It’s taken me a week to come to terms with the events of October 27^th 2018.

The task was a daunting one, to climb up the three largest peaks in Yorkshire; namely Pen-y-ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough.

Which of itself is a big task, its 2,100 metres in elevation which is like climbing Ben Nevis and then climbing 2/3^rd of Snowdon straight after – which if they were parked right next to each other would make for a tough day… but they’re not are they, no… they are in fact separated by 25 miles worth of meandering, undulating, Yorkshire dale. Which makes it more like climbing a mountain and two-thirds, but having to walk the length of a marathon before you can really get started.

Which meant a very early start for myself, Rachel and Joe as we were driving there first – that gave us a 4.30 alarm call, for a 6.30 rendezvous at the Pen-y-ghent café car park.

Which, when Rachel and I arrived, we found to be cold, dark and containing a plucky Lancastrian with a big smile and can-do attitude. An attitude I wasn’t sure that I was sharing; I’d had a stinky cold all week, combined with an aching shoulder, and a busy schedule… I was ‘a doubt’ for this during the week but had rallied enough come Saturday morning, but my personal pluck levels were definitely low.

We were soon joined by our Maximum Adventure mountain guide Ian, and then the only non-Autovista party member Stu, from Essex (he had a settle to score with mountains and today was his day).

Next up Keris’s taxi arrived and the Twendscenders were fully assembled; following some hugs and high fives we set our mind to the task. The first task being to defrost our headlamps and to see if we could find the path.

Spirits were high when we struck out, and Ian had to remind us to ‘hike responsibly’ and ‘respect our neighbours’ which of course we duly did; no one wants to be woken up by high spirited TwendScenders at 7.00 on a Saturday morning.

Rachel and I had tackled ‘Penny-G’ (as we were now informally calling her) already in September, so we knew the lungs and legs didn’t get much warming up time before Penny required you to start huffing and puffing against her inclines.

The benefit of having recently done the National 3 Peaks, was that the legs and lungs kicked back into gear quite quickly, recognising what was about to be asked of them. Penny-G might not be as big as Ben, but she is bad too in her own way, and her way is to get real steep, real quick.

Then once you start to get used to that, she switches it up and presents you with a mounting goat intimidating track with a sheer view just passed your toes to tweak at any vertigo (or instincts for self-preservation) you might have; and when you start to get used to that you get to scramble up 2 and 3 ft rocks while battling against significant winds and the cold, all this while the rest of the world is just pulling back the duvet.

There was, as there usually is, a redeeming moment of beauty, which was seeing the dawn breaking over to our right, illuminating the landscape and showing us one of the best views in Yorkshire. In that moment the adopted Yorkshireman I try so hard to supress leaked out; ‘Ee by gum Yerkshire, thas reet beautiful in’t mornin’ I exclaimed.

The benefit of taking on Penny-G via the steepest approach is that you reach the summit quickly (if two hours of exercise could ever be considered quick) and we were at the first trig point by 9 am, which gave the Twendscenders an early sense of accomplishment, but unfortunately it was still way too early to be popping corks (or unscrewing hip-flasks).

As for that marathon that I mentioned earlier, an awful lot of those miles are spent getting off Penny-G and trying to make your way to Whernside (which we weren’t researched enough to know was actually 12 miles/20k away).

For two of the next three hours we walked on and on towards the largest mass out of a selection of large masses on the horizon. The glory of Penny faded reasonably quickly, and without the associated adrenaline of a climb, the steps did seem to become a bit of a drudgery; especially as we knew from experience that the marching route omitted some local spots of geological interest, like pots, and gills and waterfalls.

Motivation took a very serious knock when I pointed at ‘Whernside’ and asked Ian from which point our approach and ascent would be made, he smiled and turned to me and said ‘that’s not Whernside… Whernside is behind that one…’  my stomach dropped like Luke Skywalker’s when Ben Kenobi told him… ‘that’s no moon’, I had a bad feeling about this.

So I decided to give myself a boost and break into one of my high energy gel sachets, and again Ian-Kenobi educated me; ‘It’s a bit early to be starting on them young man’ it was approaching mid-day, I had been climbing for two hours and marching for 3, words like ‘early’ and ‘quickly’ were beginning to take on strange new meanings that they had never possessed before.

By the time we had the real Whernside firmly in our sights it was thankfully lunchtime, and the team needed it, we had pains, we had fatigue, we had morale issues, and we had 15 minutes for lunch.

But we packed a lot into those 15 minutes, including a hot cup of tea from a food van, and some toilet stops at a local pub. I didn’t venture into the pub… I knew I didn’t have the strength of character to come back out.

We limited ourselves to 15 minutes because we knew that we were behind on time; the target time for the journey being 12 hours, which requires a solid pace throughout and we knew that with the sun due to set about 6ish that we wouldn’t want to do too much this evening in the dark. We had been at it for 5 hours already and had only completed one out of the three peaks [eek emoji face].

There was time for one moment of light relief though. Those readers who have climbed with me before will know that I do like to take rest stops as opportunities to make sure that all my straps and supports are in their rightful place – my own personal mantra being ‘if it’s got a joint, it’s got a support’ – and after having publically adjusted myself Joe was emboldened to follow suit. Unluckily Joe’s timing wasn’t as good as mine and as soon as he had drop his trousers his activity caught the attention of some passing motorists who then had to take evasive action to avoid an incident with a ditch and some sheep but thankfully no animals were harmed in the making of this anecdote.

So partially refreshed, we set out again, along a route passed the Ribblehead viaduct, with the real Whernside looming behind.

But our pace was still slow – in particular we knew that Keris was struggling, she had significant pain in her hip and every step was clearly painful for her. To compensate, Keris was taking steps as small as possible to minimise her discomfort, but it was clear it wasn’t helping her much.

The group became a bit separated as we made for the next section but then we re-joined at the next landmark, the waterfall Force Gill. Keris was clearly in considerable pain, and advised that she had taken the pain killers that she could for the moment. Joe demonstrated his generous nature and insisted that he carried the majority of the contents of Keris’s back pack in his own, and after a too short break we restarted again.

Stranger Stu was most comfortable at his own pace, which was a bit faster than the group, so he lead from the front. After a while Rach and I looked back and we saw that quite a gap had opened behind us and Keris, Joe and Ian. And it was at just this point that the Whernside climb really starting to kick in, and we defaulted into head-down-dig-deep-power-up-big-steps-mode.

About half way up we looked back again and the gap was very significant now; so we messaged back to the Whatsapp group and asked if everything was ok, when we heard it was we agreed to rendezvous at the trig point at the top. That meant more marching for Rach and I to see if we could catch up with Stu. Again as the altitude increased so did the views, and after some considerable huffing and puffing we could see the summit approaching, and despite a bit of a haze we could make out Morecambe bay on the west coast.

Another one of the ‘pay-back’ moments then happened for me, I looked back to Penny-G and she had shrunk to the size of a molehill, she was the furthest thing on the horizon. She was literally as far as the eye could see away; and earlier that day we had been stood on the top of her, the sense of achievement in that moment was considerable.

We were only about 200 ft off the Whernside summit when a familiar but an unexpected voice appeared behind us; it was Ian… he had left Joe and Keris together and had skipped up the mountain to catch up with us.

Ian then informed us that Keris had decided to complete 2 out of 3 of the peaks – and that made a lot of sense to us. We had already been out for 7 hours that day, and at that point had climbed the equivalent of Ben Nevis and had walked a further 27k. I remembered how I felt after Big Bad Ben, and we could see the pain she had endured so far, and we knew it was the right decision.

Our heart went out to Keris, we could see her and Joe someway below us on the mountain and we could see that the end for them was still a long and painful way off.

Rachel an I reached the trig point on Whernside at 2.53 p.m. some 6 hours since we were on top of Penny, 8 hours since we had set out.

Again there was little time for high fives – we knew that we had to get off peak 2, and quick march to Ingleborough to make that assent before the darkness set in. I had done Ingleborough before, and I knew it was a cold, fierce, windy scramble to the top and one I didn’t relish tackling in the dark.

The next challenge was that the descent from Whernside was horrendous, the stones on the path had been laid vertically, not horizontally (presumably to aid with erosion) but what that meant was that there was 700 metres worth of steep, trip hazard to navigate, and it was painful and slow and mentally draining, a stumble or a miss-placed foot could result in disaster. Even mountain master Ian-Kenobi was vocal about his dislike and the treachery of this stretch; ‘watch your self down here, it can get a little rough’.

Thankfully/miraculously we made it down without disaster and from the bottom we looked up and we could see Keris and Joe starting their own descent – again out hearts went out to the Ascenders. But we didn’t have much time for retrospection, we were in a race against the clock, the reducing daylight, and the dropping temperatures.

We didn’t get much momentum up though, as we were faced with another yomp. Ingleborough might have been closer than Penny was but it was still a 5 mile trek, which on any normal day could well be considered a ‘nice day’s walk’ in its own right.

Eventually we hit the path up to Ingleborough itself, and met a few people coming in the opposite direction, it was clear from their faces they were confused about our orientation. With one group saying to us… ‘you aren’t going up now are you?’ but indeed we were.

The climb up Ingleborough was very physically demanding, the temperature was really dropping, and lung fulls of cold air were harsh and abrasive to take, with the air coming back out in big plumes of smoky dragon breath. The first half of Ingleborough was made up of sandstone slabs and we marched at them for 45 minutes at as strong a pace as possible. We had some elevation and stopped for a break and some food. Ian turned to me and belatedly said ‘now, now you should be getting on the power gels’ in my head I also heard him say something about ‘using the force and letting go of my conscious feelings’.

From where we were stood we could see that the next section was severely steep, and made up of more vertically placed rocks, again better suited to mountain goats than exhausted, part-time, wannabe hikers. It felt dangerous on the way up there, it felt stumbly, it felt high, and my legs felt full of wobble. I needed a win, and it came in form of the wonder of nature.

I was fascinated to reach the top of that section and to see the grass turned into icy stalagmites forming from the spray from the stream we had just climbed adjacent to. It was otherworldly, and beautiful, and something I had never seen before, and something I wasn’t expecting to see from 100ft below. In a short, but steep distance the temperature and landscape had changed significantly and even though my fingers were numb I took my phone out to record the moment, and instantly saw the guy behind me doing exactly the same thing. Why wouldn’t you… this wasn’t an everyday sight or experience for city folks.

From the top the final peak was finally now in sight, but after a day of rotating challenges it was unsurprising to get a new flavour of challenge. This flavour was ‘rocky-road’ or more accurately ‘rocky-road-with-arctic-wind’. I had thought that my face had gone completely numb, but when the wind whipped the straps of my back pack into my face at 100 mph I realised that just wasn’t true and that I still had the capacity to feel pain, considerable pain.

The rocks in question were steep, and it was another scramble to the summit, and the wind was the major factor this time, it was unrelenting, all you could hear was wind, screaming into your freezer burnt chicken resembling ears. But there was another great moment in store and that was seeing the final trig point and making it there just as the sun was setting.

We didn’t stop this time, we took a photo, I tried to post it to Twitter but I didn’t have the fingers or the energy to get #learningonthewayup written so I just went @autovista_group and sent. I don’t think that post went live, which was a shame because I wanted people to know that even though it was late and frozen we had climbed all the 3 peaks that day.

I hugged Rachel, and she said to me ‘that was horrible, I think I cried 3 times on the way up’ I was amazed, only three times… I think I cried all the way up.

But victories that day were briefly enjoyed, and endurance was still to be tested to its uppermost limits. We had succeeded in one way, but in a much more practical, less figurative way, we were still a long way from the end game. The car park at Pen-y-ghent was still 5 miles away, dusk had turned into dark, and the world had frozen. Head torches were switched on, and the descent began, it went dark quickly, and our route down was a slippy, muddy, cow-patty one, just what we needed after 12 hours on our feet.

At their best the views for the final 1 hour 45 where like this:

Miraculously again nobody fell, and we safely navigated some very close encounters of the herd kind. Cows are lovely really and mostly unthreatening, until you find one right next to you in the pitch black, staring and snorting back at you through the night.

At this point we received some photos from Keris and Joe, both of them home, warm, and imbibing their favourite beverages. But we didn’t begrudge them those (too much) we knew that the end of their journey had been as arduous as our own, and we knew that every step we took was a step closer to our own cosy wine-glass selfies.

In that last 45 minutes, I felt myself regressing, morphing into a version of my own 4 year old daughter, as I repeatedly asked Ian; ‘are we nearly there yet’…? He did the right thing and lied to me, up until the point that some lights appeared in the mid-distance and he didn’t need to lie anymore, it was Horton-on-Ribblesdale, home of the Pen-y-Ghent café, a wretched hive of scum and villainy indeed.

Fantasies of removing boots, and sitting on heated seats soon solidified into realties. And we warmly thanked Ian and said our fair wells to Stu in that same car park we met 13 and a 1/2  hours ago.

I would like to have something wise, and elegant to finish this epic journey story with, some significant learnings, but like that night on Oct 27^th I find myself having completely ran out of steam.

So I will sign-off with saying congrats to brave Keris, what you achieved was more than anyone was asked to achieve in a single day on the National 3 Peaks.

And, congrats to big-hearted Joe, of course he insisted on carrying Keris’s stuff, and staying behind and helping her off the mountain, that’s exactly the kind of guy he is.

And thank you to Rachel, come Kili summit day we can look back on this day and continue to give each other the type of support, encouragement and camaraderie that made those last few miles of cowpat not only endurable but strangely enjoyable.