29/3/10 Dave H. I have some advice for anyone thinking of doing this challenge point: Do the others first. All 1500 of them. Then go abroad and do some more. Only go up here when there is absolutely nowhere else to go. At least if you are going to take the same route as me. I started from the road near Old Semeil, and ran up the very good forest road to it's highest point. Easy running and it only took about 10 mins. From there there is a ride through the trees in more or less the right direction so I took that. After about 15mins I was within 500m of the top. That 500m took half an hour. The trouble was that the ride was still full of snow. Nasty crunchy snow that I couldn't quite stand on, so I was constantly going in up to my knees. Not impossible, but after a while there were more and more fallen trees across the ride, and it got very dangerous because I kept falling through the snow and I never knew what I was going to land on. The only choice was to go into the trees, but this is an unthinned spruce plantation, still full of snow, so this meant crawling over deep snow under the branches. Fortunately I had a map and compass, or I might just have gone round in circles. Eventually I did get out of the trees, and had a short run though the heather to the (unremarkable) top. I couldn't go back the same way, so I ran down the heather to the SE hoping to get to the forest road, but when I got to within 200m I met a totally impenetrable juniper forest. I guess there are no grazing animals here, it was over a metre high and quite impossible to get through. So it was back into the trees again. I did eventually get down to the track, which was of course deep in snow. The whole thing was a 90 minute nightmare. It might be possible to find a better route from the NW, I don't know. And I'm not going to try to find out.
