I had a fantastic day out in the mountains
yesterday with some friends.
We did a circular route around the Glyders and the notorious Mount Tryfan.
We set off at 3am to beat the Bank Holiday traffic and arrived to glorious sunshine. The first part of the route goes past Lynn Idwal and up to the Glyders via the Devil’s Kitchen, when we summitted Glyders Fawr the views across to Mount Snowdon were breathtaking.
30 minutes later when we got to the
instagram worthy cantilever we were fully covered in cloud and could barely see 5 metres ahead of us.
It remained like that for pretty much the rest of the journey, which made navigating a lot more difficulty up Tryfan.
If you have been in the area before, you will know that there isn’t really a “route” up Tryfan from any angle. We were heading up the south face, there’s quite a lot of scrambling and some moments where you feel really
exposed to drops and the elements.
I was leading the way and noticed that I was constantly being pulled off my route by following the sound of others descending. It turned out that lots of people were on Tryfan yesterday that weren’t really experienced on mountains.
Most of the descenders we came across asked for advice on which way to go, so maybe we were in the place where we needed to be to give that advice.
I joked that it was like the internet world of weight loss, lots of people making lots of noise and distracting you from the basics which work consistently when worked consistently.
You don’t need anything fancy; no special shakes, potions, pills or oils. Just work out your energy requirements and go from there, ideally with as much “real” food as possible.
We hit the summit and descended via the west face and back
in to sunshine to finish off the hike.
Stick with what you know and you’ll be rewarded with results.
Darren “mountain man” Checkley