North Wales’ arrestingly contoured uplands is a superstar, drawing upwards of half a million visitors each year. It’s not only Britain’s most-climbed mountain; it’s probably the most-climbed mountain in the world. Some come looking for a pleasant walk, some for a challenge, some for thrills – and few are disappointed. But there’s danger here, too, and nowhere are arguments about mountain safety found in sharper relief.
What isn’t in dispute is this: at a rate of about two a year, people still die on the ridge that claimed those three lives in 1960. This upsetting tally has steadily made the ragged arête – bitten into Snowdon’s east flank 600 metres above the Pass of Llanberis – the most notorious mountain route in Britain. Its name is Crib Goch.
Empty, foam-streaked glasses and the living remains of a funeral party were spread around the lounge of the Douglas Hotel in Bethesda when I arrived just after 6 p.m. and took a seat in the corner to wait for Mal Creasey.
Mal is a mountain guide and a veteran of the Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team – volunteers whose self-imposed duty is to locate those who find themselves in trouble high on the Snowdon massif. It’s one of the busiest teams in Britain, having the dubious honour of working a patch that’s the very definition of a black spot. It’s been known for the team and its neighbouring units to attend call-outs from people in distress on the slopes of Snowdon 170 times in a single year. For one Welsh mountain, that’s pretty exceptional.
Ten minutes after I arrived the door opened and I heard the clip of crutches from the lobby. Seconds later Mal swung into the lounge, looking out of breath. He nodded a hangdog hello, before scowling at his crutches. ‘Arthroscopy. Both knees.’
I gave him a blank look.
‘Where they go into the joint and scrape off all the crap.’ He shrugged. ‘Hey – live a sedentary life and you could die of a heart attack at 50. Or live a long life outdoors and expect a few squeaks.’
There’s no longer really any debate about whether Crib Goch is a walk or a rock climb. Today it’s considered neither, occupying a grey area between the two that’s actually more dangerous than both: scrambling. Any route above a potentially damaging drop that demands the use of your hands to negotiate it is considered a scramble. It would seem the activity is addictive, too: given the proximity to vertical danger and the monkey-business it demands, devotees will tell you that it’s the most thrilling thing you can do in the mountains. Routes are given grades, going from 1 to 3 in ascending order of difficulty.* These grades were originally established by guidebook writers as a general indication of a route’s toughness when combined with how far you could fall if you screwed up, but the system has proliferated into a more-or-less universally adopted yardstick of overall difficulty.
At Grade 1, Crib Goch is considered amongst the easiest of scrambles from a difficulty point of view. But there’s a catch. What Showell Styles called a ‘special quality’ was also noted by Irvine Butterfield in The High Mountains of Britain and Ireland: ‘The ridge is magnificently precarious for about 400 feet and whilst technically easy, commands respect – with a sensationally sharp summit ridge above a steep precipice.’ These evidently awesome drops mean that exactly how anyone will fare on Crib Goch is still fiercely and unpredictably subjective. Some inexperienced walkers can skip across with nary a care, yet there are bedded-in mountaineers who blanch at the thought of going anywhere near it. In mountains this seems to be the thing; you can describe how difficult you found it and why, but how anyone else will get on is down to them.
Perhaps because of this, your Crib Goch status – more than any other mountain route in Britain, it seems – says something about you. After its many years of notoriety, today the ridge inevitably presents something of a rite of passage; a mountain-shaped question mark that only a firm constitution, a certain element of skill and a generous endowment of sheer balls can answer. Nail it, and you can proudly attest to hitting the top of the thrill curve for what a gutsy mountain walker could be reasonably expected to achieve. Miss it out, and you’re missing out. You’re below the watermark. You’re a wimp. Right?
‘Dangerous way to think,’ said Mal, as we sat down at a corner table away from the increasingly horizontal mourners. ‘With that kind of attitude, all that happens after you’ve beaten it – if you beat it – is you end up sizing up something even scarier. Some climbers feel that way if they haven’t climbed the Matterhorn. Everest, even. Can you believe that?’ He considered this for a moment, before chuckling. ‘Anyway. Crib Goch.’
There are harder, more overtly threatening mountains in Britain – in this book, even – but in terms of a personification of all that is deviously hazardous about the British hills, no shadows fall on the staircase of Crib Goch and the pile of sharp contradictions that is Snowdon itself. The slightest glance at incident reports reveals that the mountain is a high-volume cautionary anthem for what can and does go wrong in the British hills.
All this aside, on a more personal level I knew exactly why I was scared of Crib Goch. An enthusiasm for mountains and the ability to be at ease with horrible drops are not necessarily easy bedfellows – heights hate me, and I hate them back. Some people can keep their head and enjoy the thrill of tightroping along ridgelines; me, I stay back from cliff edges, avoid tall buildings and take the aisle seat on an aeroplane. Inability to focus on objective difficulties when faced with ‘exposure’ – the mountain name for a drop that will pretty much definitely kill you – meant I struggled with any terrain that wasn’t wide enough for me to sprawl messily over it should the need arise.
From reading up I knew that the crest of Crib Goch certainly did not possess much width. Five hundred metres of bony, severely angled rock over drops many times the height of Big Ben, this thing was sheer, sharp, long – and didn’t have much patience for the acrophobic.* As many claimed after the tragic accident in 1960, from a point of view of actual physical difficulty the ridge isn’t really that hard at all; like climbing a stepladder, or boulder-hopping on a beach. But raise these little exercises to a platform the thick end of 300 metres above spiky ground, and – whilst from a coldly technical point of view it shouldn’t make a difference – psychologically the consequences of a slip suddenly become harder to ignore.
I needed to talk to someone who knew the ridge in forensic detail. Someone who could tell me, with nothing in the way of macho marinade, exactly how much trouble I would be in. That’s why I’d called Mal. You can use a map to traverse the rump of any mountain, but on something as hefty as Snowdon you needed someone like Mal to really get you under its skin. A sturdy 60-something with an air of permanent bemusement, I knew him to be straight-talking, likeably mischievous and peerlessly experienced. If anyone could reassure me – or at least give me a couple of pointers – it was Mal.
‘Well, I don’t want to worry you,’ Mal began, ‘but if you got rid of Crib Goch … I’d say rescue call-outs would drop by 80 per cent.’ He sipped his pint. ‘Give or take.’
‘Falls?’
‘Yeah, some. A few get lost. But most people just get cragfast.’
This is a term you come across regularly in association with Crib Goch, and steep mountains in general. ‘Cragfast’ means, quite simply, stuck – stuck in a trap of your own making, when you’ve climbed up something you can’t climb down, and then freeze, barnacle-like, to whatever you’re clinging to. This could be because of physical difficulty; more often it’s because every way looks precarious and you’re too scared to move.
‘So where on the ridge does it happen?’
‘The Pinnacles, usually,’ Mal said, taking another sip. ‘And the beginning, the first big rock step. And sometimes
