip wire a go.

Route map

Craig y Llyn
Total distance: 10.27km. Total ascent/descent: 322m.
View route map and download GPX

Here’s what I wrote in Seven Steps from Snowdon to Everest about climbing the ladders of Everest’s Second Step, which some people consider to be the big peak’s most daunting feature.

The Englishman [Leo] Houlding graded the top section of the Second Step an HVS, or Hard Very Severe… The American [Conrad] Anker rated it 5.10, which is a climbing grade, and not its height in feet and inches. At that moment I could have LOL’d at these abbreviations. There was a ladder, and I was fine with ladders.

The main difficulty I had on the Second Step was lifting my leg high enough to climb a big round boulder between the Step’s two ladders. A can-can dancer would have had no difficulty on the boulder, but for me the easy bit was the ladder.

And yet 5 years later a series of a ladders on Corno Piccolo in the Italian Apennines gave me the heebie-jeebies. Two long vertical ladders towered 1,000m above a deep valley. The ladder sections were separated by a tricky move that involved putting one foot onto a piton that had been banged into a rock. After retreating from this devilish abyss we bumped into some hikers who told us that the route we’d been attempting had actually been closed by the authorities due to its danger factor.

Ever since that incident, the promise of ladders on a hiking route has made me nervous. Would they be like the cakewalk on Everest or the sphincter ticklers on Corno Piccolo?

The Tour du Mont Blanc had been straightforward compared to our hike along Corsica’s GR20 the previous year. There had been comfortable paths and virtually no scrambling. As with the GR20, however, when I nearly died on the last day, the hardest part of the route came at the very end.

I had read somewhere that there were 11 ladders on the Grand Balcon Sud, the airy path coming into Chamonix from the Swiss border. The trip notes from our tour company, The Natural Adventure, had this to say about it:

The ladder section on this day is very steep and exposed, with some scrambling elements. For those with a fear of heights or who are feeling fatigued from the previous day’s walking, an alternative lower route along the Petit Balcon Sud to Chamonix is available.

Bugger. On a more positive note, the Cicerone guidebook was more sanguine about the ladders:

Although abruptly steep and seemingly endless, this whole series of aids should be perfectly safe.

We had enjoyed perfect weather for the first nine days of the Tour du Mont Blanc, but with a certain inevitability, the Lord Sod was presiding over court on the final day. The weather forecast was so bad on the designated day that we decided to take the low route into Chamonix. Luckily, we had a spare day before we had to catch our flight. We decided to spend it repeating the section from Tre-le-Champ to Chamonix, this time up and over the ladders of the Grand Balcon Sud. The weather was still as promising as Harry Brook’s bowling, but it had to be done.

Just how bad were the ladders? As luck would have it, you can now see for yourself by watching my latest brace of top-notch videos. There are 28 minutes of footage in the latest pair. The first covers the Swiss section from Grand Col Ferret to Col de Balme, and the second the French section from Col de Balme to Chamonix.

You can watch the complete collection of my Tour du Mont videos here. You can also see all my photos from the trip here, and read the trip reports for Grand Col Ferret to Col de Balme, and Col de Balme to Chamonix here.

Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB): Grand Col Ferret to Col de Balme

Watch on YouTube

From the 2,537m Grand Col Ferret, we descended into the Swiss Val Ferret on a peaceful wooded valley contouring high above a neat, tarmacked road.

After a night in La Fouly, a quiet resort of mountain chalets, we continued to descend the valley on a trail that became precipitous in places as it rose above a crashing river. We passed through villages of timber-framed houses before climbing a forest path to the resort of Champex, a picturesque lakeside village nestling in a high combe.

After a night in Champex, we set out on the toughest day of the trek as we ascended above the treeline into a rocky valley. We crossed boulder fields to reach the 2,665m Fenetre d’Arpette, the highest point on the TMB. From there it was down, down, down on a rocky path back into forest, from where we followed an elevated bisse path that took us down into the village of Trient, with its colourful, spired church.

The next day we returned up the Trient valley then diverted up a forest trail to Col de Balme, the border between Switzerland and Italy, and a magnificent Mont Blanc viewpoint.

Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB): Col de Balme to Chamonix

Watch on YouTube

As we crossed the border from Switzerland into France at 2,191m Col de Balme, we were greeted with the best view of the TMB. We gazed down the valley towards Chamonix, with the icy crowns of Aiguille Verte and Mont Blanc on the left and the jagged cathedrals of Aiguilles Rouges on the opposite side.

We traversed the ridge to our right, across the colourful slopes of Aiguillette des Posettes, and examined the trails beneath the Aiguilles Rouges from afar, pondering which route to take into Chamonix. Then we descended below the pass of Tre-le-Champ into the village of Argentiere for the night.

The next day the weather was abysmal, the first bad day of our Tour. Thick grey clouds lay over the mountains above and the forecast was for heavy rain. We opted to take the lower Petit Balcon Sud route into Chamonix that day, on a sheltered forest trail a hundred metres or so above the valley floor.

We had an extra day to pass before our flight home, and we were keen to complete the higher route into Chamonix, up and over the ladders and via ferrata of the Grand Balcon Sud, which many people consider to be the highlight of the TMB. The weather wasn’t much better, but we decided to bite the bullet and get a taxi back to Tre-le-Champ to complete the circuit. Damp mist and showers were the order of the day, and we missed out on the views across to Aiguille Verte and Mont Blanc, but the ladders were exhilarating. We arrived back in Chamonix for a second time with a much greater sense of having completed the TMB.