Friday saw another Snowdonia trip, in the company of Chris, Gareth and Luke. The plan was to find some snow given the excellent conditions over the last week. Things didn’t start well, with torrential rain on the way through, but they certainly picked up over the course of the weekend.

Saturday morning found us having abandoned all ideas of snow, and setting off for a round of the Bochlwyd Horseshoe in the rain. The rain quickly turned to snow, and there also turned out to be a decent amount of snow higher up. Thus followed a snowy romp up the North Ridge of Tryfan, followed by Bristly Ridge, the Glyderau, and finally Y Garn. The descent down the East Ridge to Idwal was lovely and snowy, and a nice finish to the day.

On Sunday we decided to have a look at Trinity Face on Snowdon, and it turned into an excellent day. There was a reasonable amount of snow in the gullies, so the four of us went up Central Trinity (I/II, ***). This was my first proper graded snowy route, and it was very enjoyable. We topped out in glorious sunshine exceedingly close to the summit of Snowdon – a weird but very cool experience! Less cool was the way in which Grivel had assembled Chris’ new crampons with a ‘dissasemble when least expecting it’ feature built in. On the way back down to the car we decided to keep it interesting and go over Crib y Ddysgyl and Crib Goch. Despite moving pretty slowly, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

So in spite of having to live, as Chris so eloquently put it, on “the bare minimum” (including, but not limited to, pizza, brownies, ginger bread, spaghetti bolognese, scotch eggs, quiche (qwee-ch), bombay mix and flavoured water), we had an excellent weekend. Kudos to Luke for driving, to Chris for patiently waiting while I revelled in the joys of leading the second half of Central Trinity, and to Gareth for coordinating a truly stunning F1-style pitstop on the way home.