Wales Tour: Mount Snowdon, on a Late Summer’s Evening

by thetinypotager

Setting off in the late afternoon, you are not expecting to conquer the summit of Snowdon, as the trecherous darkness can fall very swiftly.  Instead, you can cherish having a little piece of this most beautiful mountain to yourself, away from the tour buses and crowds, just as the sun begins to set and the low cloud bank descends.

We hiked with our four young children (ages 11 down to 5) from Pen Y Pass to just before Crib Goch, using the Pyg Track, for a several thousand foot high picnic tea with a view.

Pen Y Pass is already itself rather high, and very quickly we were rewarded with far reaching views out towards the lakes Llyn Peris and Llyn Padarn.

The Pyg Track winds its way steeply up the mountainside.  Large slabs of rock cross tiny streams and, in places, the path disappears entirely and we picked our way up over the boulders.

As we near the Crib Goch junction (where if we were to continue with the children on a sunny day, we would rejoin the miner’s route) the path becomes suddenly easier; an ancient stairway of mossy stones.

We found our spot, just beyond here – with the sharp peak of Snowdon in the distance.

We watched the grey clouds sweep across the valley, until the tops of the mountains disappeared from view, and then made our way safely back, under a glimpse of remaining blue sky.

 

24 Comments

    1. Funny you should say that, I was just looking at a photograph of my 9 year old, ten feet high than the rest of us up a large rock face … right after I had said “be sure to stick to the path!” 🙂

      Like

      Reply

    1. Thank you! 🙂 I have some photos of the Welsh Coast (the first time I have ever seen giant purple mountains meet the sea) – which will hopefully go online soon. I write a lot more once the weather gets colder and I’m not spending all my free time in the garden or hiking! Hope all is going well at your lovely French farm.

      Like

      Reply

    1. Thank you Keng. I’m trying to get them to love walking for the view and fresh air (as opposed to hitting a target … because then you are always looking far ahead at a peak, and not around you.) 🙂 Hope all is going well with your travels! x

      Like

      Reply

    1. Thank you Derrick … we’re just planning our trip to Scotland next year so that the children can see some very very big mountains. They’ve added an extra electric car supercharger to Scotland’s Cairngorms, so we can now -just- make it to Thurso, without me having panic attacks about running out of fuel 😀

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    1. Thanks so much! We were there just before an absolutely huge storm, which made for terrific photo ops. Back at the campsite, we were lucky that our tent was on a wooden platform, a lot were washed away in the morning (!)

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.