Snowdonia Winter Skills Course
We had a surprisingly good nights sleep last night considering we were in a strange bed and had eaten too much dinner. We enjoyed a cooked breakfast before meeting up with our coach (Dave) and the rest of our group. We didn't really know what to do about the Darren and Sarah wager, as it turned out that we got Sarah right but not Darren! All three of the other people in our group have come on their own.
We started off with the usual 30 second introduction to ourselves in the context of a winter skills course. Sarah sounded like she was going to wipe the floor with the rest of us, after her 30 second whistle stop tour of living in Switzerland and "just wanting to make sure she knows what she's doing on the glaciers". Everyone else sounded like they liked going up hills in the summer but found them scary in the winter.
We went to the Plas y Brenin store to get everyone kitted out. We were quite smug because we already had our own crampons and winter boots. And even smugger to have got the boots as eBay bargains. Once we were weighed down with ice axes and helmets as well as everything else, we got into our mini bus and off we went. Well, after a few false starts as Dave was having a spot of bother with the clutch. He blamed the seat position, whereas I would have laid the blame firmly on the stiff soled winter boots, but we got going eventually.
Dave seemed pretty confident that he knew where there'd be some snow, and pulled up a few miles down the road, just before Tryfan. We set off up a lane towards a mountain called Carnedd Llewelyn. Dave had warned us that we'd have to walk for about 2 hours before we got to the snow, but it didn't seem long before we could see plenty of snow on the higher slopes!
After we left the lane we made our way up to a ridge towards the summit. We were surprised (and a little bit smug) to find that Sarah wasn't quite the action woman we were expecting, and that we were actually far more confident scrambling over snow covered rocky ridges than she was. Anthony was pouring with sweat and had to push himself to keep up, but was obviously pleased with his efforts when we made it to the snow. Darren took everything in his stride despite having confessed earlier that he was afraid of heights. Dave was of course skipping from rock to rock like a mountain goat.
We got our ice axes out fairly early on, quite soon after leaving the lane. An ice axe is mainly for three things. Posing with at the summit, using as a sort of walking stick, and stopping yourself sliding back down to the bottom of the snow line if it all goes terribly wrong. In extreme cases they can also be used for chopping steps in snow, climbing frozen waterfalls and as a weapon if things turn bad on the hill. We will be purchasing our own ice axes ASAP, mainly for photo opportunities. I hope they do them in purple, to match my waterproof jacket and new hat.
A bit further up, we got our crampons on. Ours had come highly recommended by several of Claire's colleagues, and seemed much better than the ones everyone else had rented, as theirs kept falling off! Ours stayed firmly attached to our boots, and were yellow and shiny. It was much easier walking in crampons than I expected. I'd been particularly concerned about walking on rocks with them, as I expected to go skating across any smooth rock surface to a certain death below, but the crampons actually gripped the bare rocks better that our boots did.
When we were a few metres from the summit there was enough snow for us to practice some winter skills. Which meant that we spent an hour doing "ice axe arrests" sliding down the snow covered slope on our bums, backs and fronts, like children, and stopping ourselves from falling into the corrie below at the last minute by jamming our ice axes into the snow and grinding to a halt inches from the edge. When we were satisfied we'd got the hang of it, and I could no longer feel my hands and some of my toes, we set off back down for tea and cakes.
The way down seemed much further than the way up. I managed to get far enough ahead at one point to eat the rest of my packed lunch, which had been weighing my rucksack down in quite a taunting manner for some time. The lane seemed to go on forever and we were all relieved to get back to the minibus and to a change of shoes.
After tea and ginger cake we struggled to stay awake through a PowerPoint presentation about avalanches, and then it was dinner time. We shared a bottle of wine and chatted to some other students for a couple of hours, and are now in our room comparing aches and pains. Claire has hundreds of blisters and I have hot restless legs, which is far more serious.
Tomorrow we are doing more of the same on a different hill I think. Hopefully there will still be some snow left for us.
PS - for any mothers reading, the bit about the ice axe arrests was very slightly exaggerated. Please do not panic, I think our lives were more at risk in the minibus.
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Location:Snowdonia
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