1pm. Imagine an airport terminal where all the planes have been scheduled to leave simultaneously, and for some reason everyone’s dressed up for ski-ing.
Can you see it? How about if, as well as all of that, for some reason there are no dehumidifiers, it’s freezing, and there’s only one announcer who’s loud and for some reason, very Welsh.
We’re close now. Close to describing the impossibly-packed, condensation-filled, noisy, unbearably wet, railway terminus that calls itself a café, at the top of Snowdon. Once you’re in, it’s almost impossible to move. Elbows, rucksacks, poles, beanie hats, gloved fists of coffee, red-faces, shoe laces, cardboard cups, waterproofs, phones and jackets fill that hall like an ocean tumbling out of Millets the camping store.
It’s really three things, which I think might be part of the problem. It is the railway terminus for tickets down the mountain. Every now and then the Welsh announcer bursts over the hubbub with the names of the latest lucky standby-ticket owners who’d successfully bought their way down for £27. I was right - there never really was any way I’d take the train, but not for the reason of unfit laziness. It was simply not possible.
The massive shed is also a gift shop (because of course it is) as well as a nominal cafeteria. Nominal as in, there was a counter serving snacks about as far away as Glastonbury. And the multi-coloured ocean of high-end outdoorswear was not navigable. I caught a glimpse of the gift shop hoodies above the heads of about a million people. It was a long way to go for a cheap hoodie that says I climbed Snowdon.
I found my colleagues. Through some miraculous act of quick-thinking, Robert had actually found a seat and had gradually started bagsying spaces around him. In that place, there’s no seat left unsat upon for more than three seconds. I suspected Robert had used similar tactics to his approach to the trigpoint. Ah well.
“I’d imagined a tea room with doilies and a teapot,” said Vicky. Yes. I’d have settled for a little space to dry wet clothing a bit, and maybe a Jaffa cake. A decent cup of tea would have been a lovely bonus. I ended up leaning against a cold window, drinking water and eating sandwiches out of a zip-lock bag. I was grateful I’d saved them.
When I think of climbing a mountain, I don’t think of hundreds of people. I think of that Friedrich painting with the Victorian man looking out at the fog from a craggy peak. I think of Monarch of the Glen, or Lawren Harris, the great romantics with their themes of solitude, tranquility, beauty and vivid stillness... not several hundred soggy hikers trying to move in every direction all at once in a gigantic wet chicken shed.
2:30pm. It was time to start descending. Through the cloud, out of the misty rain and the hubbub of the summit. Dave, our expedition leader, had chosen the easiest route down, and, although we’d all get separated again, there were no complaints about taking the long and gentle Llanberis Path back down to the real world.
By the time we were all sitting in the pub, we’d had the chance to reflect about the achievement, comparing step-counters, heart-rates, and calorie counters. It was an achievement: several hours of walking and climbing and scrambling. There were sore knees and sore shoulders, there were tight calves and stretched hamstrings, as well as windswept faces and unkempt hair that normally would have mattered. But none of it did really.
And there, out there in the drizzly sky of North West Wales behind us, was the mountain itself, unchanged, unmoved, unbothered in the mist and the cloud. Snowdon: a piece of land that geology had once selected for elevation to a thousand metres. A pile of rock with a trigpoint on top.
They say the best reason to climb one of those things is because it’s there. I looked around the room at my fellow Snowdoneers, holding beers and ciders and wine, and yes, for at least one soul, a gin and tonic. I think the experience is there to move us, perhaps to bring us closer together, as colleagues, as mountain-climbers, as friends. The mountain might not move anywhere, but perhaps we do. Perhaps putting it under our feet by walking over it gave us all a thing we didn’t have before.
And that’s great. Because from now on all of us can say we’ve done it. And we did it really well too. Together.
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