Well Friday came and I found myself stuck in motorway traffic again, but at least I was headed to Snowdonia and this time I had company in the van. Toby and I were on the road, for what seemed like forever.
Eventually we arrived, unfortunately it was raining cats and dogs. Happy Halloween. Well the rain set the tone for the weekend. Wet.
Saturday morning dawned bright and hopefull. I collected Toby from Pete's Eats and we headed round towards Bethesda where we had arranged to meet Max (from uni). The plan was to have a go at the Crib Lem Spur onto Carnedd Dafydd.
Eventually we found somewhere to park and after joyful reunions, set off up the hill.
We slogged up towards the ridge that we planed to scramble up, an interesting grade 1 by all accounts, while suffering a constant bufferting by the wind.
After a brief bite to eat at the base of the spur we decided to brave the wind and try our luck on the ridge. It was blowing quite hard now.
We struggled our way up through the wind tactically hiding from the gusts behind large rock spikes. It became a game of wind, wait, still, move. In that way we made our way swiftly up the ridge. There was little incentive to hang around.
We topped out, predictably, into the teeth of the gale! It was brutal. Walking was difficult. We made it as fast as possible to the low wall shelters on the summit. We ducked in here to hide from the elements, oh by now it was properly raining and had been for a while, where we were joined very shortly by some woefully ill equipped walkers. One of them was in skinnie jeans. After chatting about the weather we departed the summit and headed back for the waiting cars.
The Carneddau really do try and throw your navigation off. Max felt it too so it's not just me, you want to walk the wrong way off the hills. Anyway we made our way back down to the cars, then off to a caffe to recover our strengths. All in all a very enjoyable day out!
