Environmental Considerations
Most upland paths will have a visual impact on the landscape, whether there for traditional access, or for the simple pleasure of walking in an appealing mountain environment. The paths that exist today are predominantly there for outdoor recreation, and due to increasing use they have suffered from wear and serious erosion, with some very large and obtrusive scars causing unacceptable visual impact.
This has lead to the need to build or repair paths in a way that minimises the impact of use and erosion, and restores sites to an acceptable and durable state. Only when this is done can access be sustained and environmental benefits seen.
At Mobile Adventure we believe that large scale challenge events can have a damaging impact on our mountain paths. Therefore, we try to minimise this effect and also reduce the impact on local residents, by strictly controlling the number of participants per event. Our small group policy is designed to minimise impact on the rural infrastructure - roads, footpaths & communities directly affected by our operations.
We put the environment and safety first and operate a strict policy on group size for our events providing professional support with a 1:8 instructor ratio per team.
This approach combined with high quality professional support and first class equipment consistently yields high success rates in all of our challenges.
The increasingly popular 3 Peak Challenge will always impact on the local community during anti-social hours. However, with careful route planning and sensible schedules this impact and the disturbance on the local community can be greatly reduced. Scheduling of start times especially at Wasdale Head is important and to avoid late night disturbance we aim to finish on the descent of Scafell Pike by 9.00pm.
We wish to develop a sustainable business with minimal impact on the local community and we limit numbers to a manageable level on our most popular events.
Although many companies organize mass charity fundraisers with literally hundreds of entrants; we believe, in addition to the environmental impact, that this can lead to a compromise in safety standards due to ineffective group management.
Other Mountain Challenges
Due to these inherent problems with the 3 Peaks, we have developed several other comparable Mountain Challenges which have less overall environmental impact:-
- Lake District 3000 Footers
- Lake District 6 Peaks Challenge
- Lake District 10 Peaks Challenge
- Lake District 24 Peaks Challenge
