A Hot Welsh Bank Holiday

The weather forecast for the bank holiday weekend was quite variable. But that – as usual – seemed to just be the forecasters generalising for the rest of us what those in the south-east would experience! :angry: Whereas the north-west looked like it would have great summer weather. On a bank holiday!! And in particular North Wales looked to be the sunniest place to be…

Holyhead Mountain

Saturday dawned cloudy so we opted for the easy option, Holyhead Mountain. Although I always find this venue a little un-inspiring, so after a couple of routes we headed over towards Main Cliff…

On the walk across we heard calls from above on one the other buttresses. It was Paul! The Barnsley gang had also descended on Anglesey for the summer bank holiday weekend. They’d come across that morning and had driven through torrential rain right up until Conwy. Clearly North Wales was the place to be to miss the rain. 🙂

After a brief catch up we continued on our journey to Main Cliff. However, when we got there all the classic lines were occupied. Doh. Never mind, that just made time for tea and cake. :yum: Sorry, no cake pictures Colin.

The clouds had by now cleared so we had sunny skies, calm seas out towards Ireland, and all of the open land around Holyhead Mountain was covered in flowering heathers and gorse. The whole area was a fantastic blanket of colour!

Tremadog

I was still thinking that the weather on Sunday might not be perfect, so we stayed with the costal theme and headed out to Tremadog for our adventures. But, the weather was perfect. Too perfect for such a sunny venue as Tremadog in fact, it was roasting! We climbed a few classic routes, lost a few pounds due to perspiration, and then in a bid to avoid killer dehydration decided to quit the climbing in favour of one of the other things that is so brilliant about Wales, the fantastic beaches…

Morfa Bychan

Just around the corner from Tremadog is Morfa Bychan, a wonderful and enormous sandy beach where you can drive right out on to the sands and set up for a day’s lazzing about by the sea. There’s a small fee, £4, for driving on to the sands. However, we didn’t pay as we simply walked out carrying our deck chairs…

Craig Yr Ysfa

Now knowing that the weather was trully set for summer highs our plans for Monday’s sport turned to the mountains. Cloggy was first to be considered, but for some strange unmemorable reason it got dissmissed and we headed up to Craig Yr Ysfa instead – as I had wanted to climb Mur y Niwl or Aura for many years and had not got round to it.. We’ve been to Craig Yr Ysfa serveral times before, but always in poor weather or with friends just starting out as climbers, to climb the ultra classic Amphitheatre Buttress. On this occassion we put in all the hard effort, hiking up to the top from Ogwen and leaving our sacks at the top of Pinnacle Wall and then, deciding against the abseil, trudging down and back up to the bottom of the face. Only to find another team in-situ! We waited a full hour and still no progress. Those moves must be tough! Time was now vanishing and we had to think about the long drive home. The A55, after such a brilliant bank holiday weekend, was going to be bumper-to-bumper. So alas yet again we headed off to climb Amphitheatre Buttress. A consolation prize in terms of climbing difficulty, but never-the-less an utterly brilliant route. To add a little interest we decided to move together for the whole length of the climb. No quite soloing, but very very fast, we were on top in about 45 minutes.