Climbing Mount Snowdon

I’m not the biggest fan of Wales.

But they had a nice mountain.

When I was in Year 7 for whatever reason my school took us on a school trip to climb a mountain.

This is the type of random experience I’d get annoyed at the guys I coach in the Deep End for doing impulsively🙄 

But it was a lot of fun!

Looking back on it makes me feel nostalgia for the same sort of experience again.

Day before: Super long drive from London into Wales twisting and turning on cliff face roads in a huge bus that feels like it’ll fall off at any second.

Night before: Being pretty unsupervised and running around in the curtains of the place we’re staying at pretending to be batman 😳 

Then the mission starts.

We wake up pretty early.

6AM: Batch making a TON of sandwiches (I did about 10) these we’d eat any time we got hungry on the hike.

7AM: We all get driven up to the bottom of the Mountain and split into different groups for different tracks.

My group ended up taking the Pyg Track, this was a 6 hour track. That’s pretty insane.

Regrettably I couldn’t find any photos of this…

EXCEPT I JUST TOOK 1 HOUR OUT OF MY DAY LOOKING THROUGH EVERYTHING.

• Old school newsletters

• Old school wayback machine saves

• Old school twitter history

And then I took an extra search on my hard drive to see if I could maybe find something.

Tell me why the ONLY image that is findable is dated 2018 (I climbed this in 2015).

Anyway.

The image.

So yeah. 11km track. (that’s only half of it).

There were some pretty fun parts on the way up.

• I drank water that had been purely filtered through the mountain. Best water I’ve ever had in my life! (I was also pretty thirsty)

• Had to do some mini climbs which were pretty intense but fun

• Got to talk a lot to people and connect without any phones (this never happens anymore)

Then we reached the summit.

What did we do?

We had a snowball fight 😁 

Right at the edge of something where any slip would mean instant death, we had fun.

And almost died a few times…

This is where things got dark.

I almost actually perished.

See we went on a day that was quite snowy.

This was fine on the way up! But then the snow started to melt… more people started to walk on it…

It became slushy.

It was slippy.

That’s when we started going down…

It might not look it but this is VERY STEEP.

It’s about what your seated shoulder press is incline wise.

Snow being snow, if you fell off the path it would be a very steep slip and slide to the bottom.

That slushy slippery ice, it makes me fall.

Luckily I’m a pro at gravitational awareness and body positioning and I prevented myself from falling down the entire mountain and dying.

BUT IT WAS VERY CLOSE.

That was a pretty terrifying moment.

Then came the other 5 hours coming off the mountain.

Anyway Snowdon was an incredible time.

I’d happily go back and see if I can beat the mountain again.

I’d love one day to go with the guys in my coaching group and just make a day of it, or somewhere closer to London.

Meetups like that would be pretty fun.

But I’m not walking down Mount Snowdon again, I’ll take the train.

6 hours of walking 11km is enough for me. Can’t be getting too much fatigue like that 🙄

Your Hypertrophy Hero,
Fletcher