Today was a monster! One of the major objectives of this holiday was to go up Snowdon with Aimi. She had never done it before. I could have taken her the easy route but where’s the fun in that?
I didn’t deliberately choose a hard route but I did choose a route where there’d be less people. The ranger path is my favourite, it’s right round the back of Snowdon where none of the tourists go. You don’t have to battle through hordes of people doing charity walks all up the same hill complaining about how hard the easiest route is. It also has some really spectacular views that surprise you when you reach the top of the ridge. I would advise anybody to do this route as it is by far the best.
This was our last day staying in the campsite so got up and broke camp reasonably early. Other people were a bit slower to get on the move, taking an age to decide what they wanted to do that day. Walk or climb or swim or beach. This place had it all. Having had a good rest yesterday most people were up for doing something active. But most had done snowdon to death so went off to walk or climb another hill in snowdonia.
It took us 3 hours to get to the top where we were mauled by hundreds of people all trying to get the same selfie. We joined the queue up to the pedestal and got our picture proof before running away. It disgusted all of us to see how much rubbish was left scattered around the mountain top. Also the surprising lack of bins didn’t help this. I can understand not having bins on the tube. The government is petrified a backpack bomb would be left in one to cause as much terror as possible, but the top of a mountain in Wales? The worst thing that would happen if you blew up the summit would be spreading sweaty hiker down the cliff side and annoying the Welsh OS mapping office by making all this years maps instantly inaccurate. Give the plebeian masses bins for madness sake and keep our hillsides looking nice!
The quantity of people made kato a little nervous and also very popular. “He looks just like a fox!”. My gosh if I had a pound for everytime someone said that I would have had at least £100 by the end of the day. Being a Shiba Inu he’s only a little dog but managed the whole day with only a little bit of coaxing. To us it was 14 kilometres but to him, with his legs a third of our size, it must have seemed a lot further. After a good break at the top, he was a lot more spritely heading downhill. I think he knew we were going home.
At the bottom we jumped in the van and headed back to Beddgelert. Straight to the pub where we had dinner at the first day. We knew the food was good, we knew the food was cheap, and that’s all we needed right now.
