Snowdon gets a lot of bad press. From hillwalkers especially - but mostly from the kind of hillwalker with romantic notions, who spends the week dreaming of themselves wandering lonely as a pumpkin, then get to Pen y Pass at the crack of noon on a Bank Holiday Sunday, climb the hill by one of its shortest routes, and wonder why it's busy. There will be complaints about too many people, the railway, and the cafe.
Especially the cafe. The old "Snowdon Hotel" was, it's true, a pretty ugly lump and it's now been demolished, with a modern glass-fronted building costing something like £10million being build to replace it. Snowdon is a big mountain, and it's pretty easy to avoid it if you don't like it - and it does help make the summit slightly less crowded than it would be otherwise.
If I have mixed feelings about the cafe, I don't about the railway. It's great, isn't it? The Swiss have them in the Alps, and here's Wales with its very own brilliant piece of transport engineering. True, it all went tits up the first time they tried to get a train up it, but it's done pretty well since, and I like the friendly little trains, heard or seen from all sorts of places especially on the western flanks of the mountain. From the east, you'd hardly know it existed.
It's busy on Snowdon - well, yes, naturally. It's not busy all the time though, and all it takes is a willingness to get out of bed a bit earlier than usual and even on a sunny bank holiday weekend you can park, climb the hill in relative peace and quiet, and get to the pub before everyone else at the end of the day.
There are some great routes too - from Gwynant, you can climb Yr Aran and follow the south ridge to the summit. We did that a bone-chilling day in December once, with snow above 2000' - it was so windy on the summit it was hard to stand up yet just around the corner it was fine. From Llanberis, you can climb Moel Eilio via the very same pass that the marathon uses - then continue over the long grassy ridges of Foel Grons, Foel Goch and Moel Cynghorion to reach the cliffs of Cloggy and eventually the summit via the last stages of the Ranger path. Back to Llanberis over the cliffs of Llechog is a much better way than the pitched path. It's a long route, and one we did on an April day so warm it could have been August. We met hundreds of people between the Ranger and Llanberis paths, but less than a dozen on the rest of the walk.
Even the popular routes on the east side, the Pyg and Miners' tracks, are full of interest and great mountain scenery - but nothing can beat the classic horseshoe over Crib Goch, Crib y Ddysgl, Yr Wyddfa and Lliwedd. Crib Goch is I think even better if you use the quiet north ridge to reach the knife-edge summit, and not difficult at all if you can cope with the exposure. It can be a bit trickier to find the easiest way over the pinnacles and up Crib y Ddysgl, but whatever happens don't miss out Lliwedd as most people seem to - it's a great place to be on a lazy summer afternoon. I've enjoyed great conditions on Crib Goch (usually I don't like to be up there if it's bad!) - but the weirdest time was definitely on our Welsh 3000s trip in 2006. We set off at 4am to climb Snowdon - it was throwing it down and literally blowing a gale (3 out of our team of four got blown over yards from the summit of Snowdon as we set off towards Crib y Ddysgl) - and just as we were contemplating an early exit via Bwlch Coch, it all suddenly stopped, just past the pinnacles. We crossed the knife-edge in complete calm and dry, with just fog swirling around us, befoer exiting down the North Ridge, and back into the maelstrom. Perhaps there is a God, after all!
None of these delights are are on the menu for tomorrow of course - but in wind and rain, I'll still be able to imagine the hills above and draw on the energy they give me every time I set out on them to make it a better day.
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