3 Peaks Challenge - Planning
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Planning
Probably the most important part of the whole event. We spent many evenings checking routes, times, estimates, travel conditions, roadworks and hours of daylight and darkness. We knew that whichever way round we did the peaks, we would have to do one at night, most likely Scafell Pike. We had planned from the start to try and complete the peaks in 23 hours, that way, should anything go wrong we would have an hour in the bag to fall back on.

The most traditional route is to start at Ben Nevis and work your way down to Snowdon but, bearing in mind the time of year we were doing this, if we didn't get to Snowdon at a reasonable time the whole event could have been jeopordised by not getting a parking space at Pen-Y-Pass. Fortunately John and Helen had already attempted Ben Nevis and knew the route and said if we got stuck behind traffic heading down to Scafell, we could lose a lot of time. 		With everything considered, we opted for doing the peaks in 'reverse' order. Next was deciding on a start time. Starting too early would mean the danger of getting stuck in traffic and the possiblity of midday sun. Starting too late would mean hitting Glasgow traffic heading to our last peak. John spent many a happy hour at work producing spreadsheet after spreadsheet with all the various start times, where we might encounter traffic problems, midday sun and hours of darkness. In the end we opted for a 5pm start which in hindsight was not good - we would have been awake for at least 10 hours prior to starting the challenge.
Below is the plan that we were going to work to...
Peak
Base of Snowdon
Summit of Snowdon
Base of Snowdon

Base of Scafell Pike
Summit of Scafell Pike
Base of Scafell Pike

Base of Ben Nevis
Summit of Ben Nevis
Base of Ben Nevis		 Time
17:00
19:00
20:30

01:30
03:15
04:30

11:00
14:00
16:00		 Comments



Driving 5 hours
Darkness
Getting Light
Getting Light
Driving 6 1/2 hours
Traffic
Afternoon Sun
Afternoon Sun
Take me home
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