Hiking Snowdonia

Hi all, I am currently wishing I were in London with my family. I had a great long weekend with them in Cardiff (and the surrounding area), but I am in Swansea now for a couple of days because I had quite a few hours of class I thought I’d still attend. I'm meeting up with them in London tonight where we’ll continue the fun, which you’ll all hear about.. soon. Kathy—I already failed at slowing mom down on the souvenir shopping. :P

I have been keeping busy with tests and planning stuff for the families visit so I’m just now posting about the weekend of March 4th-6th when I went on a trip to one of Wales’ National parks – Snowdonia. Shannon and I went with the hiking club on what they later told us was one of their hardest hikes. We didn’t know this before we decided to go, but we’re both in good enough shape from Swansea basketball that we survived!

We took off Friday night on a 5 hour drive. The fourteen of us got to our bunkhouse, which was an old school house, late that night and got some rest before our long day of hiking. We started off on Saturday at an area called the Rhinogs. We basically just walked around the mountains, hills, and lakes all day. The group stopped a lot for short breaks and they pulled out chocolate and candy every time, which I thought was pretty funny. I was glad for the breaks though, it was hard work climbing some of the steeper hills. They would look for parts of the mountain that were rocky and steep so they could “scramble” up them. I was scared for loose rocks and not having anything sturdy to grab at, but I got pretty good at it. What I found out later was that going down was way harder because you get to look down the mountain and see the path you could stumble down right in front of your face.

First waterfall I saw on the hike

We walked through a foresty area that made me feel like I was on Twilight with such green mossy looking environment – the picture doesn’t do it justice

Rhinogs

Beautiful landscape

Shannon and me in front of the mountain

When we came up to a lake at the top of the mountain, we saw some guys in a tent camping out - kind of made me wish we would have been camping right on top of the mountains!

The bunkhouse

The second day we went to a mountain called Cadair Idris. It was an easier path, with less “scrambling,” but was still pretty exhausting! The closer we got to the top the colder it got. There was frost towards the top which you can see in the next picture, but the sun shining down was really warm.

Made it to the top!

This is the best picture I could find to depict the most nerve racking leg of my journey.

Shannon and I were so uncomfortable with the loose rock. Since we haven’t had practice hiking we were really slow and felt like we were going to just slide down the mountain. I was laughing so hard once because I couldn’t believe how hard it was, but I was wanting to cry because I was so nervous. Below is the same picture, the left red circle is the hiker who took off just leisurely strolling down the mountain, making us look ridiculous. The circle on the right is me! Hopefully the size of us can give you an idea of how steep the mountain was!

Once we got down the mountain though, we got to sit and relax by this lake for a little while. It was much warmer down there and so pretty.

Making the trek back to the cars, it was still a lot of up and down, but much easier on grass!

Alright, off to London soon!