You can See for Metres!

Behold the magnificent view from the summit of Mount Snowdon:



On Sunday, Eve and I climbed to the 1085 metre summit of Mount Snowdon in Wales. The mountain is called Yr Wyddfa in the local lingo (have no idea how that is pronounced). This is Wales' highest mountain. It isn't the highest in Britain, that honour belongs to Ben Nevis, near Fort William in Scotland (we climbed this one five years ago on our honeymoon). Neither of these mountains are terribly high on an international scale, but it's still few hours of good exercise.

So it was a bit misty, but still fun. It wasn't clouded in all the way up; there was plenty of great views of the beautiful Welsh landscape on the lower bits. This panorama photo was taken at around the halfway mark. If you look carefully you can see the Snowdon Mountain Train creeping up through the valley on its way to the summit.



Not soon after we stopped to take that shot, we were approached by a plucky and determined scavenger. We named it Betty the Sheep. Betty seems to hang around the Halfway House (a small shop halfway up the hill) begging for morsels from the climbers. She followed us for a few hundred metres, then bleated at our betrayal for a while and wandered back down the hill to search for easier prey.



To be fair, she did manage to bum a small section of peanut butter sandwich from us, which we offered in an attempt to get rid of her. Didn't work.

At about 750 metres or so, we stepped into the clouds, and the wonderful views dissappeared. It became errily quiet, except for the sound of the wind which started to whip up stiffly from the valley, trying to force us over the edge. Visibility was only a few metres.

While there wasn't much to see, the fact that we couldn't see anything was eery in itself. Take a look at this shot, from about 900 metres or so up:



Looking over, it's impossible to tell how deep the drops on the side of the track get, it could be thousands of metres for all you can tell. There must be some strange kind of vertigo you can get from *not* being able to see how high up you are. Suffice to say, we kept well to the centre of the path, which was thankfully well marked.

Occasionally in the higher reaches the cloud would part for a split second giving a hint of the view.



We eventually reached the summit train station, after climbing some surprisingly exposed and treacherous bits across the narrowish ridge near the top (I'm not surprised that people have died climbing this mountain). The mountain railway train pulled into the station just after we did.



The train is in that picture somewhere.

The train station, shop and cafe is about 20 metres below the actual summit of Snowdon. So we climbed the rest of the way to the top, where I took the first photo. There you can find a standard issue plaque showing the direction and distances to various geographical thingies. We weren't that interested in this, as it could have said the Sydney Opera House was 15 metres away due north and we wouldn't be able to disprove it.



Here is shot of a bunch of tourists at the summit of Snowdon. Again, you may have to look carefully to see anything.



Deciding that there wasn't much to see or do at the top, and that we were freezing to death in the rather icy breeze, we bought tickets to take the train back to the village of Llanberis. This particular train was a steam powered affair, which was pretty cool.



The railway is a rack and pinion job, designed to clamber up the occasionally steep bits of the mountain. It's been operating since 1896, and they seem to have four or five locomotives, about half of them steam engines. The train takes about an hour to make the 5 mile (8 Kilometre) trip to Llanberis. Of course the weather when we arrived back at the bottom was clear and bright. Oh well.