North Wales - September 2007

Look further down for the photos.

On the weekend of September the 22nd 2007 Gary, Jools, Alex and I went off for a weekends scrambling in North Wales. We stayed at the Bryn Tyrch Campsite on the Friday night (just near the pub), and Alex (on a short break from travelling the world) spent his first night under canvas. In fact he also helped to pitch his first tent and tried real ale for the first time.

He's not foreign or anything, just from London :-)

On the Saturday we decided to do the whole Snowdon horseshoe, which starts with the Crib Goch ridge. This was also Alex's first time scrambling, and we made a slight mistake choosing this route. We'd gone through the guide book looking for a good Grade 1, and when we found Crib Goch thought "cool, thats a great route, and it's only a Grade 1". We forgot the exposure, and the fact that we had been doing this for a few years. As can be seen from the photos we learnt that whilst we can all walk along the crest of the ridge with our hands in our pockets a beginner shouldn't be expected to.

As it happens whilst we have put Alex off scrambling for life he still loved everything else, and has asked to come on our next trip... just not if we go scrambling.

The photos below just show Crib Goch and the end of the horseshoe, the weather was supposed to be great on the Saturday with fog at the start of the day burning off to sunshine by lunch, however the fog consolidated into heavy rain with a fresh wind so there wasn't anything much to photograph.

I hadn't been up to the summit of Snowdon for years, and found it even more ugly than the last time I was there. The building site didn't help (they are currently rebuilding the station and cafe on the top) but mostly it was the queue of people waiting to climb the steps to the trig point and all the screaming kids. We didn't bother to climb up ourselves, and despite being pretty scared on the ridge going up there Alex insisted on finishing and we pushed on to complete the whole route.

Photos