For the third time this week, I was back up in the snowy mountains of the Ogwen Valley, enjoying some winter mountaineering. It's been incredibly busy in the valley over the weekend, with cars lining the roads and some questionable parking skills by some! Luckily, we got a spot in the car park at Ogwen Cottage, and escaped into the hills before things got too crazy. I was leading a group of students who wanted to climb a 3000ft peak, so we chose to go for an ascent of Y Garn.
Walking up to Cwm Clyd was easy enough and although we were soon in the snow, it was soft enough to not need crampons on. From there we joined the NE ridge, where we put our crampons on and took out our ice axes. As we ascended the ridge, right on cue, the clouds lifted and we got great views of the summits as well as back down into the Nant Ffrancon Valley.
The summit ridge, while not technically hard, was a fantastic finale to our climb that finished with a short snowy step onto the summit plateau. The cloud swirled around dramatically as we headed over to the main summit. There is a descent sized cornice overhanging Banana Gully which we were careful to avoid - especially as there was a 30cm wide deep crack running parallel to it about a meter from the edge!
Conditions were positively balmy on the summit as we settled down for a spot of lunch. There was hardly a breath of wind. Before long a few other groups arrived at the top and there were soon about twenty people up there! After a bit of food and some chatter with the other summiteers, we decided to descend the same way.
The reason for this, was that after descending about two thirds of the ridge, there is a spot where you can take your crampons off and bum slide down a big snow slope. After checking the slope was safe, that's exactly what we did! Great fun! We were down by the little lakes in no time! After a quick snowball curling match on the frozen lake, we descended carefully back down to the mini bus, rather tired, but all very very happy.
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