Snowdon – Wales highest mountain!

The other weekend I took my friend Amanda up Snowdon in Wales, this was her first ever mountain!

Staying at a local B&B in Llanberis (http://www.lakeviewhotel.co.uk/) which is a quaint place, has decent meals and the owner Mike is definitely a character!  We had a spare few hours on the Saturday to have a mooch around Llanberis and a drive to Caernarfon, which is a lovely Welsh seaside town and has a castle!  Unfortunately we were too late to get into the actual castle, but enjoyed the views from outside a pub!

We set off on Sunday morning at 9am, allowing us enough time to leisurely reach the top and back down without too much pressure, there’s a car park at the bottom of the path which is £4 for the day.  I decided that we would take the Rangers Path up and down as I’d done it previously with CYM and also knew it would fairly quiet compared to the very popular Llanberis path.  If we had more time, I would have perhaps gone up Rangers and down the Miners Path for a bit of diversity, but you have to rely on the Sherpa bus to transport you from one path to another and I wasn’t sure on the frequency of the buses and what time we would be back down.

The path starts off on a steep incline zig zagging until you reach a gate, the path then levels out and it’s pretty easy-going for a while.  The scenery as always is just lovely and on a hot summers day like we had, the views of Snowdon’s peak were clear to see pretty much straight away.

The path then becomes a little harder, more steps and more zig zagging!

Eventually it levels out once more and the walk becomes a little easier.  At this point you can clearly see the Cafe on top of Snowdon and know that you have maybe an hour or so to go, with that knowledge you push through and reach the railway and merge with some of the other paths.

Up until then the amount of people we had seen was around a dozen so really quiet.  Once you reach this part, the amount of people becomes a lot more, however not as many as I imagined there would have been.

The last part gives you great views down the Miners Path and Crib Goch, a route I would like to tackle one day!  Watch this video if you dare!

Finally we reached the summit at around 12:30pm, so in total it took us 3 1/2 hours to reach the top, with plenty of short and longer stops on the way.

Quick summit shot, we headed to the Cafe for a cup of tea and flapjack, regained our energy (and dried off the sweat!) had the luxury of a toilet before making out way back down…  Amanda resisting the urge to get the train back!

Coming back down the way we came, it’s always a different experience on the legs…and of course being on a mountain I did take a tumble…wouldn’t be normal if that didn’t happen to be honest!

Coming down was slightly quicker, although we did take plenty of breaks purely because it was so hot.  We got back down to the car at 4pm, making that 3 hours.  So all in all it took 6 1/2 hours up and down going at a very relaxed speed.

Snowdon is a lovely mountain to climb and with so many different types of routes to tackle, you’ll be hard to find a route that doesn’t suit your abilities.

Some more pics…