Ben Nevis – Bagging our first Munro

To a Scottish person, a Munro is a mountain over 1000m in height. To hike up one is to "bag" it. Every Scot can tell you how many Munros they've bagged. 

Now a 1000m doesn't sound that high but the base of almost all Scottish mountains is close to sea level.  

Yesterday we bagged our first Munro, Ben Nevis the UKs highest peak.

Ben Nevis is walked by 12,000 people a year. In rough figures that is 400 a day. It is not walkable all year. Even without the winter snow, the almost constant cloud cover and accompanying rain mean that there are few great days to climb it.  We had checked the forecast and saw a window in the morning and knowing that thousands would attempt the climb we resolved to start early. The alarm went off at 5am.

We started at about 5m above sea level and hiked the 1345m to the summit. The hike has three distinct sections:

1. The base to the saddle: the path winds its way through silver birch forest and sheep paddocks with lush pasture and bracken fern. You can see the top of the mountain from here but it is not Ben Nevis. From the saddle you can see Ben Nevis and what you think is the summit but it is actually a lower ridge.

2. The switchbacks from the saddle to the ridge line. The path becomes steeper with rough stone steps giving way to loose rock in parts. From here you can see that the mountain becomes loose scoria to the top.

3. The ridgeline to the summit. This takes 30 minutes to walk. The ridge climbs in small plateaus, you keep seeing the next one and think you are almost at the top. The track is loose rocks and gravel but wander off line and it becomes very unstable with loose rock pieces about the size of a house brick.

At the summit there is an all weather hut, a survey cairn, and stone ruins of an old observatory.

We started walking at 6am and returned to the carpark around 12:30, exhausted but satisfied that we had bagged our first Munro.