The Rossendale Rambler

(From the archives, February 1965. This was the first 'walk' I did in North Wales)
When the secretary of our North Wales Rambling Group came to see us, he emphasised that his was a rambling group. 'We walk', he said, 'We don't go straight up'. He tilted his arm at an angle to show the sort of thing his ramblers didn't attempt.

With this encouragement I presented myself on a February morning at Lake Ogwen for the first walk. Shock number one came when the guide appeared. He looked like, and was, ‘a seasoned mountaineer‘ with the clear blue eyes and weather-beaten skin that you read about in books. The secretary spoke to him, and it was plain he was being told there was a new boy in the party. His c.b. eyes flickered momentarily in my direction, and in that moment I was observed for future recognition when I got lost, summed up according to how I would behave in a crisis, and dismissed as a liability on any party that was unfortunate enough to include me.

Next the secretary himself pulled on the biggest pair of climbing boots I have ever seen. "The guide knows we are only walkers", he said, "and doesn't push us too far". As he said this two other members of the group got out their ice axes.

We were now ready to start. The party moved off through the iron gate that leads up to Cwm Idwal, and I began to take stock of my companions, with one exception all two inches or more taller than me and equipped as though they were going up the Matterhorn. The exception was a boy of eleven, wearing wellingtons. Any comfort I might have drawn from his presence was quickly dispelled when his father told me casually, as we walked along, that this child, in those wellingtons, had been round the Snowdon Horseshoe.

Where the footpath to Cwm Idwal bends right we walked straight on, and were soon going up a slope of 60 degrees. At least, that is the angle I quoted to people until I painstakingly measured it on the map, then it proved to be nearer 20 degrees. Perhaps it seemed steeper than it was because there was no path, and it was covered with loose snow.

At two thousand feet we reached a point where it seemed we could go no further. Confronting us there was an intimidating ridge in the shape of a dragon's tail, sloping down towards us and covered in ice. This was the Gribin, and as I was wondering how we would get round it, the party solved the problem by walking up it. This was the most terrifying part of the day. For fifteen minutes that seemed longer, we clawed our way up those rocks brushing off the feathers of ice with our hands to get a hold. When we got to the top (this was Glyder Fawr, our objective), Wellingtons' father, noticing how white and shaken I was, told me it would be easier going down. I had my own reservations about this, as I was quickly learning that hill walkers have a vocabulary of their own, and that such words as 'easy' and 'hard' have only a relative meaning for them.

Going down, in fact, proved to be another slope, leading down to Lake Cwn, of 22 degrees (exactly) but covered with small pieces of rock and ice. Negotiating this is called 'running the screes'. I don't mind being known as the first in mountaineering history to crawl them. At one point we came to a patch of frozen snow (on the slope) fifty feet across, and all the ramblers, except one (guess who?), walked straight over it ! I indicated to the guide that I was going round the patch, and ten minutes later he obligingly came, lent me an ice axe, and pointed out the footholds, i.e., blades of grass in groups of twelve, spaced six feet apart.

At the bottom of the scree we went over a frozen lake, where one fellow went through up to his knees. Finally we came down the rocks in front of the Devil's Kitchen. They must be beautiful in the summer, but with their coating of ice, and the freezing water running over the top that morning, it was no time to admire the scenery. As I went down on my back, trying to look as if I was enjoying it, Wellingtons came belting past, stopping every so often to bash the ground with a piece of rock (presumably because of an early interest in geology, or because he liked to see the ice splinters fly in all directions). He never slipped once.

Down in Cwm Idwal his father was the first to ask how I'd enjoyed the ramble. I told him that to call that assault course a ramble was an understatement. "You've had a bad initiation", he grinned. Now I'm saving up for a pair of climbing boots. For rambling only, of course.

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