A candidate for the oddest and most amusing outdoors story in recent weeks is surely the Vauxhall Frontera which made it to the summit of Snowdon last Saturday before being abandoned near the start of the descent.
The driver, Craig Williams, 39, from Cheltenham, said it was a spur of the moment decision to drive to the top of the highest hill in Wales. “Out of a list of 50 things to do before you die,” he said, “this was one of them. If you think that was on top of the list, the other 49 are now not going to be done.”
As with the 4x4-related events at (or below) sea level at Portobello in August last year, there has been some good banter about the Snowdon incident, mostly of the wry-amusement variety.
A poster named colina on UKClimbing.com said that someone had asked the driver “Why did you want to drive up Snowdon?” – to which the answer was, of course, “Because it’s there”. Another UKC poster, MHutch, said: “I can see how driving up a wide, stony track could cause devastating environmental damage.”
“Flippin’ satnavs,” said Alison Fox on walkhighlands – and there have been various comments along the lines that Williams would have been better taking the train, or that it was all just a ploy to avoid the exorbitant parking fees at the foot of the standard Pen-y-Pass approaches to Snowdon.
Four days on, the Frontera is still up there, high on the 1,085-metre hill. Alan Kendall, general manager of the Snowdon Mountain Railway, suggested four removal options – “It could be winched off by helicopter, broken up and brought down in pieces, ramped onto a flat bed truck and brought down on the railway or driven down” – but it is unclear why the last of these doesn’t appear to have been tried as yet.
This is by no means the first vehicle to find its way on to the upper slopes of Snowdon. Quite aside from umpteen thousand visits by the trains, there were successful top-outs by cars in 1904 and around 1918, both events seemingly celebrated rather than condemned – a Pathé film was even made of the second ascent. And another UKC poster, Dave Williams, noted that he had come across two army Land Rovers “parked next to the station platform sometime in the early ’70s”.
There was also the Model T Ford on Ben Nevis in 1911 and 1928, although the wheels literally came off a proposal to mark the centenary of the first of these ascents when the people involved were required to carry a dismantled replica up the hill, put it together on the summit and then take it apart again for the descent.
Elsewhere, an aeroplane landed on the summit plateau of Helvellyn in 1926, while in June 1989 there was an incident – so strange as to almost defy explanation – when a walker named Iain Cameron, accompanied by his father, met an ice-cream van at almost 1,000 metres on the Cairngorms Munro of Mullach Clach a’Bhlair.
Recalling that day in a 2002 issue of The Angry Corrie, Cameron noted that the van was seen “looming out of the mist”, but was “apparently ready for custom” nonetheless.
“The ice-cream seller and partner were rather puzzled at the lack of trade. ‘I thought it would be busier than this,’ one of them said. Further enquiries only confirmed the lack of any nice hot cups of tea which would have been much more appropriate than ice-cream given the weather.”
No one kicked up a fuss about that mysterious encounter – no mainstream media outlets, conservation groups or court officers were involved – so Craig Williams might have been better advised to have driven a Mr Whippy wagon rather than a Frontera up Snowdon last weekend.
As it is, he has been bailed to appear in court in Caernarfon on 16 September.
Donate to us: support independent, intelligent, in-depth Scottish journalism from just 3p a day
Related posts: