Our Snowdon Challenge...

A few weeks back we had the opportunity to go and climb Mt Snowdon in northern Wales with a few friends. Snowdon is the second largest mountain in the UK at 1085m, behind Ben Nevis in Scotland (1344m). It was a pretty quick trip which was planned to the T (thanks to our very organised friend Martin), we headed up in a bus on friday night, woke up early and climbed the mountain on saturday morning and then headed back to London late saturday night. To say we were stuffed afterwards is an understatement!

Our hostel was at a place called Llanberis, which is a little town at the base of the mountain. We arrived on Friday night around 12:30am, so by the time we had set up tents and everything it was around 2am before we got any sleep. Not a good start to the expedition. A few hours sleep, a early start (and pretty ordinary hostel breakfast), and we were on our way!

There are quite a few different routes to get up to the summit, some more difficult (and dangerous) than others. We took the Miners Track up which is apparently the second or third toughest one, but one which you get to see a lot of really spectacular lakes and mountain views. It left from a place called Pen-y-Pass, and the initial climb was pretty easy and not very steep.

After a little while we reached the first lake called Llyn Teyrn which was pretty awesome. The country side on the way was also amazing, especially the mountain goats and sheep. At this stage we were still pretty keen and finding it pretty easy going. Kept going for a bit longer when we reached a really big lake called Llyn Llydaw, which was again spectacular. By this stage we were getting closer to the bottom of the clouds which made for some good photos accross the lake and mountains. After following the lake around for ages we faced the hardest part of the climb which was a scramble up the mountain side to join another of the other tracks.

After overcoming this we had to stop for a fair bit to catch our breath and rest the legs. In fact by this time the stops were becoming a bit more regular as the climbing got steeper. The temp was starting to fall dramatically too, eventually only a couple of degrees at the top. We had been walking for about 2 and half hours now and it started to seem like it would never end! The clouds were really thick too, if it werent for the amount of people that we could follow in front of us, it would have been pretty easy to get lost!

Eventually though we reached the top of the ridge and had a less steep walk to the summit. It was freezing on the top and mighty windy too, lucky I had decided to pack in a jumper as I nearly didnt bring it, which would have been a big mistake! Actually it was funny that the jumper and shoes I climbed up in I had actually bought a year ago in Snowdon while Mum and Dad were over when we were going to climb it then but didnt end up getting the chance because of the weather. Ended up coming in use!

Reaching the summit was a good feeling (even though visibility was only a couple of metres), felt like we had achieved something. It took about 3 hours all up which was a pretty good effort we thought, considering our lack of fitness! The hot pasties and hot chocolate were very welcome at the summit cafe!

We decided to take the Llanberis track down as it was the easiest and provided some different scenery, though we didnt know that the 'Snowden Challenge' was being run on the same day. Competitors from all over the world compete in this race which they run up to the summit and back on the Llanberis path. What was totally amazing though is that a normal walk up and back down the Llanberis path would take someone at least 6 hours, and the winner did it in 1 hour 15 minutes! We were about halfway down the mountain when the first runner passed us going up, and we were only 3/4 of the way down when he passed us coming back! What was more impressive though was the man in the race who looked like he was at least 120, who like the first runner was up and back by the time we got to the bottom (see the last photo)!

After we had all come down we had a quick rest before packing back into the bus for the long drive back to London... where more than a few of us got some well deserved sleep. All in all, it was an extremely crazy 24 hours, but we were glad we were able to do something we thought we were never going to get the chance to do.

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