Walk of the Welsh Glyders 11 March 2014.

We we’re up early and away from home for just before 7am, after a short coffee stop we arrived at Ogwen Cottage just after 9am to fantastic weather and scenery to match. The visitors centre and YHA looks to have had a recent facelift with excellent facilities, WC, food and indoor interactive information centre, great for kids and well worth visit, with reasonable parking cost too, just £2 for 4 hours or £4 all day, we went for £4 as we expected the Glyder to live up to Trail magazines reputation as a long, but rewarding climb.  

We headed off up the good path towards Llyn Idwal (“Llyn” translates as tarn I suspect), the path took us in to a huge glacial bowl with the tarn in the middle towards a steep scramble up devils kitchen, it took us around an hour to negotiate the steep path and scramble to Llyn Clyd. After a quick brew we continued to the summit of Glyder Fawr 1001 meters high,  after a tough climb we reached the summit and we’re rewarded by breath taking views over towards the famous (but far too busy) Mount Snowdon and it’s smaller but much tougher neighbour the notorious Crib Goch. It really felt like an alpine experience looking across Wales highest mountains still clinging on to large sections of winter snow.

View of Grib Goch from Glyder Fawr

After stopping for lunch and to take in the views we continued across the fairly straight forward Dwyn Glyder towards Glyder Fach 994 meters, the summit is quite a technical climb to achieve, so Sarah waited at a ledge and I scrambled the final few meters to take a couple of pictures. After managing to climb off the shattered summit rocks we headed down south east to pick up the path towards Llyn Bochlwyd, whilst this is marked as a path on the OS map it was nothing more than a shattered scree slope and a very steep one at that, after much sliding, tripping and falling we eventually made it to the valley path, and after a well earned flap jack and brew we continued back to Ogwen Cottage via Llyn Bochlwyd. As we headed back to the car fighter jets roared through the valley on training exercise as the sun began to set. We got back to the car for just after 5pm to reflect on this  fantastic walk, made perfect by the weather conditions, and a real test of the legs and shoulders carrying the rucksack ahead of Coast to Coast 2014!