Come rain or shine, you can't beat a club weekend meet for getting you out there sharing new climbing and walking adventures. Ben Williams dispatches his diary of a wet and wild weekend in North Wales.
Day 1: The municipal spirit of a club meet
Some discussion in the car about different types of rain and what the weather might be like when we get to Snowdonia, prompted by miserable low cloud in the valley when we set out from Burton-on-Trent.
Rhys ploughs his boy racer Clio through standing water in the dark, a continuous drumming on the roof of the car. With all the optimism in the world the prospects for climbing this weekend don't look great. The bad weather causes a series of accidents and delays us through Stoke-on-Trent. This doesn't put Rhys off, who drives like Johnny Dawes even if he can't climb like him.
Our destination is the Gloucester Mountaineering Club (GMC) hut in Deiniolen, a slate mining village high above Llanberis, and the Mountaineering Club of Burton-on-Trent's January meet. Considering this weather, we don't actually know how many other club members are going to be there – if any – so after a four hour drive we're pleasantly surprised to find Keith and Pete installed and warming up the hut.
Like all huts it's refreshingly sparse and white-washed after the pamperings of modern living. There's no TV or internet here, only pictures of GMC members climbing icefalls and a bookcase full of out-of-date climbing guides. There's also a prominent photo of a man wielding a sledgehammer in typical Soviet worker pose, standing on top of the hut in bright sunshine during the restoration of the building in the 1960s.
And as people unpack and share the stories of their journey, you can see something of this energetic, municipal spirit maintaining into a club meet even today.
It's not old fashioned exactly, but there's definitely something accommodating and mannered which comes from a different era.
Keith and Pete are both in their sixties, lounging in front of the fire in their technical fabrics. Keith wears shorts, a mild-mannered and thoughtful Burtonian, wiry and diplomatic; Pete meanwhile is a retired and endlessly bantering ex-university lecturer who is straight into his spiel, talking in deprecating terms about his native Yorkshire and welcoming Ellie with a few choice wind ups.
The conversation turns easily to talk of gear – the climbing club lingua franca – and the relative benefits of B1 and B2 boots, where you can buy cheap dry sacks in Nottingham and so on.
Amidst this whirl of talking people drift off to their bunkbeds in the adjoining building.
Day 2: Well-weathered but happy
A suspiciously quiet night of weather gives way to a pleasant, blustery morning and the first views of the surrounding Welsh countryside. The old mining communities are spread out over the mountainside, a disproportionate number of churches, chapels and neat graveyards vying for space with scattered quarrymen's cottages and stubby rock outcrops. The colour palette is a thin chromatic of browns, greys and watery greens, but it's not an unpleasant view. There's good looking bouldering right out of the back door.
The forecast is for storms after midday with better weather before, but we're too lazy to take advantage of this weather window. We settle down instead to a leisurely breakfast, sitting around the long table with endless cups of tea.
New people arrive. Nick and Kate are immediately busy planning their day's walk with Keith and Pete. They're talking about a low-level trek to avoid the worst of the weather which takes in waterfalls on nearby Anglesey.
Ellie, Rhys and I still have a vague idea to climb, despite the forecast, so we form a splinter group and decide to investigate the nearby Dinorwig slate mines. Even if we only end up exploring as seems likely, the mines should be more sheltered than Snowdon and the Pass.
We decide that 'Looning the Tube' in Australia quarry is worth a look, so once we're parked at Bus Stop we grab the gear and head up into the mines. But with light rain beginning to fall we soon change our plans – the bad weather encourages procrastination – and make instead for the hanging tunnel which leads into another smaller quarry, California.
These tropical place names are incongruous considering the forbidding nature of the quarries today, but maybe that's the point. These slate miners certainly had a sense of humour.
Through the tunnel the soaring California Arete – a 40m solo – dominates the bay; a party can also be seen aid-climbing a heavy chain which breaks into a tunnel at half-height, clipping slings for feet and pulling up on the rusty metal. But we're soon defeated by the weather. Sudden lightening and strong gusts turn California into a shooting gallery, and with flowing hail and flying slates we beat a hasty retreat to the car.
We're keen to salvage something vertical from the day so we drive up the Pass from Llanberis before dropping back down through the clouds to the campsite at Nant Gwynant. It's always feels a bit less serious down here and, after a few fortifying swigs of wine in the car, we head out into the rain to climb Heddwch.
The walk along Lyn Gwnyant is very pleasant, picking our way through the trees with the lake beneath us, there are some great routes here if you're prepared to dig them out. Heddwch isn't perhaps one of them but it's a fun finale to the day.
Maybe it's even more fun in the wet – a series of damp mantelshelfs leading to a tree-hugging exit – and we get it done as the light begins to fade before traipsing back round the lake in the twilight.
There's enjoyment to be had in salvaging something from a day like this, perhaps even more now that it's so easy to take a cheap flight out to foreign sunshine and permanently dry rock.
And back at the hut, judging by the volume and enthusiasm of the returning walking party, they've also found satisfaction over their wild 12 miles. They got caught in the storm too and everybody looks well-weathered but happy. Over spaghetti and pies the dinner time conversation – well aerated and increasingly well-watered – is typically unflinching and tackles the big issues of the day.
Everybody throws in their two penny's worth (Rhys says this is the time in the week that he gets to feel most intelligent). We discuss Coronation Street, trans-gender politics and the purposes of education, topics which don't get much air-time at the climbing wall. The conversation continues into the night with everybody getting along nicely, before people drift off to their dorms to the sound of more rain.
Find out more:
« Back