Britain's cut-price mountain safety man set out this morning on his weekly equivalent of a climb up Everest, credited with saving thousands of pounds in rescues on the fells.
Jon Bennett, a former hotel manager, pounds up Helvellyn in the Lake District every day with a mobile weather station collecting high-level data for the national park's detailed forecasts.
Given just four and a half hours for the ascent and return of 950m (3,117ft), and paid £8.40 an hour, he meets dozens of fellwalkers and climbers dependent on his findings. Pausing briefly at the foot of Striding Edge this week, he was thanked in turn by retired marketing manager John McCarthy from Penrith and off-duty Liverpool police officer John Hanlon.
"I was planning to take my teenage lad to the top of Helvellyn last week," said Hanlon, "but we got the snow and ice conditions from the weather service and decided discretion was our best bet." Bennett's warnings of classic avalanche conditions last week prompted similar prudence elsewhere – luckily, as there were dangerous snow slides in Borrowdale and the eastern fells.
"We've two layers of compacted snow with a sandwich in between of spindrift – loose crystals which might as well be ballbearings for the way they act," said Bennett, scrabbling a hole in the cornices along the Edge. "That's the perfect set-up for an avalanche."
The day's trek also saw Bennett note down walkers' footprints near the edge of corniced snow, which duly featured in his evening report on the park's website, which also feeds into a telephone weatherline and the Meteorological Office.
"If you walk there you're on a shelf of snow above thin air," he said. "It may look like part of the mountain but it definitely isn't."
Bennett, who shares the job with former overseas tour leader Jason Taylor, pilots Windermere tourist boats during alternate weeks and says he wouldn't want to do anything else. Hotel work was better paid but the surroundings were matchless.
"Poor but happy, that's me," he says, looking across the sweep of peaks from Dollywagon Pike to Catstycam. "The commonest question I get is on the fells is: aren't you bored with Helvellyn? I say: no two climbs are the same. And how could anyone ever get bored with this?"
He and Taylor are the latest in a tradition going back 34 years that is estimated to have saved hundreds of lives.
"I meet former colleagues regularly and it's interesting to compare notes," he said. "They had to make pen and paper notes in all weathers, but today's instruments record their readings – wind speed and chill, snow depth and the like – electronically themselves."
The mountaintop service works closely with fell rescue teams and its parsimony is helping their campaign to have VAT lifted from their lifesaving equipment. The government collects an estimated £200,000 from the voluntary outfits – enough to pay for Bennett and Taylor for more than 30 years.
Martin Wainwright©. Published in The Guardian 18-3-10
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