Or “snow”, in Welsh. Which I’ll confess I didn’t know until I looked it up. Anyway, there was plenty of it around this weekend, albeit the wrong type. This became clear on Saturday morning: I started up the road to the Ffynnon Llugwy reservoir full of anticipation of a traverse of the Carneddau. A spectacular sunrise distracted me from the post-holing for a little while, but it soon became a bit tedious (and very hard work!).
As the sky turned from saturated pink to uniform grey, my sense of running quickly overtook my sense of adventure – I gave up wading and beetled back down the hill and along the A5 to Ogwen instead.
My tactic was to instead go to a location where lots of people would have trampled down the voluminous powder. Sure enough, Idwal came up trumps and I made good time to the bottom of Devil’s Kitchen. I broke out the axe here, turned right at the top and entered the cloud about halfway up Y Garn. The fun fast descent was taken a little slower than usual as I guided down a chap who was out for this first winter walk and looked a little bewildered by a complete lack of visibility or navigational landmarks!
After leaving him at the top of the kitchen I nipped up Glyder Fawr, partly to get a bit more ascent in and partly because I really, really like running the descent back down from the summit to Llyn y Cŵn. The summit was cloudy and a bit chilly, and the descent actually turned out to be a bit tricky because of a tough icy surface layer of snow. Nevertheless, I was soon back down at Idwal and completed my lap of the lake before returning to the car via Cwm Bochlwyd. A lot of effort, but a good day even if the weather wasn’t quite what was expected.
This morning dawned foggy, and with all the snow melted from the roads and fields around Capel Curig. I decided on a shorter day, given the poor forecast and general malaise from yesterday’s exertions. Regular readers may think I run up Moel Siabod’s south-east ridge every other week but it’s over a year since I was last up there. The approach was a bit tedious today on very soggy snow.
At the bottom of the ridge it improved a little in texture and quite substantially in volume, so that after half an hour of fun I was axe-in-hand and all too soon breaching the top of the ridge on to the summit plateau.
A brutal descent followed, with multiple shin-bashings as I repeatedly broke through the crust above 8-10 inches of powder near the summit, swiftly followed by a complete white-out for a short while as I attempted to follow a bearing. The navigation went well, however, and the snow improved to become runnable until shortly before I entered the forest above Capel. It definitely wasn’t the blue sky weekend we were promised in forecasts mid-week, but I’ll take it over pretty much every alternative.