Summit Failure
After our low-level morning bike ride on Saturday morning Steve and I set our sights a little higher and the Summit of Plynlimon called. We drove along the A44 and parked at the Elvis Rock layby and then started the walk to the summit. The going was pretty tough with knee to waist deep soft snow but that was the idea.
We took a bit of a detour from the path to start with, crossed a little gulley and a stream and then continued up the path towards the summit. We didn’t have a huge amount of time as we didn’t leave the car until 2.30pm and it starts getting dark at 4.30pm. It would be completely dark by 5pm, so I had a time of 4pm at the latest in my head for turning around. That gave us 1 hour 30 to get up there, half an hour of light to get back to a decent path and then half an hour of semi-darkness to get back to the road. I did have a torch with me and I knew we could do the last half mile by torch light if needed.
The going was pretty slow thanks to the snow but by 3:30pm we were getting towards the summit. As we did though conditions worsened and the snow started falling. We couldn’t see more than about 20 metres in any direction as near white-out conditions descended. Not a problem we had a compass and GPS with us and knew which way we’d come so could quite easily get back down in zero visibility.
Icy Post
I checked where we were and we were only about 70 vertical metres from the summit so we continued on for a while. Conditions then become very icy under foot and the wind whipped up making it difficult to keep our footing without crampons on, so by 3:45 and about 20 vertical metres from the summit I decided it was time to turn back. We could have made it. Plynlimon isn’t that high, we had decent clothing on, knew where we were, where we were going and how to get back, but sometimes the summit isn’t the only goal. In those conditions the summit would have looked like any other part of the hill, so getting there wouldn’t have been that exciting and as the weather conditions looked set to worsen, having a little bit of leeway as far as the darkness was concerned was going to be a good thing.
The descent was pretty easy and we reached the farm buildings near the road just as complete darkness fell. Perfect timing and a good walk in the snowy hills of Wales.
