THE BEN (AGAIN)
Have we written about Ben Nevis in Trail before? Many times. Have the majority of people reading this magazine already climbed it? Most probably. Do we ever get tired of talking about Britain’s highest mountain and the many excellent routes up it? Absolutely not. And that’s because Ben Nevis isn’t just a big mountain, it’s also a great one. Like many people, I first walked up Ben Nevis via the fairly pedestrian Mountain Track many years ago, back before I knew anything about the mountain’s famous North Face and the spiderweb of fearsome routes that crawl all over it. I’ve since been back many times, most memorably via the Ledge Route and Tower Ridge, and I’ll be there again in July to introduce my 8-year-old son to
The Ben. So I’ve climbed it from almost every angle and seen just about every view it has to oer, but then I see images like the ones taken by Tom Bailey (above) in this issue and I fall in love with this 1345m colossus all over again. And therein lies the beauty of climbing mountains, and indeed of creating this magazine. The mountains themselves change very little, but the people we climb them with and the conditions we find them in make every new experience just as thrilling as the last. I was as excited to read Tom’s account of his CMD Arête adventure (page 16) as I was when I plotted my very first route on the mountain. We hope you enjoy all of the pages we’ve dedicated to Ben Nevis in this issue, and that they inspire you to head up there and climb it (again).
Oli Reed, Trail editor