The British mountains are a strange place, especially when compared to everyone else’s lumpy bits.
Start with the numbers – we don’t do well in Altitude Top Trumps. Ben Nevis, our loftiest, sits at 1,345m above sea level. It actually gained a metre in 2016, when modern hyper-accurate GPS technology was deployed to settle the matter once and for all. While that sounds like a respectable figure (4,412ft, if you prefer shillings to decimals), it’s hardly worth bragging about when Norway alone boasts over 300 mountains that are taller.
Closer to home, there’s Snowdon. Or rather, Yr Wyddfa. It’s widely described as the highest mountain in England and Wales – though by that same reckoning, it could equally be called the highest mountain in Belgium and Wales, being as much not in Belgium as it is not in England.
Yr Wyddfa (Welsh mountains probably deserving Welsh names) crouches at a modest 1,085m. Just below the summit sits Hafod Eryri: a café, gift shop, and railway station all compressed into a building of singular ugliness. It draws somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 visitors a year – a figure that ballooned during the 2020–2022 lockdowns and has never quite deflated back to where it was before COVID came a-knocking.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that around 8–10 people die on the Snowdon massif each year. I’m writing this as reports trickle out about two young men found dead on the mountain after a protracted multi-agency search in grim conditions.
It’s something I have some direct experience of. In a previous career I worked as an outdoor instructor and mountain leader, spending much of my time stomping up and down the ridges and paths of the British mountains – leading everything from Duke of Edinburgh expeditions to multi-day corporate challenges (the kind that four blokes in Sales enthusiastically insist the entire company should be forced to endure). I also spent a few years with one of the quieter Mountain Rescue teams in North Wales, among the 6,000 or so unpaid volunteers who form the ground branch of inland search and rescue in the UK.
In late spring 2011, I was one of the damp, huddled masses packed into that squat grey summit building on Snowdon. I had just escorted a group of Big Four accountants to the top as part of their preparation for a corporate charity trek to Everest Base Camp later that year. After three hours of uphill trudging through heavy mist and a flurry of photos at the summit cairn, we had retreated to the relative civility of the café – the one that replaced what the then-Prince Charles had memorably described as “Wales’ highest slum.” The new version is essentially a minor motorway service station with a better view. A sort of upland Greggs. Standard stuff for these trips: thirty minutes for the punters to rearrange their layers, contemplate their life choices, and work through the damp cheese sandwiches their hotel had inflicted upon them.
While conducting my own invoice-to-effort ratio calculations, I noticed a particularly frantic-looking man pushing through the rain-sodden crowds toward the food counter, desperate to get the attention of the staff. I found myself moving toward him at the same moment as another instructor – a vague acquaintance I’d spotted several times over the years, a fellow professional escort of hapless hikers. He reached the man first and established that he’d been searching for help: his friend had collapsed somewhere on one of the ridges below. A plan formed quickly. The other leader went to hunt down the defibrillator he knew was somewhere in the building; I pinned down a rough location and asked the staff to call North Wales Police. Before we pushed out into the weather, I turned back to my group of moist actuaries and told them to sit tight while I dealt with a minor issue.
What followed was a scramble down a rocky, steep ridge – weaving between boulders, hunting for the shortest line. My colleague, considerably more agile than me, pulled ahead, and I followed in his wake through the dense, swirling mist that is so endemic to the Welsh mountains.
Personal responsibility quietly erodes in an age of diminished personal autonomy, and genuine, unmediated contact with risk is increasingly rare.
We found the casualty – a larger man, lying on his side on a flat section of the ridge. I won’t describe in detail what happened next; it’s a scene I quietly revisit every time I renew a first aid or emergency medical qualification. If you’ve never been trained in CPR, how to use an AED, or basic lifesaving treatment, I’d urge you to seek it out – I’ve linked to some resources at the foot of this article.
While we worked, one of us – I no longer remember which – made contact with the police again, and messages were relayed back to mountain rescue. A helicopter from RAF Valley was on its way, but the weather was uncooperative and its arrival far from certain. A foot party was also moving up toward us, though they were at least two hours out and, when they arrived, could do little more than help carry the casualty back to the valley.
Then we heard the rotors – a sound that filled the air and bounced back off the curve of the ridge below. It came, then went, then came again: the aircraft tracking up and down the ridge, searching for us. My phone rang with word that they couldn’t find our location and certainly couldn’t land nearby. Without radio contact – the kind we’d have had on a Mountain Rescue callout – we had no way to guide the aircraft in, and the option of a winchman being lowered to our rocky ledge quietly disappeared.
I watched fine water droplets form on the bothy bag – the frameless weatherproof shelter most leaders carry to protect casualties from the elements. The scene felt almost surreal: our small world of three people inside a white snow-globe of mist, tucked between house-sized boulders, while the helicopter crew crabbed slowly up the slope below, hunting for a gap in the cloud.
And then, with the timing of a film that has run slightly long, the gap appeared. The wind shifted, the mist pulled back, and there below us was the oil-streaked yellow fuselage of an RAF Sea King. Everything that followed came in a blur of noise and action. My colleague cracked a Pains-Wessex smoke flare and sent a column of bright orange smoke downwind. I gathered the bothy bag and stuffed it into my pack before the rotors could snatch it up into their path. The aircraft drew level with our ledge, tracked up and over, and the winchman descended on the cable. After a shouted exchange about the casualty and our treatment of him, he was packaged into a stretcher, clipped on, and lifted back into the mist – gone in seconds, leaving us alone on the ridge in sudden quiet.
Everything after was muted. We packed our kit and walked back up to Hafod Eryri, checked in with our groups, and I went looking for the casualty’s friend. I found him deep in the station building, being looked after by the staff. I gave him a brief account of what had happened and helped arrange for him to take the next train back down.
That evening I learned the casualty hadn’t survived – indeed, he may have been gone before we reached him. It was a major cardiac event, one that would most likely have had the same outcome in a supermarket or at home. It wasn’t really a mountaineering incident; it was an incident that happened to take place on a mountain. The specific complications were access and distance from help – something many of Scribehound’s rural readers will recognise all too well.
That was a long time ago now, and it wasn’t the only time I came across an incident in the hills. The dominant narrative around mountain casualties tends toward the feckless: careless people taking needless risks in terrible weather. The reality is more prosaic. Many incidents are bad luck in inaccessible terrain, or people failing to appreciate that these relatively small, well-worn mountains are also capable of producing weather that will kill you if you meet it unprepared.
There is, I think, a particular kind of disconnection at work – the sense that if many people are doing something, the risk must be manageable. A sweet spot where an activity looks extreme but doesn’t feel dangerous; where the photos are impressive but you never doubted you’d be home that night. Nobody genuinely believes the thing they’re doing is dangerous. If they did, they probably wouldn’t do it.
Llanberis Mountain Rescue is the team responsible for Snowdon – and, unlike most Mountain Rescue Teams with their broader remits, Llanberis deals almost exclusively with incidents on this one mountain. Their operational tempo is climbing steadily: around 300 callouts in 2023, over 360 in 2025. Back in 2011, it was closer to 180 for the year. The reasons are likely multiple, but an increase in the mountain’s perceived attractiveness combined with a corresponding decrease in awareness of its risks probably does most of the work. Most people wandering through a supermarket don’t pause to calculate how long it would take for an ambulance to reach them if they gashed their leg near the chiller aisle. A lot of modern mountain visitors don’t consider that, if something goes wrong, the best-case scenario involves sitting immobile on a cold, wet, windy ridge for several hours.
Personal responsibility quietly erodes in an age of diminished personal autonomy, and genuine, unmediated contact with risk is increasingly rare.
There is also a persistent assumption that mountain rescue operates like a miniature fire service – a team of paid professionals on shift in a well-equipped station in the valley, ready and waiting for the call. The reality is rather different. Llanberis Mountain Rescue, like every other team in the UK, is run entirely by volunteers who, on receiving a callout, down tools, leave the dinner table, or slip out of the office and make their own way to the hill. There are no shifts, no standby pay, and no taxpayer-funded hut.
Llanberis fields sixty-odd of these people, and they are the busiest team in the UK – their callouts accounting for roughly 9% of the total for England and Wales in 2024. Their income for 2023–24 was around £172,000, of which £115,000 went straight back out on equipment, training, and operational costs. What remains goes toward future expenditure; not a small consideration when a replacement vehicle for mountain rescue operations runs to between £80,000 and £100,000.
So rather than a lazy picture of people doing daft things on a mountain that’s lower than most Alpine villages, what you actually have is more people visiting a place without understanding what it asks of them.
As a Canadian friend once put it: you just have the dangerous, interesting top bit. You don’t have the two days of driving through boring farmland to get there.
First Aid and Emergency Training Resources
If you’re planning to spend time in the hills – or even if you’re not – knowing the basics of CPR and how to use a defibrillator could save a life. The following are worth your time:
St John Ambulance offer first aid courses across the UK, including basic life support and AED training. Many are free or low-cost.
British Red Cross run a range of in-person and online first aid courses, including a free online introduction to emergency first aid. redcross.org.uk
The Resuscitation Council UK has free, clear guidance on hands-only CPR – a technique that requires no training to attempt and dramatically improves survival odds in cardiac arrest. resus.org.uk
For those who want something more tailored to outdoor and remote environments, it’s also worth approaching a commercial provider accredited under either the REC (Rescue Emergency Care) or ITC (Immediate Temporary Care) frameworks – both are widely recognised qualifications for outdoor professionals and hill-goers. REC First Aid and ITC First both have directories of approved training providers across the UK, making it straightforward to find a course near you.
Those working in rural or land-based environments – forestry, arboriculture, estate work, agriculture – may also want to look at a Forestry First Aid (+F) course. The +F is a specialist add-on to a standard first aid qualification, developed in line with Forestry Commission guidance and covering the hazards specific to remote working: catastrophic bleeding, chainsaw injuries, crush injuries, hypothermia, and Lyme disease. It’s the industry standard for anyone working on Forestry Commission land, and increasingly expected elsewhere in the sector.
