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Day 21
For the first time on the walk I slept really well in the tent. When I woke at 5.30am it was already light. Unzipping the door I saw the promise of a beautiful sunrise. I thought that at last I was to enjoy one of those beautiful fresh early mornings when camping is pure delight but my optimism was premature. By the time I had eaten breakfast and was taking the tent down the mist was as thick as it had been when I put it up.
There was no sign of any track continuing so I set off on a westerly bearing towards Carnedd y Filiast. The going was terrible. At every step I was destroying webs, wet with droplets of mist. It is obviously not only grouse which enjoy life in the heather. There must have been many thousands of spiders on this hill. I kept trending northwards to get slightly better going. I knew that I was probably walking off the top of the map but at every attempt to turn westwards I fell into holes and could hardly move. I felt very depressed and thought that this was my punishment for saying so confidently a few days ago that I was sure that I would not give up. Eventually I ended up in a totally flat bog. I could see neither rising nor falling ground in any direction and progress was equally squelchy whichever way I turned so at last I was able to go south-west trying as far as possible to step onto tussocks of grass and not into the deep waterlogged spaces between them. Eventually I saw a fence ahead which I thought would probably lead to the summit. A few minutes later I joined a wide bulldozed track which ran straight up to the trig point. Despite my relief I could not really be pleased to see a track of this sort going right to the top of a mountain.
Now there was a fence to follow with the faintest of paths alongside. A track of any sort seems so much easier than totally untrodden heather. The next top, Carnedd Llechwedd- llyfn, is described in the book as a 'choose-your-own' summit after walking 200 yards south of the cairn by the fence. I paced it out but there was no way that I could make an informed choice of tussock in the mist. Still I thought 'good enough' on a flat featureless bump like this.
As I descended westwards the mist dispersed and my spirits rose with it although I almost wished that I was still seeing it tussock by tussock when I saw the steep slopes of Arenig Fach ahead. It looked hard work and so it was with the day now turning quite hot.
As I climbed I remembered my first time up this hill with my friend Margaret. We had a campsite on the road to Ffestiniog and came cross-country over all the bog. We worked near Slough and got in the habit of coming to Snowdonia once a month at the time of the full moon. The very first time we went round the Snowdon Horseshoe on the Saturday and on Sunday climbed the north ridge of Tryfan, Bristly ridge and the Glyders. Margaret had done them before but anything of this sort was completely new to me. What a marvellous weekend for a novice hillwalker! Years later when our son Martin was eleven we did something similar to finish his collection of the Welsh two-thousanders; the horseshoe on Saturday and finally on the Sunday, Tryfan. How many people finish their Welsh two- thousanders on Tryfan?
The north ridge must be the best way up Arenig Fach, reserved for through walkers or at least those prepared to make a little more effort than peak-bagging it from the main road. It is rocky in places and opens up views onto Llyn Arenig Fach which seems to be almost a corrie lake although its a very open corrie. At the summit Arenig Fawr was just visible through the haze looking a hundred miles away.
The descent was not enjoyable over more thick heather. I joined a good clear track at one point but it unaccountably disappeared. I found a small stream and stopped amongst rocks on its bank for a midday brew up. Then I had to negotiate several walls, fortunately broken ones, to find a way onto the road.
Not only was the weather bright and sunny but there was now a real mountain ahead. The grass and then rock on the north-west ridge of Arenig Fawr was appreciated all the more after so much struggling through heather. So was the wonderful spacious feeling of being on top of a well defined ridge with open sky around me instead of clinging mist. Although the mist gives an intimacy which accentuates the little details of the landscape it is really the openness on the top of high ridges which brings the mountain lover back to the hills again and again.
The bold and rocky summit of Arenig Fawr was a good place to be as well. It carries not only a trig point but a memorial to the American crew of a Flying Fortress which crashed on this mountain in 1943. The south top is lower but equally bold and rocky, marked with a cairn. The book lists a third top on this mountain which it calls the South Ridge Top. Because their definition of a mountain requires only a reascent of 50 feet with no other qualifying criteria it is perhaps inevitable that a few oddities should creep in and this one is perhaps the oddest of the lot being just the biggest of a number of insignificant swellings on the south ridge of the mountain. It was fortunate that visibility was now perfect for I would surely have had some doubts about which bump to go up otherwise. In fact this top had a certain significance for me being my number 100 of the walk.
The col ahead was very boggy indeed but being now used to constantly wet feet I thought little of it. Moel Lyfnant is a predominantly grassy hill, pleasant enough in the sunshine but lacking the rocky ridges of its higher and more interesting neighbour.
As I came down westwards I spotted what looked like a pleasant campsite on the slopes of Gallt y Daren where a small ravine debouched in a grassy delta. I decide to investigate this place rather than camp in the rather boggy valley. I went up hoping that there would be somewhere flat to put the tent and indeed it turned out to be a very beautiful site. As soon as I had the tent up it started to rain again.
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