A Tryfan north ridge
s I stepped out of the car into a muddy puddle and stared up at Tryfan’s grey, saturated north ridge, I could not have predicted that this would become my finest ever mountain day. It was cold in the Ogwen Valley, but far from freezing. We could see white dollops high on the mountains from the breakfast table of our hostel, but somehow it didn’t feel like winter. It was calm, drizzly, almost mild – and it was all a bit miserable. But we’d driven a long way to get here, so we weren’t about to sit around doing nothing. Besides, we had a local expert egging us on…
“Don’t worry about the clag down here,” Rob Johnson assured us. “It’ll be full winter conditions from around 700m. We’ll have a great day.” And he should know, because he’s a local mountain guide and the chairman of the overworked Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team.
So with crampons buried in our rucksacks and ice axes safely lashed to our backs, off we went. The early stages were steep, sweaty and soggy, but it wasn’t long before grass and mud gave way to snow and rock. In summer Tryfan’s north ridge is a scrambler’s paradise, a riotous mixture of technical terrain and tricky route-finding that’s regarded by many as the very definition of Grade 1 scrambling. I’m a very confident scrambler – in fact it’s by far my favourite way to travel in the mountains – but I’ve always considered myself a bit of a charlatan in winter, a cocky hillwalker masquerading as a serious mountaineer (or a have-a-go hero with all the gear and no idea). As a result, anything with even the slightest degree of technicality has a tendency to set my tummy fluttering. So it felt good to have an experienced companion with impeccable local knowledge in the lead.
Rising from the valley floor to Tryfan’s 917m summit, this fractured, soaring ridgeline is one of the most recognisable landmarks in north Wales, and it sums up everything that’s great about Snowdonia. There are moves to make your legs wobble, problems to solve, shards of rock so sharp you could slice cheese on them, and a trio of oddly angled standing stones (The Cannon, Adam & Eve) for you to horse around on. It’s huge fun, not excessively exposed, and demanding without being too difficult. But what’s it like under snow?
We started discovering the answer to that question around half an hour after leaving the car, as the squishiness of sludge was replaced by the reassuring crunch of hardened snow. If you’ve explored this ridge before, you’ll know even the early footpath sections are ferociously steep, so it wasn’t long before crampons and axes were deployed. The higher we climbed, the better it got. Below us the hum of cars from the A5 faded, and the tourist hordes of the Ogwen Valley became a distant memory. Cloud swirled around, clearing occasionally to tease a glimmer of a view, before clamping down again to leave us lost in our own little world: one of snow and ice, rock and ridge. The terrain was committing, almost frightening in places, and the sheer number of route options would have left me bewildered if not for Rob’s calming reassurance.
We started on a path, then hit a wide section of ridge, then negotiated an awkward rock step with the added security of a rope around our waists, but we knew we could have avoided that obstacle completely on easier ground to our right if we weren’t trying to be so laddishly heroic. From the road this route looks simple, arrowing directly upwards like a craggy escalator,
but the reality is quite different once you start spidering across its many crinkles and crevices. Tryfan’s north ridge rises and falls, twists and turns, shimmies and slides, grapples and heaves its way up the mountain – and from around halfway up you’re dealing with nothing but rock. We stayed as close as possible to the crest, posing with shaky knees on the Cannon Stone, then squeezing beneath shed-sized blocks and clambering up tight gullies to reach the mountain’s north summit. I’d never considered it before, but the name Tryfan translates from Welsh to ‘Three Peaks’, and when you’re scrambling across that trident of summits they feel far more pronounced than first impressions suggest. Every boulder, slab and turret was rimed in ice, with the snow consolidating and compacting beneath our feet as we inched closer to the dual columns of Adam and Eve that mark the top of this remarkable mountain. As we approached the summit the cloud cleared for a few precious seconds, giving way to deep blue skies, crystal clear air and a view of the Ogwen Valley I’ll never forget. We could see people strolling beside Llyn Ogwen, milling around the café at Idwal Cottage, totally unaware of the alpine-style conditions we’d climbed into high above. I smiled at the ridiculousness of it all.