Another Monday, another mountain day! Today, Adam and I headed back to the Carneddau where, last week, we had enjoyed an unexpected epic in the snow. Although snow could still be seen on the peaks of Carnedd Dafydd and Carnedd Llewelyn, the winter conditions we had found seven days ago were long gone. In fact, most of the day was blessed with sunshine and distant views. When we arrived just past Capel Curing on the A5, there was till quite a bit of cloud hanging in the Ogwen Valley due to the cold conditions, but the sun soon burnt this off to leave a stunning scene.
Our planned route was effectively to do a high altitude clockwise lap of the Llyn Cowlyd Reservoir which is quite impressively long (almost 3km) for this type of terrain. We spent quite a bit of time studying the map closely and tracking our every move during our approach to the reservoir and the first (more interesting) half of the ascent of Pen Llithrig y Wrach.
Before starting up the south ridge we spent a moment admiring the impressive feat of engineering before us. Close inspection of the map shows an apparent stream which runs around the mountain side to the west. A stream on a mountainside might not seem particularly unusual until you notice that, instead of running downhill, it keeps an almost constant height of about 415m. It turns out that this s a manmade watercourse which collects water from a relatively large area and uses a very gentle gradient to feed this water into the reservoir.
First lunch was a brief and chilly afair due to the strong winds, but we enjoyed amazing view to the north looking at Bangor and the Irish Sea. One thing that struck me was the number of wind farms out there! Judging by how slowly they seemed to be turning, they obviously weren’t experiencing the same condition as we were!
A speedy descent of the north east ridge soon got us back down to the head of the reservoir but, with time starting to drift on, there wasn’t too much time to enjoy the scene before heading back up towards Creigiau Gleision. This turned out to be quite a wet and boggy stretch and we were both quite relieved to get back up on the high ground.
Our descent started as a race against the approaching darkness, but is was the cloud and rain that got to us first. It was a bit of a shame after such a beautiful day, but we could hardly complain and it made the arrival back at the car all the more happy!
