Three Peaks Challenge Completed!

A massive shout out goes to Chris White and pals you completed the Three Peaks Challenge last month! They completed it in a total of 23 hours and 48 minutes and managed to raise over £1,700 for Leukemia Research and Prostate Cancer charities, phenomenal effort guys! We got through a letter  explaining their exploits in a bit more detail, have a read!

We had all been out and bought new waterproofs, fleeces hats and gloves for what turned out to be one of the hottest weeks of the year! Our first mountain was to be Ben Nevis in Scotland where we had 5 hours to get to the summit and back down, however we were slightly disheartened when we read in the visitors centre that a fit walker normally does this in between 7-8 hours.

9 of us (3 Girls and 6 lads) started walking at 17.00 hours on Saturday in a tropical 25 degrees which is great at zapping all your energy, but what made this climb even stranger was hitting the snow towards the top wearing shorts, t-shirt and sunglasses! 

With a bit of a step on we managed to be back at the minibus by 22.30 which was great, but 30 mins behind where we needed to be and we still had 2 more mountains to climb. Before we started we thought we would be able to make a bit of time up on the drive between the climbs but then we found out our minibus was limited to 62 mph!!

We arrived at Scafell Pike in the Lake District at 04.30 after managing to get about 1.5-2 hours’ sleep in the bus. About half way up we had our first casualty as one of the lads popped his knee out, fortunately he was ok to sort it out and head back down. The rest of us pushed on to get to the summit by 06.30 and we back at the bus by 08.30 still running 30 mins behind, at this point we really did think we might not be able to make the 24 hours mark. This was when we lost our second member of the team as another of the lads pulled out through injury.            

After a further 5 hour bus ride and an hour or so sleep we were approaching our final mountain Snowdon in wales. We had made up about 15 mins on the journey but it meant we only had 3 hours 45mins to get to the summit and back. The Snowdon visitors centre advised this should take 5-6 hours and as Snowdon is higher and longer in distance in than the Scafell Pike route (which had taken us 4 hours) we knew we were really going to have to give it all to make!

We dumped everything out of our bags we could to try and lighten the load and the second the bus pulled into the car park we were off! Being another hot day it was very busy, especially at the summit and mountain rescue was out in force, luckily we did not need them. We arrived at the top at 15.23 and after 30 seconds at the top to take a couple of pics it was a run down with a sprint finish with three of us arriving at 16.48, 2 more at 17.01 and the final 2 at 17.30 just 30 mins over the 24 hours.

This really was a tough challenge and all involved gave 100% but we were defiantly spurred on by how generous everyone has been with sponsorship, and how hopefully the money raised can improved someone else’s life when there are going through the toughest challenge of their lives.   

Thanks again for all you help I have been blown away by how generous everyone has been!