The Glyders

Or Biting Off More Than You Can Chew.

We spent the weekend in North Wales and yesterday went for a rather long walk over the Glyders, about 13.5 miles with approximately1800m of ascent (give or take as our gps went a bit wonky in the middle) taking in three of the Welsh 3000'ers. We climbed up to start just after the quarry at Carnedd y Filiast (821m) and walked along the ridge over Mynedd Perfedd (812m), Foel goch (831m), Y Garn (947m), Glyder Fawr (999m) and Glyder Fach (we skirted around the back over Castel y Gwynt at 950m) then Y Foel Goch (805m) dropping down to Cefn y Capel (441m) to finish in Capel Curig. Ridge walks are fabulous, as once you are up there, there are always amazing views and relatively little up and down to worry about. Of course, on walks where there are 3000'ers there is always going to be some uphill (and there most certainly was!) but it was all worth it. I think. I should probably apologise to all non-British people who ever read my blog (if, in fact, there are any) because of the way that I casually change between feet, metres, miles, etc. There are fifteen 3000'ers in Wales and they are called thus because they are higher than 3000ft, but because the OS maps are printed with the heights in metres, these are the ones I tend to use here. 999m is 3279 feet.

From Y Garn, looking over Llyn Clyd & Llyn Idwal towards Tryfan

At the summit of Glyder Fach with Snowdon in the distance

Looking towards Glyder Fawr

Coming down off Cefn y Capel

Sheepses and lambses at Gelli

Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach means 'big mound of stones' and 'little mound of stones' in English, which is very appropriate. We have had great fun while I have been putting up this post trying to work out all the Welsh pronunciations for all the places, probably getting it all terribly wrong. I can speak about 10 words in Welsh, none of them of any use in any situation, and I am determined to learn a few more useful ones, as we do go to Wales quite often and have a week's holiday booked in the Black Mountains this year.

One of the reasons that we chose to go to Wales this weekend was because of the smoking ban that has just been introduced, which is A Good Thing. But as it was, we were so long out our walk that it was too late to go to the pub by the time we got back and we ended up with tinned chilli and easy cook rice at the campsite with bottles of beer, which went down very well.

I am a little bit achey in the legs today, but not as bad as I feared I would be and all in all and despite some route uncertainty at the beginning and severe knackeredness at the end (!) a good day was had by all.