The highest woman in Europe

Most people climb to the summit of Mount Elbrus in about eight hours. It took me 14 years.

As students in southern Russia in the early 1990s, my friend Simon and I would stare through my kitchen window and marvel at its rounded twin peaks and icing sugar smooth slopes, 40 miles away in the Caucasus. At 5,642m Elbrus is the highest mountain in Europe, one of the seven summits coveted by mountaineers who want to reach the highest point of each continent. My mountaineering experience amounted to a few hill climbs in the Lakes and Snowdonia but I promised myself I would return one day.

Only a few hundred western Europeans complete the climb each year, yet it is much less technically challenging than its lower Alpine rival, Mont Blanc: its cone shape and smooth sides make it accessible even for inexperienced peak baggers like me.

Simon chose a Russian outdoor activity specialist because "they have a 75% success rate" and were cheaper than UK-based operators. They also allowed us to travel as a small group - just me and five male mountaineering mates and marathon runners - rather than join a larger team.

Pasha, our guide, greeted us with traditional Caucasian warmth, and a traditional Caucasian smile with a shining gold tooth, at Mineral Waters airport, a two-hour flight from Moscow and four hours by minibus from Azau, the main ski resort at the foot of Elbrus. But Courchevel this is not. Azau is, after all, in Kabardino-Balkaria, a semi-autonomous region of the Russian Federation, which grants it the freedom to be completely ignored, financially at least, by the government in Moscow.

First, we needed to acclimatise. Pasha led us on a gentle three-hour walk up Mount Cheget to around 3,000m from where we got our first view of Elbrus - brilliant white and forbidding. On the second day, we reached 3,600m on the romantically named All Communist Union Party mountain.

On the third day, we took the cable car to base camp. Priut-11 refuge, in the shadow of Elbrus's twin peaks, is basic but adequate. It was once a diesel hut that supplied a state-of-the-art three-storey hotel built in 1939. Campers now use the carcass of the ruined hotel as a windbreak.