Weekend wonder - Snowdon scrambles
Published in Adventure Travel magazine as part of regular material I created for their ‘Weekend Wonders’ feature.
David Hetherington scrambling on rocky slabs high above Llyn Llydaw during an ascent of Y Lliwedd on the Snowdon Horseshoe.
Living in Edinburgh, my built-in compass usually sees me heading north when I have time off - Scotland’s hills are very hard to resist - and I've headed south in the UK only twice before. Thick mist and rain one November spoiled the view for us in the Lake District and at times we counted ourselves lucky we could even see each other on the hill. On my second trip, we spent 3 days walking and scrambling with friends in Wales in Snowdonia National Park. Thankfully, there was no rain forecast and we expected 25 degree C temperatures.
Snowdonia National Park is a perfect place to visit for mountain walking, especially if you’d like to test your scrambling skills. Early on in my hiking and backpacking ‘career’, I had a bad experience whilst scrambling. I can’t recall which mountain I was on but I was in the North-West Highlands of Scotland and I clearly recall being stuck on the side of a ridge in a position where I didn’t want to go up and I didn’t want to go down. Numerous attempts at alleviating the situation failed and I had my first (and only) experience of ‘sewing machine leg’ where your leg involuntarily shakes and you feel like you are going to fall off the mountain. On that occasion, I was gratefully assisted by a friend physically moving my foot to an unseen foothold but it set in motion for me a somewhat irrational fear I have of falling when I’m on technical ground. Since then, I’ve often been wary of putting myself into exposed situations but I do love the visual aspect of a mountain ridge and scrambling along one is as fine a way as any to reach or descend from the summit of a mountain.
We started our Welsh trip with a scramble around the Snowdon horseshoe. This classic route traverses the excellent Crib Goch, at times a knife-edge ridge that led us to the summit of Yr Wyddfa, or Snowdon, Wales’ highest mountain. The horseshoe continues over Y Lliwedd and returns you to Pen y Pass. It’s a long day out but you’re almost guaranteed peace and quiet once you’ve left behind the drama of the number of people on Snowdon’s summit. The next day we drove round to the beautiful Ogwen Valley and climbed the north ridge of Tryfan, a route that the British Mountaineering Council calls ‘a long and thrilling grade one scramble that makes a perfect introduction to the sport’. On the summit, the brave can leap from two large rocks called Adam to Eve to test their mettle even further. We continued over the spectacularly spiked rocks of Glyder Fach to Glyder Fawr before we descended a really fun route on Y Gribin. This entertaining ridge, which led us back to our car via a refreshing mountain lake, provided us with great views back to the route we’d descended off Tryfan.
Looking after yourself
Snowdonia National Park is covered by Ordnance Survey Explorer Snowdonia map set - OS Explorer Maps OL17 / OL18 / OL23. If you’re nervous about scrambling on your own, or with friends, consider a training course. You can learn the skills safely before venturing onto technical terrain. Plas Y Brenin (http://www.pyb.co.uk) is the national mountain sports centre and is located in Snowdonia National Park just outside Capel Curig.