Snowdon Sherpa for Snowdon

Yr Wyddfa, or Snowdon, draws hundreds of thousands of walkers each year. It’s no stretch to see why – glacial ice cut this Ordovician volcano into staggeringly beautiful cwms and ridges, offering 10 different routes for you to climb to the top of Wales at 3560 feet.

The downside? Car parking is a well-reported nightmare – the main sites often fill before breakfast – but there is another way. Five Sherpa bus routes form a circuit around the base of the mountain, linking Llanberis, Pen-y-pass, Beddgelert and Caernarfon, plus the further flung hubs of Porthmadog, Bangor and Betws-y-coed, with stops at the start of all the main paths. No queuing for parking space, and you don’t even have to come down the same side of the mountain as you went up: instead you can cross Snowdon and admire it from another angle, then bus your way back round.

Or you could hop off a Sherpa bus to scale one of the national park’s many other enticing peaks – Moel Siabod from Capel Curig on the S1 route; the Matterhorn-mimic Cnicht from Pont Aberglaslyn on the S4; Elidir Fawr* from Dinorwig on the S3, or the little-visited but spectacular Mynydd Mawr from Rhyd-ddu on the same bus route – see Walk 23 in this issue.