My day started early. Up at 6am, and in the car by 7:20. This was to be our first lads trip in 2 years, and it was going to be good. The first part of the trip was an almost 5 hour road trip to get from Witham to the campsite. The way there was oddly familiar. As the road signs for Coventry emerged, I realised it was the same route as I would take back to university! Eventually however, the English signs faded away and transformed to one’s written in Welsh (with English underneath, so that clueless Englishmen like us wouldn’t get lost).
We arrived at our campsite around 2 in the afternoon, and proceeded to admire the beautiful scenery around us. Once we were done taking in the views, we set up camp.I have to say, I was not the most useful scout in the expedition. Nat and James did the most of the putting up, whilst I watched and occasionally pretended to help out. With the camp set up, it was time to gather supplies. We drove to the closest Morrisons and picked up food and cooking/eating implements. Quick drive back to camp, then we began the (as it turned out) long and complicated process of lighting a fire.
It started promising. The kindling lit up as it should, and the sticks that passed for firewood were bathed in the flames. And yet, as the kindling burnt out, the wood did not catch. Try as we might, the fire just would not start. We sat there for a good 45 minutes before we decided to leave the smouldering kindling alone and to try again later. Disheartened, we went to grab some more firewood for our second attempt. As it turned out, such a thing would not be necessary, as our smoke transformed into a real and proper fire!
We added fuel to the fire, and we could finally begin our cooking. As it turns out, cooking over a fire is not the easiest job. The biggest success we had was potatoes roasted in the ashes, followed closely by some tinned bean which we put directly into the fire. On the other hand, our lamb chops and bacon couldn’t even begin to compare to the fare we could have in an ordinary kitchen. Despite this, we ate our fill, and, satisfied, we tucked into bed.
I had a restless night – unsurprisingly so, as I had only been camping once, and that was close to a decade ago. I kept waking up, and struggled to fall asleep, and the cold wind certainly didn’t help. Eventually, morning came, and I decided to get up to get a bit of a warm-up for Snowdon. I put my boots on and went on a little walk through the hills surrounding our campsite.
I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the walk was worth it. I snapped a few great photos of sheep, and I also found an upgraded version of the view from a campsite (which was already quite good!). I headed back after reaching a fence I couldn’t jump, and woke Nat and James up.
We quickly got dressed and prepped for the big day – we were going to climb the tallest mountain in Wales after all! We decided our best bet for breakfast would be a fry-up at a pub, lots of calories, lots of energy. At first, we had wanted to head to a local pub for a Full Welsh Breakfast (I assume that’s a thing). However, after a small mishap at the carpark of one, we decided that we’d instead go the traditional route of going to Spoons instead.
Filled up on all kinds of goodness, we left for Snowdonia proper. Along the way, we oohed and ahhed as the mountains seemingly grew bigger, and by extension, prettier. As we approached Llanberis, we started pointing at which mountains might well be Snowdon, though as it turned out, we were wrong on all counts, and had simply pointed at other peaks that were part of the same massif.
Still, as we arrived in Llanberis, you could feel the anticipation in the air. The tallest mountain in Wales awaited us. After parking our car, and snapping a few photos of the picturesque landscape, we made our way to the bus stop. We had initially planned to take the Watkin Path up. This required us to take a 2 different buses (which was a fact we only determined after a chat with the bus driver – the bus maps were quite confusing).
The first bus took us to Pen-y-Pass, the start-off point for the Pyg and Miner’s Track. Here, we would wait for half an hour for a bus that never showed up. After I checked the bus timetable, we decided that we must have missed our connecting bus (or it had simply never shown up – both quite common in Britain). Either way, the next bus was in over an hour, and we didn’t want to sit around the Middle of Nowhere, Wales for ages, no matter how pretty the scenery.
As such, we chose to climb Snowdon using the Miner’s Track, and climb down the Llanberis Path (which was the initial plan anyway). We chose the Miner’s Track over the Pyg Track for little reason besides the fact that we might see some cool ruins along the way.
The track was easy-going at first. There was a steady climb, but nothing too difficult, and the path was straight and (mostly) even. Of course, this allowed us to appreciate the stunning scenery all the more. And I have to say, it was beautiful! The pictures speak for themselves, but seeing it in person was something completely different. The savage beauty of the mountains can only be accurately experienced by truly being there, breathing that air in, and taking in the details and camera misses. The lakes, the hills, the valleys, it’s all so pretty it’s hard to put it in words. To put it short, you should definitely climb Snowdon!
We passed a couple of crystal-clear blue lakes, and rounded a corner, and the gravel path suddenly turned to stone, and the ascent got much steeper. Finally, it felt like we were climbing a mountain! The higher we climbed, the better the views got, and it was hard to look anywhere without coming across something breath-taking.
Now would be a good time to give a little context to the route we took. The Miner’s Track was created for miners who would traverse along it to get to and from the copper mine in the area. As such, you can see the remains of the mining infrastructure, including the mines themselves, which is a fascinating insight to the history of the area. I have to say, I would not have wanted be the one to lug copper back down this mountain.
Eventually, we reached a lake (Llyn Glaslyn), we we took our long lunch break. The next part of the climb was going to be difficult, very difficult. The ascent was huge, and the path was rocky, and loose in many parts. Some of it was also wet, and not to mention the crowds of people making their way down along the Miner’s Track. As such, a long break was much needed.
Then began the climb. It was just as difficult as expected. We gained 100m in just under 15 minutes, and we would keep a similar pace for the entirety of the climb of this section. Nat and James opted for the route of most resistance, as they went off track slightly to challenge themselves and to cut some time down. Not having quite the same level of fitness, I opted to simply follow along the track, which was challenge enough by itself.
After what must have been over an hour of climbing this steep, rocky path, we finally made it over the ledge and onto a ridge, and we were greeted with new stunning views from the other side of Snowdon, as well as… railway tracks! Indeed, the more northerly approach from the Llanberis path has such a small gradient, that you can take a train almost all the way to the summit (at least in non-Covid times, currently the summit station is closed) – an actual train!
Of course, taking the train was not for us, and we pushed on, to the summit. I had a brief moment of panic after some shortness of breath, but this quickly after a short break. Then it was the last push, and the summit was in sight. We were basically there!
We waited a good 15 minutes in a queue to get to the summit itself (upon which there is some sort of sun dial, which I couldn’t really look at thanks to the queue behind us). We snapped some photos, and started on the way down. Unfortunately, a cloud had completely engulfed the summit as we had reached it, so we didn’t get the famous Snowdon views (though the scenery along the way made up for it).
And there it was. Done. We had climbed Wales’ tallest mountain. A strange little fact that I find difficult to accept even now. However, we had definitely achieved it, and we began our long climb down the Llanberis path. We stepped by ruins and sheep, and mountain vistas surrounded us. We had started the climb along the railway track at first, however I decided that the gravel on which it was sitting was a lot harder to traverse than the path itself, and so we went back onto that.
Along the way, we had stopped at the train station to see how much the train cost – a whopping £22! No way were we ever going to pay that (not that we particularly wanted to take the train down- didn’t want to be caught cheating did we?), so we continued the climb down.
James decided, at this stage, to attempt to cut our time down a little by going off-track. This proved to be a mistake as the descent from this heel was a lot steeper and a lot harder to walk down than the path would have been. James still insists we did gain some time, but Nat and I do we think we lost a good amount of time due to the difficult descent.
I should mention, I would not recommend climbing Snowdon along the Llanberis route. The path is very boring and long, and the views, though lovely, do not compare to the views one can see along the Miner’s Track. Not to mention, it’s the most crowded, and any reasonably fit adult would be able to do the Miner’s Track.
After almost 2 hours of walking we finally made it down to Llanberis, where we found our car, and set off to find some food and our sleeping bags to fall into. It had been a long, if very successful day.
We May Roam 