The Friday night before

Every trip page we write starts on Saturday morning, because that is when the walking starts. It is the wrong place to begin. The trip starts on Friday, somewhere around six in the evening, and the Friday is often the part people remember.

The train

Friday afternoon, a rucksack in the luggage rack, laptop finally shut. There is a particular feeling to leaving a city on a Friday with boots in your bag, and it arrives somewhere around the point the buildings stop and the fields start. You can usually spot the others on the platform before anyone says anything. It is the packs.

Arriving

Bunkhouses and hostels have a smell that is the same everywhere: damp waterproofs, woodsmoke, drying socks, and whatever is being cooked. People arrive in ones and twos over about an hour. Someone has already claimed a bottom bunk. Someone else is on the phone in the corridor finishing a work thing they promised themselves they would not finish.

The first conversations are all logistics, because logistics are easy. Where did you come from, how long did it take, is that a new pack. Nobody talks about why they booked yet.

The floor covered in kit

At some point the bags open and every available square metre of floor disappears. This is the best bit of Friday evening. Someone has brought four pairs of gloves. Someone has brought no gloves. Somebody is holding up two mid layers asking which one, and three people who have never met are giving contradictory advice with enormous confidence.

This is also when kit problems get solved, which is exactly when you want them solved. A jacket that turns out not to be waterproof, boots with the laces going, no head torch. All of it is fixable on a Friday evening and none of it is fixable at eight hundred metres on a Saturday afternoon.

The briefing

After dinner everyone sits down for half an hour and the instructor goes through the day. The route, the ascent, the timings, where the group turns around if the weather is against it, what everyone needs in their bag in the morning.

Two things happen in that half hour. The first is that a vague plan becomes a specific one, and people relax, because anxiety mostly lives in the gap between what you imagine and what you have been told. The second is that everyone says their name and a sentence about themselves, and the room stops being a set of strangers.

“Nobody sleeps badly because the hill is hard. They sleep badly because they do not know what the morning looks like. The briefing is what fixes that.”

The pub, or not the pub

There is usually a pub, and it is usually one drink, occasionally two, and someone always says at about half nine that they are going to head back. Everyone follows within ten minutes. Big mountain days have a way of making moderation feel like an easy decision.

This is when the conversations stop being logistics. It is somewhere between the first and second drink that you find out somebody quit their job in March, or has never been up a mountain, or has been up a great many and has stories.

Boots by the door

Last jobs. Bag packed for the morning so you are not doing it at six in a dark room. Water bottles filled. Something for breakfast. Phone charging. Boots by the door with socks stuffed in them.

Then someone checks the forecast one more time from a bunk, because everybody checks it one more time, and it says exactly what it said an hour ago.

Lights out about eleven. Somebody snores. The alarm is set for six. Outside it is completely dark in a way it is never dark in London, and tomorrow is a long way up.