I sat outside in the infant warmth of the sun until it sat four fingers’ height above the horizon, then shambled back to the hut and began to gather up my possessions. Eating another chocolate cake and slugging back some of my remaining water, I stayed wrapped in my sleeping bag and gently dozing, giving the air long enough to warm a little, until outside the door the sky had turned from deep blue to bright white. Pulling down the broom lodged in the rafters, I gave the floor a quick sweep, picked up a dead candle to dispose of later and gave a last glance around the hut. With daylight streaming in through the window, it was a quite different place.
I walked out into a veil of white cloud. The morning sun was warming the grass and steam was rising like bushfire smoke into the air. It was beautiful. Following the shape of the ridge, which I could just see, I walked the brief distance to Mynydd Moel, the furthest east of Cadair’s triple summits. To the north, the heads of northern Snowdonia’s mountains rose from the morning mists, hard and bare; of rock, not grass. Where I was now standing was a sort of bridge – the link between the verdant south and the austere, brutal north. Reminiscent of both, but resembling neither entirely.
At the rock buttresses of the northern flank, I took a look over the edge before turning south. The slope began to tilt downwards, and at my feet hoverflies dozily awoke and rose where I stepped.
* Milarepa rode the rays of the sun, while Bön-Chung sat cross-legged on a magic drum that ascended the mountain while he meditated. Milarepa won, but as he arrived at the summit he threw a handful of snow onto a nearby peak in honour of Bön-Chung. I once interviewed Reinhold Messner – a mountaineer deeply respectful of Tibetan beliefs but deeply pragmatic about his own climbing – about Kailash. When I commented it had never been climbed, he vehemently corrected me to the effect of the above, before deadpanning: ‘Though, this sun-ray climbing technique – I don’t know how it functions.’
* The mountains in Britain are Ben Hope and Creag an Leth-Choin in Scotland, Carnedd Llewelyn in Snowdonia, Pen y Fan in the Brecon Beacons, Kinder Scout in Derbyshire, the Old Man of Coniston, Brown Willy on Bodmin Moor, Holdstone Down on Exmoor and Yes Tor on Dartmoor. Notable mountains abroad include Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Kosciuszko in Australia, Mount Adams in the eastern United States and Madrigerfluh in Switzerland. These kept King busy – ‘charging’ the mountains took him three years in a journey he dubbed ‘Operation Starlight’.
* Snowdonia is thick with Arthurian connotations, although these are mostly concentrated on Snowdon itself.
* Plantlife, a charity for wild flora in Britain, pulls no technical punches in its description of Cadair’s botanical interest: ‘[Cadair Idris] is noted for vascular, habitat and bryophyte interest. Euphrasia hotspot. Calcareous rocky slopes with chasmophytic vegetation; Oligotrophic to mesotrophic standing waters with vegetation of the Littorelletea uniflorae and/or of the Isoëto-Nanojuncetea; Siliceous rocky slopes with chasmophytic vegetation; Siliceous scree of the montane to snow levels (Androsacetalia alpinae and Galeopsietalia ladani).’ I couldn’t have put it better.
* Hemans also has the distinction of coining the term ‘stately home’ in the first line of her 1827 poem ‘The Homes of England’. The first line reads: ‘The stately Homes of England,/How beautiful they stand!’
At around 3 p.m. on Saturday 2 April 1960, three sixteen-year-old army cadets vanished on the slopes of Snowdon. They were part of a group of five who had left Pen-y-Pass earlier that afternoon for the summit of Wales’ highest peak during their much-anticipated ten-day adventure-training holiday.
The weather was a mix of rain and low cloud – reasonably gruesome by sea-level standards, but nothing odd for this part of North Wales. Snowdon’s high elevation and proximity to the coast meant waiting for perfect conditions hereabouts was hardly the done thing, and certainly wasn’t character building – at the time a prerequisite for most forms of youthful outdoor endeavour. Besides, these boys had been assured that the route they were taking up the 1,085-metre peak wasn’t anything worth fretting over; according to their instructor, the ridge that would be the outing’s highlight ‘had been walked by women in high heels’.
Initially, the headlines that began to creep into the national press were coyly optimistic. The Daily Mail began its story of Monday 4 April with the comforting image that the three boys had ‘settled down to spend their second night in mist and drizzle’, clearly confident that nothing more malign than a twisted ankle or disorientation could be preventing the boys from reappearing, weary but chipper, when the mist finally cleared.
But at 8.30 a.m. on Monday 4th, hope was abandoned. Two members of a rescue team came across three bodies with severe head injuries lying amongst rocks at the base of a 100-metre drop, in an area known as Square Gully. The boys – John Brenchley, John Itches and Tony Evans – were roped together. The rescuers’ report delicately implied that their injuries were such that death would have been instantaneous. It had taken a team of 100 nearly two days to find them.
Piecing together what had happened wasn’t difficult. The three boys, separated from their instructor in rain and sudden Snowdonia mist, had taken a wrong turn on the ridge. Becoming lost in a catacomb of tall rocks and terrain that coaxed them towards dangerous ground, amidst tiredness and fear one had stumbled and fallen; the others, tied together, had been pulled down with him. According to one seasoned rescuer, what befell the boys that day was ‘sheer bad luck’.
Even in 1960 it wasn’t uncommon for people to lose their lives climbing British mountains. But the story of the three teenaged boys lost on Snowdon touched something sensitive in the national consciousness – and with the final, tragic outcome, something snapped.
Over the next few days, the stern faces of Search and Rescue personnel, teachers, police officers and mountaineers filled the pages of the national press, all proposing competing theories as to how this tragedy could possibly have occurred – not just on a mountain, but on a mountain damningly described as ‘safe’. The papers had a thorough chew of the case, announcing the tragedy with predictably hysterical headlines such as ‘The Ridge of Death Row’ (Daily Mail) and ‘Peril on a Peak’ (Daily Mirror). Both stories featured grim photographs from the mountainside – grubby and speckled in the way only 1960s news pictures can be – of rescuers manhandling stretchers down sharp rock, and each came loaded with blame cross-haired in various directions: chiefly towards mist, bad luck and, inevitably, the boys’ instructor, an experienced and ‘highly competent’ 28-year-old mountaineer named Peter Sutcliffe.
Many of Sutcliffe’s critics claimed that the young instructor’s charge of five boys was far too much for him alone to herd safely to Snowdon’s summit, and that the deteriorating weather should have prompted him to turn the group back. Others focused on details, highlighting the inherent flaws in the ‘roping-together’ technique the boys were using – an arrangement common in the Alps that relies on the principle that if one person takes a tumble, the others are required to quickly and deftly fling the slack over a handy spike of rock to arrest the fall (the problem here being, of course, that if no spike immediately presents itself the rest of the party is yanked towards whatever doom awaits). But most extraordinary in all of this was the disagreement amongst practically everybody