It feels as though every trip I book just gets more and more exciting, as my head fills up with more ideas, giving me so many things to explore and try!
This trip becomes the third year-consecutive trip to the incredible piece of earth that is Mount Snowdon. Travelling this time with my girlfriend Phoebe, who I visited Prague with, Dan, who joined me last year in Wales and Abi, making her debut trip with me!
In similar fashion to the previous two years, this journey started with big ol’ road-trip, packed with snacks and naps. We left at 9am on Saturday morning, wasting no time, and arrived at around 1pm at our AirBnb in Porthmadog, Gwynedd. It was a stunning, timeless little cottage on the seafront, giving us the opportunity to immediately start making photos right on our doorstep!
After we had settled in and finally got around to lugging all of the luggage from the car to the house, we decided to take an aimless drive down the road with intention to stop off at any location that had caught our attention! The first and only stop on this little drive was when we found this ‘massive rock’ (as Dan referred to it as) in the middle of nowhere! We parked up on the side of the road and began to climb. It proved slightly more difficult than expected, but half an hour later, we found ourselves at the top.
Bags down, coats off, photo time!
After a few drinks and some party games in the evening, we got ourselves a relatively early night and prepared for a 6:30am start. Of course, if it were just Dan and I, this would’ve been the case. But at about 8:30, we finally left the house and set out on a 40 minute drive to the base of Mt. Snowdon! In the summer of 2017, I successfully climbed the mountain on the Llanberis path. In January 2018, in the midst of a ferocious storm, Dan and I attempted an unsuccessful 5am trek on the Miners’ track. This year, Dan and I were in agreement that we owed it to ourselves to retry what we had failed the previous year. The conditions were far better and we were confident.
On the way to Snowdon, we stopped off at a little river to break up the journey and explore a bit. It was very cold, very windy and very foggy. With the rain pouring and an echo of doubt in all of our minds, we began. After about an hour and a half, we had already surpassed the point Dan and I had reached last year - it was looking promising. The path ended and all that was left was an incline. Though it was far too steep to walk, we would have to climb it. We climbed in total for around 2 hours and after being passed by at least 30 climbers on their way down, exclaiming that it was too tough to climb, we decided that our safety was more important than our egos, and we turned around. None of us regret not reaching the summit, because it was so foggy that we wouldn’t have seen anything different anyway, it would just have been a personal achievement for us. But we tackled more than we ever thought we were going to that day, and I am thoroughly proud of all of us.
