{"id":4689,"date":"2016-01-17T20:31:58","date_gmt":"2016-01-17T20:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/?p=4689"},"modified":"2022-04-11T16:39:46","modified_gmt":"2022-04-11T15:39:46","slug":"eira","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/eira\/","title":{"rendered":"Eira"},"content":{"rendered":"

Or “snow”, in Welsh. Which I’ll confess I didn’t know until I looked it up. Anyway, there was plenty of it around this weekend, albeit the wrong\u00a0type<\/a>. This became clear on Saturday morning: I started up the road to the Ffynnon Llugwy reservoir full of anticipation of a traverse of the Carneddau. A spectacular sunrise distracted me from the post-holing<\/a> for a little while, but it soon became a bit tedious (and very hard work!).<\/p>\n

\"Sunrise

Sunrise from the Carneddau. \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Sunrise

Sunrise from the Carneddau. \u00a9\u00a0Haydn Williams 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Alpenglow

Alpenglow on Pen yr Ole Wen. No Photoshop messing with this one! \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

As the sky turned from saturated pink to uniform grey, my sense of running quickly overtook my sense of adventure – I gave up wading and beetled back down the hill and along the A5 to Ogwen instead.<\/p>\n

\"Carneddau

Carneddau pony foraging beneath the snow. \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

My tactic was to instead go to a location where lots of people would have trampled down the voluminous powder. Sure enough, Idwal came up trumps and I made good time to the bottom of Devil’s Kitchen. I broke out the axe here, turned right at the top and entered the cloud about halfway up Y Garn. The fun fast descent was taken a little slower than usual as I guided down a chap who was out for this first winter walk and looked a little bewildered by a complete lack of visibility or navigational landmarks!<\/p>\n

\"Some

Some other people on Y Garn. \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

After leaving him at the top of the kitchen I nipped up Glyder Fawr, partly to get a bit more ascent in and partly because I really, really like running the descent back down from the summit to Llyn y C\u0175n. The summit was cloudy and a bit chilly, and the descent actually turned out to be a bit tricky because of a tough icy surface layer of snow. Nevertheless, I was soon back down at Idwal and completed my lap of the lake before returning to the car via Cwm Bochlwyd.\u00a0A lot of effort, but a good day even if the weather wasn’t quite what was expected.<\/p>\n

This morning dawned foggy, and with all the snow melted from the roads and fields around Capel Curig. I decided on a shorter day, given the poor forecast and general malaise from yesterday’s exertions. Regular readers may think I run up Moel Siabod’s south-east ridge every other week but it’s over a year since I was last up there<\/a>. The approach was a bit tedious today on very soggy snow.<\/p>\n

\"Not

Not much visibility on the approach. \u00a9 Haydn Williams 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Follow

Follow the muddy-swamp road. \u00a9\u00a0Haydn Williams 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

At the bottom of the ridge it improved a little in texture and quite substantially in volume, so that after half an hour of fun I was axe-in-hand and all too soon breaching the top of the ridge on to the summit plateau.<\/p>\n

\"Enjoying

Enjoying some proper snow. \u00a9\u00a0Haydn Williams 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

A brutal descent followed, with multiple shin-bashings as I repeatedly broke through the crust above 8-10 inches of powder near the summit, swiftly followed by a complete white-out for a short while as I attempted to follow a bearing. The navigation went well, however, and the snow improved to become runnable until shortly before I entered the forest above Capel. It definitely wasn’t the blue sky weekend we were promised in forecasts mid-week, but I’ll take it over pretty much every alternative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or “snow”, in Welsh. Which I’ll confess I didn’t know until I looked it up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4694,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[569,538,80,420,118,207,396,309,380],"class_list":["post-4689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-outdoors","tag-carnedd-moel-siabod","tag-daear-ddu","tag-devils-kitchen","tag-fell-running","tag-glyder-fawr","tag-moel-siabod","tag-running","tag-snowdonia","tag-y-garn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haydnwilliams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}