A welcome in the hillsides
wormwood_pearl and I just spent a weekend in Snowdonia with some climbing friends and their hardcore mates.
I'd been to Snowdonia several times before, most recently last September, when a couple of my hillwalking friends and I went camping in Cwm Ogwen and tried to climb all the Welsh 3000s over a long weekend. But this was the first time I'd been rock climbing there, and it was interesting to see the place through new eyes. We were trad climbing, in which there's no pre-placed protection on the route: you carry up a selection of cunningly-shaped wedges of metal which you wedge into handy cracks as you pass, and then clip the rope into them. If you fall, and you've placed your protection properly, then your highest runner will catch you.
Each rope-length is called a "pitch". When the leader has climbed a pitch, he sets up a solid anchor to belay from in a relatively convenient position, then belays the second up. The second removes the protection from the route as she goes. When the second reaches the leader's position, she clips into the anchor. All the gear is given to whoever's leading the next pitch, then the new leader unclips and the new second belays them up the next pitch as before.
Trad climbing's the dominant form of rock climbing in the UK, and Snowdonia's one of the birthplaces of the style (and indeed of rock climbing itself, as I understand it). As far as I can tell, the chief features of trad climbing are:
Anyway, our day-by-day doings were as follows:
Friday: spend much of the day packing and running around trying to acquire a harness, shoes etc for wormwood_pearl. Depart at 5.30ish, stop off for dinner at Tebay services (one of the only independent motorway service stations in the UK, and orders of magnitude nicer than your average motorway services). Arrive at the Rucksack Club hut in Nant Peris at about 2330.
Saturday: climb a route called Dives/Better Things (Hard Severe, ie quite tricky and/or exposed), my first ever multi-pitch climb, with my friend Stuart. He offers to let me lead the second pitch: I decline. The third pitch is up a nasty steep crack, with a long drop below it. I find it absolutely terrifying, and jam myself deep into the crack, consequently missing all the nice holds. Upwards progress is made mostly by smearing my feet off rough patches of the wall and finger-jamming in the crack, which leaves me with bloody knuckles.
We descend, eat our sandwiches, and wander round to find another route. At this point we meet up with my friend Michael (another beginner) and his climbing partner Ian. Stuart and Ian go off to do something hardcore, leaving Michael and I at the bottom of Wrinkle (V. Diff, ie fairly straightforward). After quite a lot of faffing about and waiting for other climbers (there are queues on these things, can you believe it?), we start up it. The first pitch features a basically unprotected five metre traverse, which Michael (leading) finds more than a little frightening: I find it scary enough when he's belaying me from above (or rather, across). The next pitch isn't too bad, and one of the climbers from the pair after us gets bored and climbs up after us, so I have a nice chat to her while I'm belaying Michael up the second pitch (she used to do Photoshop for a living, but RSI has put paid to that). I lead the third pitch: the climbing's not too bad, but the exposure's horrible, and so I place gear almost every metre. The necessity of focussing on the gear helps a lot. I go up in a big zig-zag, and don't bother to extend my runners: I know this will cause rope drag, but how big a problem can that be? Quite big, as it turns out. By the end I'm having to drag the rope up like a tug-o-war. The climber who I was chatting to earlier speeds past me at this stage, and basically tells me how to set up my anchor at the top. Home, late, exhausted and totally freaked out, to the communal barbecue: eat a huge amount of food, including an entire half-kilogram Cumberland sausage, and collapse into bed at 10pm.
Sunday: I try to find someone to go for a walk with me up the neighbouring mountain Elidir Fawr. Nobody wants to come with me, so Wormwood Pearl and I drive round to Little Tryfan, a popular beginners' slope, for an easily angled 3-pitch climb (Crack 2, we think, but it's hard to be sure). I lead. It's fairly straightforward - the climbing's easy enough that I can stay calm and just think about the gear placements and so on. After Saturday, this is exactly what I need. As I'm belaying WP up the second pitch, a guy comes past me soloing (climbing unroped) downwards. I ask if my anchor looks OK, and he quietly re-forms it for me using half as much gear, before handing me a slightly wonky nut he'd found abandoned on the route and continuing on his way.
We finish at about three (pretty slow, but hey, we're beginners) and eat our sandwiches, before it starts to spit and we head home. Jo, Michael and Ian aren't back from their long climb on Tryfan yet. At about six, we're starting to worry about them, so I call Jo. "Where are you?" I ask. "Pitch six," she says. "Out of?" "Nine". Oh dear. It subsequently turns out that they'd veered off-route onto something substantially harder than they were prepared for, and got stuck on one pitch for about two hours. Fortunately, there was an easy way off after pitch seven, but it still takes them a long time to get everyone up there. We are all getting pretty worried about them as time goes on, night falls, and they still aren't back. They eventually get back at about 2330, having had to walk down the mountain in darkness. I suggest Elidir Fawr the next day, but unsurprisingly find no takers.
Monday: a bunch of the hardcore mountain bikers get up at 0500 intending to mountain bike up Snowdon (bikes aren't allowed on the mountain after 1000). I consider going back to sleep, but decide that I'll just lie awake for two hours and only drop off when I'm meant to be getting up, so I get up with them and head off to walk up Elidir Fawr and Y Garn myself. The skies are clear and the views are excellent, but the wind's strong and gusty, and I occasionally have to lie down to avoid particularly strong gusts. I top out on Elidir Fawr at 0800 (thus bagging my final Welsh Munro), stay in the summit windbreak for about a minute, and then head down - walking along the exposed ridge to Y Garn in a gusty crosswind doesn't strike me as a good idea. Annoyingly, all my summit photos are really blurry - the camera wouldn't focus on anything, no matter how far away. Any thoughts, photographers? The camera was fine when I tried it again lower down. I get back at 0900 for second breakfast with the mountain bikers, who gave up when one of them got blown down a scree slope (fortunately, not seriously injured). We pack, clean up the house a bit, then head into Llanberis to have lunch at Pete's Eats, an excellent cafe which serves tea in pint mugs. Then to the climbing shop, for the one vital bit of gear which Michael is convinced would have made his epic on Tryfan easy to escape. We head back to Glasgow at about 1430.
I felt a bit of a wuss on Sunday evening, having done such an easy climb while Jo, Michael and Ian were out having their epic*, but climbing a mountain before breakfast the next day helped me feel a bit manlier :-)
* "Epic" appears to be climbing parlance for "expedition that did not go according to plan". In particular, epics need not involve serious injury, though that obviously makes for a better story.
I'd been to Snowdonia several times before, most recently last September, when a couple of my hillwalking friends and I went camping in Cwm Ogwen and tried to climb all the Welsh 3000s over a long weekend. But this was the first time I'd been rock climbing there, and it was interesting to see the place through new eyes. We were trad climbing, in which there's no pre-placed protection on the route: you carry up a selection of cunningly-shaped wedges of metal which you wedge into handy cracks as you pass, and then clip the rope into them. If you fall, and you've placed your protection properly, then your highest runner will catch you.
Each rope-length is called a "pitch". When the leader has climbed a pitch, he sets up a solid anchor to belay from in a relatively convenient position, then belays the second up. The second removes the protection from the route as she goes. When the second reaches the leader's position, she clips into the anchor. All the gear is given to whoever's leading the next pitch, then the new leader unclips and the new second belays them up the next pitch as before.
Trad climbing's the dominant form of rock climbing in the UK, and Snowdonia's one of the birthplaces of the style (and indeed of rock climbing itself, as I understand it). As far as I can tell, the chief features of trad climbing are:
- minimal impact on the rock,
- the need for large amounts of shiny kit,
- fear.
Anyway, our day-by-day doings were as follows:
Friday: spend much of the day packing and running around trying to acquire a harness, shoes etc for wormwood_pearl. Depart at 5.30ish, stop off for dinner at Tebay services (one of the only independent motorway service stations in the UK, and orders of magnitude nicer than your average motorway services). Arrive at the Rucksack Club hut in Nant Peris at about 2330.
Saturday: climb a route called Dives/Better Things (Hard Severe, ie quite tricky and/or exposed), my first ever multi-pitch climb, with my friend Stuart. He offers to let me lead the second pitch: I decline. The third pitch is up a nasty steep crack, with a long drop below it. I find it absolutely terrifying, and jam myself deep into the crack, consequently missing all the nice holds. Upwards progress is made mostly by smearing my feet off rough patches of the wall and finger-jamming in the crack, which leaves me with bloody knuckles.
We descend, eat our sandwiches, and wander round to find another route. At this point we meet up with my friend Michael (another beginner) and his climbing partner Ian. Stuart and Ian go off to do something hardcore, leaving Michael and I at the bottom of Wrinkle (V. Diff, ie fairly straightforward). After quite a lot of faffing about and waiting for other climbers (there are queues on these things, can you believe it?), we start up it. The first pitch features a basically unprotected five metre traverse, which Michael (leading) finds more than a little frightening: I find it scary enough when he's belaying me from above (or rather, across). The next pitch isn't too bad, and one of the climbers from the pair after us gets bored and climbs up after us, so I have a nice chat to her while I'm belaying Michael up the second pitch (she used to do Photoshop for a living, but RSI has put paid to that). I lead the third pitch: the climbing's not too bad, but the exposure's horrible, and so I place gear almost every metre. The necessity of focussing on the gear helps a lot. I go up in a big zig-zag, and don't bother to extend my runners: I know this will cause rope drag, but how big a problem can that be? Quite big, as it turns out. By the end I'm having to drag the rope up like a tug-o-war. The climber who I was chatting to earlier speeds past me at this stage, and basically tells me how to set up my anchor at the top. Home, late, exhausted and totally freaked out, to the communal barbecue: eat a huge amount of food, including an entire half-kilogram Cumberland sausage, and collapse into bed at 10pm.
Sunday: I try to find someone to go for a walk with me up the neighbouring mountain Elidir Fawr. Nobody wants to come with me, so Wormwood Pearl and I drive round to Little Tryfan, a popular beginners' slope, for an easily angled 3-pitch climb (Crack 2, we think, but it's hard to be sure). I lead. It's fairly straightforward - the climbing's easy enough that I can stay calm and just think about the gear placements and so on. After Saturday, this is exactly what I need. As I'm belaying WP up the second pitch, a guy comes past me soloing (climbing unroped) downwards. I ask if my anchor looks OK, and he quietly re-forms it for me using half as much gear, before handing me a slightly wonky nut he'd found abandoned on the route and continuing on his way.
We finish at about three (pretty slow, but hey, we're beginners) and eat our sandwiches, before it starts to spit and we head home. Jo, Michael and Ian aren't back from their long climb on Tryfan yet. At about six, we're starting to worry about them, so I call Jo. "Where are you?" I ask. "Pitch six," she says. "Out of?" "Nine". Oh dear. It subsequently turns out that they'd veered off-route onto something substantially harder than they were prepared for, and got stuck on one pitch for about two hours. Fortunately, there was an easy way off after pitch seven, but it still takes them a long time to get everyone up there. We are all getting pretty worried about them as time goes on, night falls, and they still aren't back. They eventually get back at about 2330, having had to walk down the mountain in darkness. I suggest Elidir Fawr the next day, but unsurprisingly find no takers.
Monday: a bunch of the hardcore mountain bikers get up at 0500 intending to mountain bike up Snowdon (bikes aren't allowed on the mountain after 1000). I consider going back to sleep, but decide that I'll just lie awake for two hours and only drop off when I'm meant to be getting up, so I get up with them and head off to walk up Elidir Fawr and Y Garn myself. The skies are clear and the views are excellent, but the wind's strong and gusty, and I occasionally have to lie down to avoid particularly strong gusts. I top out on Elidir Fawr at 0800 (thus bagging my final Welsh Munro), stay in the summit windbreak for about a minute, and then head down - walking along the exposed ridge to Y Garn in a gusty crosswind doesn't strike me as a good idea. Annoyingly, all my summit photos are really blurry - the camera wouldn't focus on anything, no matter how far away. Any thoughts, photographers? The camera was fine when I tried it again lower down. I get back at 0900 for second breakfast with the mountain bikers, who gave up when one of them got blown down a scree slope (fortunately, not seriously injured). We pack, clean up the house a bit, then head into Llanberis to have lunch at Pete's Eats, an excellent cafe which serves tea in pint mugs. Then to the climbing shop, for the one vital bit of gear which Michael is convinced would have made his epic on Tryfan easy to escape. We head back to Glasgow at about 1430.
I felt a bit of a wuss on Sunday evening, having done such an easy climb while Jo, Michael and Ian were out having their epic*, but climbing a mountain before breakfast the next day helped me feel a bit manlier :-)
* "Epic" appears to be climbing parlance for "expedition that did not go according to plan". In particular, epics need not involve serious injury, though that obviously makes for a better story.