Jumpin' Humpy

9.5 miles (only!) The fabulous weather continues to hold. The stars at our camp last night were stunning, brilliant in a night sky with no light pollution for miles. A few bats and the ubiquitous sheep wandering about completed the evening show. We were up early after a windy but dry and warm night, and were on the trail by a bit after 0800, off to traverse the Rhinogs. We’d learned from our mistakes at Cadair Idris and checked both map and compass frequently, resulting in a fairly slow pace but no time lost  to backtracking. This country is quite different from the more southern part of Wales, all rock walls, scree and huge boulders interspersed with boggy bunch-grass meadows and laced with small, hidden streams carefully placed to cover feet at inopportune moments. Amazingly, stone fences run up and down the mountains, over the boggy meadows, going on for miles sometimes. It’s hard to imagine how many years it must have taken to build those fences. There are few sheep and virtually no cows here, and thigh the land is divided into pastures of a sort, they have none of the soft, lush greenness of the pastures to the south.

So, we successfully traversed the Rhinogs and walked into Trawsfyndd early in the afternoon. We’d planned on staying there for the night but elected to bus into Caernarfon directly rather than waiting until tomorrow morning. We’ll have a bit of time to explore in the early part of the day tomorrow before catching another bus to Rhyd-Ddu, at the base of Snowdon.

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