Job done.

Gurinder smashed Snowdon in 3h 5m, getting done at 0535, completing the challenge in 23h 34m, and I was last down just 3m over the clock, although taking only 3h 42m.

Scafell Pike done in 3hr 10m

Now an hour ahead of schedule thanks to mammoth effort by James, Gareth and Gurinder!

James said 'Scafell is just a big pile of stones that has no right to be there'

At this rate we'll be late

Been following this truck for half hour, satnav says we've already lost 15min thanks to to going 35-40mph on this 50mph road :-(

4h 30m exactly for Ben Nevis

The waterfall

About 900m up

Well above some clouds

Summit 0845!

Not bad after starting at 0610.

Go on sponsor a few more quid :-)

Already seems high

Start

Dave takes his first shot of Ben

Cheers, to my Mum and the 3 Peaks

Upto £2925 now, amazing. Thanks to you all :-)

Scotland is beautiful

Breathtaking scenery. Loch Lomond

Seeing a lot of this today

Windscreen wipers, and the back of my brothers head

All packed

Just soaking my feet before bed. Long drive upto Scotland tomorrow.

Schedule.

So you all have some idea what we're doing, here's the final schedule.

Tuesday 31st May
6am Start climbing Ben Nevis
11am Finish Ben Nevis and start driving to Scafell Pike
5pm Start Scafell Pike
10pm Finish Scafell Pike and start driving to Snowdon

Wednesday 1st June
2am Start Snowdon
6am Finish Snowdon

At least that's the plan!

Posts now appearing on Facebook (maybe)

I've been trying to import the blog onto my Facebook page for the last few days, and finally today it was successful instead of telling me there was an error. So in theory this post will now appear on Facebook automagically, as will all our photo updates when we're doing the walk.

Giving things a little scale

Thanks Eric for hashing this up for me. I was looking at the heights and found out that the Shard of Glass, currently being built at London Bridge and set to be Europe's tallest building when it's finished this time next year is approximately only one quarter of the height of Ben Nevis. If you're not familiar with the Shard, we've also included the London Eye too.

Getting all 3D

OS Maps are great, but there's nothing like Google Earth to see actual terrain. Here's the three mountains, with approximate routes sketched over, they really show what we're dealing with.

Ben Nevis



Scafell Pike



Snowdon

Our location during the challenge.

I've enabled Google Latitude on my phone and added the app to the blog at the top right of the page. Each time you refresh the page it will show my latest location according to my phone, for the time being it's going to be pretty boring, showing me at work, or home, but during the challenge it will show my phone's latest location when it has reception.

I've just checked 3's coverage across the peaks. Ben Nevis is pretty sketchy almost all the way up, Scafell Pike is apparently a deadzone and Snowdon actually seems to have reasonable coverage most of the way up. So even if you can't see exactly where we are, you'll know roughly.

Test walk in the dark

So, without our head torches this is what we were looking at last night, having made sure we were out before the moon came up. Besides James running off and hiding, poised to jump out and scare us only to be spotted before he had the chance and a hide-n-seek in the dark contest that nobody had the energy for we learnt a lot last night. It was around 10 degrees C but while we were moving we only needed a base layer to stay warm enough.

Walking and staying on route by head torch was more challenging than I'd anticipated as the beam is either more or less at your feet to avoid tripping on tree roots or rocks, or pointing ahead lighting the way, but not both. Keith turned up with some crazy new technology LED torch that fit in the palm of the hand and was brighter than anything we had, but sounded a bit expensive. I definitely going to have to get some sort of additional lighting though.

T-Minus 13 days

Here are the routes we're taking.

3 weeks today!

Yes, it's just three weeks until we do the 3 Peaks Challenge. It's been a pretty short few months leading up to it. We got the team together again on Sunday for a final check that we're all in good shape, here's stats from the walk that day:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=200829662990576341226.0004a2c92cf5615d765e2

Total Distance: 9.59 km (6.0 mi)
Total Time: 2:35:47
Moving Time: 1:44:16
Average Speed: 3.69 km/h (2.3 mi/h)
Average Moving Speed: 5.52 km/h (3.4 mi/h)
Max Speed: 16.98 km/h (10.6 mi/h)
Min Elevation: 197 m (646 ft)
Max Elevation: 293 m (963 ft)
Elevation Gain: 667 m (2188 ft)
Recorded: Sun May 08 11:04:11 GMT+01:00 2011

That approximately half the height and half the time of Ben Nevis, and about 2/3 of the walking distance, if we can keep that up we should be on target. We're now looking to do a night walk in the next week or so to get a feel for what we have in store at Scafell Pike (which we are doing between 11pm and 4am).

Thanks to every one that has donated, we may not have achieved the £5,000 we'd hoped for, but we're not too far off half of that; £2,200 at time of writing which is still amazing :-)

55ft shy of Ben Nevis

Over the long Royal Wedding weekend I returned to the North Downs, I stuck to the steepest hills I could find and set myself an hour time limit. An hour later and I'd scaled the equivalent of Ben Nevis (all but 55 feet) *(bad maths here, a small mix up between ft and m, so I covered 1/3 of Ben Nevis, not almost the whole thing!) but in only half the distance.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=200829662990576341226.0004a26f8caa4eab8b410

Total Distance: 4.43km
Total Time: 1h 00m 50s
Moving Time: 50m 59s
Total Elevation: 393m (1289ft)

We've got another team walk on Sunday, the final group meet before the event, then just 2 more weeks of training. It's getting very close now!