Simon Ingram
packs a snow shovel and heads high into the Cairngorms to dig a hole to sleep in (yep, you read that right)
To celebrate Trail’s 30th year, we’re dusting off our archives each month to resurface a favourite mountain adventure from the past three decades. Most people probably don’t consider digging an icy hole near the top of Britain’s second highest peak to be a fun way to spend a winter afternoon, and even less would then consider crawling inside it to spend the night alongside a group of strangers. But that’s exactly what we did back in 2007, before crawling back out the next morning with a cracking story to tell.
Iused to work with a complete idiot called Rupert. Every Monday, he’d roll in looking like he’d spent the weekend hanging out the window of a fighter jet, spouting anecdotes about stolen goats, burning sofas, and the inevitable drunkenly destructive stumble home. He’d then turn to me with a smugly cocked eyebrow and say: “How about you, Ingram? Been at the Lego again?” Just once, I wanted to walk in and say, “Well, actually, Rupert…” followed by something monumental that would stun him silent.
So, years later, when Andy Bateman rang me and asked if I’d like to spend a weekend at 4000ft in a snowhole, I immediately thought of Rupert, and said “Okay.”
And the funny thing is, I really thought I knew what was coming.
But really, very few people know what it’s actually like inside a snowhole. They think they know: these things are, after all, seen in mountaineering movies, usually just before somebody croaks. Other people’s preconceptions are strung around novels, the accounts of some ridiculously hard flintfor-skin explorer or, in my case, James Bond films. Consequently, I was very excited. Maybe there’ll be an ice tablet bed draped with an animal pelt. Scandinavian waitresses wearing furry hats and boots, sending frosted tumblers of vodka and a cheeky wink my way. Yes, this was going to be splendid.
Slowly, details crept from the woodwork like damp. There would be no animal fur duvets. No waitresses. Saws and shovels would be involved. Sweat. Cold. And for some reason, this was all going to take place not under a Norwegian aurora but on the gale-chipped slopes of Ben Macdui. Which is in Scotland.
“DIGGING SNOW IS LIKE CHEWING ROCK. IT’S THE TOUGHEST WORKOUT YOU COULD EVER HAVE”
No turning back now...
Anyway, three weeks later I was sitting round a dinner table deep in the winter-bound Cairngorms. The eight others present really couldn’t have been more different from each other – save for one uneasy patch of common ground. We’d all travelled great distances, parted with money and gathered in this remote place to take part in one intense and peculiar experience. Tomorrow, we were going to climb to the top of Britain’s second highest mountain in sub-zero air, dig a very large hole in the snow, and sleep in it.
We arrived at the 4000ft contour on the eastern flank of Ben Macdui at 3 o’clock the following afternoon. The Cairngorms were in a thoroughly crabby winter temper: full white-out, -5°C plus god-knows-what-wind-chill, and buried in snow. Eventually reaching a bealach, we dumped our heavy winter packs, each laced with a purposefullooking arsenal of saws, shovels and helmets. The cloud opened briefly to give a startling, crisp vision of Angel’s Peak close by to the south-west, and, after orders to stay put, Andy began traversing a snow slope of some 30° into the soup. Moments later, he stopped, stamped his feet twice, then started attacking the ground with a very long pole. We watched this with a mixture of bemusement and trepidation, until a few moments later when he waved for us to proceed along the slope towards him. “Snow’s hard. It’s going to take longer than usual. Best get cracking.” Andy laid out the pole along the slope, and made several indentations in the snow corresponding to red and white stripes along it. “There’s your doors. Shovels. Saws. Away you go.”
We attacked in pairs and threes, tunnelling into the mountainside. Blocks of snow were sawn, prised out and manhandled to the side of the gradually oblong-resembling hole.
Carving the cave
Digging snow is like chewing rock. Once you’re through the powdery crap on the top, your shovel goes ‘crunnnnng’ against something hard, and the graft starts. This breaking of the ice layer was the toughest part. Within an hour we were digging through snow that fell last winter: crystalline blocks of compacted ice that moved only with stern persuasion from axe, saw and shovel.
It’s the toughest workout you could ever hope to have. To cap all this off, as your excavation is on a snow slope gliding elegantly into nothingness below your feet, anything you put down, you lose. One member of the group deposited a shovel on the slope, only to cry in dismay as it glissaded merrily a thousand feet or so down the mountain. If it had gone any faster, there’d have been sparks.
As we dug, whiteout became blackout, the wind livened, and snow fell. For several hours, all that existed in the world was airborne ice, the four square feet lit in my headtorch beam, and eight other juddering lights staggered to my right. It was as intense a situation as I had ever been in. We may have only been nine herberts digging a hole, but in terms of drama we could well have been digging for our lives.
Finally, the call came from Andy to stop going inwards, and to start going along. It was time to dig what was quaintly dubbed ‘the lounge’. After a couple of eureka moments when the tunnels met each other, attention turned to widening the room, levelling the floor and removing the snow from the area where we’d be sleeping. As the night thickened, fatigue took hold and hunger began to bubble. With the room growing and taking shape, half the team returned outside to start blocking the holes and building the chimneys over two of the entrances to keep the weather out and the ‘warm’ in. This was a delicate construction and balance process, made more challenging by our hairy position and the cold.
Blocks dug out from the doors were heaved and relayed down a line of hunched bodies into igloo-style stacks over the middle door, the space between grouted with snow that solidified immediately. A rhythmic teamwork was quickly established and jobs assigned. This frozen ledge was probably one of the few places where a builder, a neurosurgeon, a solicitor and a photographer – among others – were desperately working together to produce that most basic of needs: safe shelter. If our situation wasn’t so surreal, it could almost be profound.
Settling in for the night
After five hours, our shelter was built. Soon the snowhole was filled with the grunts and murmurs of shifting bodies, the clink and rustle of gear being dusted off and hung on wall-embedded axes. Andy busied himself smoothing the floor and walls, before unravelling a roll of rope, sliding
it the length of the cave beneath everyone’s sleeping mats and attaching it to a pole that disappeared out the rear door. “Do I want to know what that’s for?” I asked.
“No. Just forget it’s there.” He covered it up with his sleepmat and grinned at me. “There we go. All gone.”
A snowhole – which I’ll call ‘the cave’ from now on, as a mere hole it really was not – is a deeply surreal, unnatural-feeling place to be. Before I came up here, I remember trying to quell the concerns of an older sister, who raised the not unreasonable question: “What will you do if it collapses?” To which I snorted: “Tunnel out, silly.” Tunnel out! I’d stand more chance of teleporting out. Though this was a needless worry – a properly dug cave like ours is a deceptively tough construction.
It takes a while to get used to the fact that everything – ceiling, walls, floor – is ice and, therefore, a bit chilly. Physics soon turn against you. Immediately, my water bottle had to move to a new home inside my jacket, my damp waterproof had gained its own coat of ice and a Curly Wurly I had been treasuring in the lid of my rucksack for this moment turned out to be solid enough to excavate concrete. Though the temperature inside won’t rise above freezing, as a shelter from the wind and snow the difference is immeasurable. Block up the doorway, break out your down gear and climb into your sleeping bag and, after a few minutes, something happens. You start to like it. Everyone settled and the mood softened. Dinner was served, strange and ingenious headgear was donned, and slowly the cave – weirdly, inconceivably – began to feel like home.
Party at 4000ft
The scene was sealed when the whisky finally appeared. Soon hipflasks were being chainganged around the cave amid chuckles of increasing liveliness, and after 20 minutes or so I felt my aches evaporating and a grin spreading across my face. Despite being warmly wrapped up in a fleece, down jacket, daft hat and 4-season sleeping bag, I was still breathing a jet of frozen steam. Which was really quite nice.
The night was passed strangely in a state of semi-slumber to the soft rhythm of snores, the odd drip from the ceiling and the occasional murmur from a disturbed, confused sleeper. There was a strange quality to the light inside – almost phosphorescence, as if the surrounding snow provided a glow of its own. And outside, the summit-bound wind sounded like nothing on Earth from within the cave.
When I extracted myself from my layers for
a Jimmy Riddle, it was probably around 2am. Strapping on crampons, I stepped out of the cave – and onto another planet.
The cloud was down and, away from the flute-like acoustics of the snowhole, the wind was just a silent, gentle buffet. The place was lit by a diffuse moonlight and, most arrestingly, the cloudy air, the mountainside and the fine snow heaping at my feet were all exactly the same shade of pale grey. Aside from the marker flag, a pile of ice axes and the dark entrance disappearing behind me into the snow, it was like floating in frozen brine. I could have been in high camp on Everest, the bottom of the sea, Mars. Anywhere but the east flank of Ben Macdui. I enjoyed the moment but I’d never been more grateful to get back into shelter in my life.
Back to reality
Morning came as mornings do, with stirrings accompanied by contented yawns, the odd groan and from my left a remark that banished the last dregs of sleep from my head.
“Seems like the roof is lower.” “What? You’re seriou…what?” “Hmmm…” he pondered, as if considering a devilish crossword clue. “Might be me.”
Whether it was him or not, the condensation forming a layer of fresh ice or simply the vision of revitalised morning eyes, it seemed that only a cataclysmic avalanche or a small nuclear attack could break this. We had built something from snow that we could have lived in for a month.
After coffee and breakfast, we abandoned the snowhole. Standing outside and peering in, despite the memories and aches of our desperate evening digging it, it seemed impossibly huge. We could have buried a pharaoh in there.
Having collapsed the entrance, we walked over the summit of Ben Macdui, arriving a few hours later back at the bus feeling like we’d been to war – along with all the warm, pub-bound glee of surviving something you never even contemplated doing, but will recount for years.
Rest assured, do this and you will be recounting it, over and over. Snowholing applies your winter skills to a task of extraordinary intensity. You’ll forever walk with the swagger of someone who once climbed to 4000ft, dug a hole out of ice, in the dark – and slept in it. And whether your audience is a fellow winter walker, a smug little sod called Rupert or some greensleeve who’s never set foot on a mountain – there ain’t a person in the world who won’t raise an eyebrow at that.