Go Ape

Here’s the first of our guest blogs from the guys that won the first Go Ape Adventure Bursary of the year. They got £600 worth of equipment to help them achieve their challenge: completing the Welsh 3000s.

“It’s generally agreed there’s 14 or 15 mountains in Wales are over 3000 ft high. Our challenge was to reach the top of all of them in one day.

For those of you with an enquiring mind that’s about 46.5km with 3,900m of climb, or, if you prefer 27.9 miles and 12,800 ft of climb. However, those distances are from the top of the first mountain to the top of the last.  You also have to get to the top of the first (Snowdon, the highest point in England or Wales) and off the last, so it’s actually quite a lot further.

We set off at 5.30am from the Llanberis car park at the foot of Snowdon.  Our plan was to dog trot most of the way, actually we took a dog with us as well who did his best to pull up over a variety of cliffs throughout the day.

There were 4 in our group, our other group of 5 set off at the same time but were intending to take it at steadier pace.

Our first ascent was Crib Goch, not for the faint hearted.  If you can imagine walking along your roof ridge for about a mile with a steep fall, steeper than your roof, on either side then that’s Crib Goch. 

We reached the top of Snowdon just after 7:00am and ran down fairly briskly until we reached our short cut, down a steep gully.  It didn’t look too bad from the top.  But once committed to what had looked like grass banks turned out to be slippery rocks covered by moss.  I fell quite a way, luckily my fall was cushioned by my sarnies, which I mashed to a pulp, yum yum.

Having reached back down to the bottom we had to climb back up, bag a peak or two then tackle Tryffan – a great scramble.  I have to confess we didn’t jump between the twin pillars at the top.

A few more tops then back down to just a couple of hundred metres before we tackled the final section known as the Carnedd section.  This involves a huge, grinding ascent, it’s one of those climbs when you keep thinking you’ve reached the top only to see another ridge ahead of you!  However, once on top, apart from being about 12 miles long, this section is pretty easy going.  There’s one outlying peak that you have to detour about a kilometre off the route to reach with quite a descent and climb, but once you’ve done that it’s simply a question of doing the miles at a steady trot over the broken surface.

It took us about 11½ hours from the top of the 1^st to top of the last peak, but another 3 hours or so getting on and off, so about 14 hours in total.  Luckily the weather was good, fairly chilly but dry.

It’s a great challenge, because it’s tough, but achievable for any, very determined, reasonably fit person.  There’s a great website www.welsh3000s.co.uk that describes it in far more detail and is well worth a visit.”