A Wet Day In Wales

Tim Josephy

August is high summer in Wales.  The rain comes down in stair rods, but at least they are warm stair rods.  Lou didn’t want to walk because he had a broken big toe and I didn’t want to climb because I had a broken arm.

So that was why we were strolling up the Snowdon Ranger path on our way to Cloggy.  At least I was strolling, Lou was stumping along, with one foot in a mountain boot and the other in a cut away trainer – admittedly an all terrain trainer.  The landscape slowly merged into the grey cloud but there was no danger of us getting lost; all we had to do was follow the remains of Lou’s disintegrating plaster cast back to the car park.

We crossed into Cwm Brynog and fetched up under the Far West Buttress of Cloggy.  Waterfalls poured dismally out of green chimneys and livid mosses sprouted from every crack.  Lou cheered up noticeably.  Somewhere in the middle lay the start of Primitive Route, a V Diff (yes, there really is a V Diff on Cloggy!) the description of which we had found in Herbert Carr’s original Snowdon Guide.

I led off (why do I always fall for it?) up slabs streaming with water.  All was going well until I stopped to put a runner in.  I had racked our few pieces of gear on my right as usual, with no thought of how I’d undo a karabiner with my broken arm; the resultant feat of balance and twisting would not have disgraced a member of the Royal Ballet.  We progressed up the cliff – details of the route have thankfully drowned – successfully proving once again that Goretex is the finest material known to man for absorbing ten times its own weight in water.

Eventually we arrived at the foot of an overhanging corner some ten feet high.  Near the top an ancient piece of tat hung down, with green slime dripping off the end.  The guide airily said “a steep corner is passed on small holds.”  Now several things should be understood about the pioneers: one, they were extremely economical with the truth,  two, they had no morals at all when it came to getting up routes and, three, they were astonishingly inventive in circumventing difficulties.  Naively though, we tried to climb the corner.  I couldn’t pull on the tat.  Lou could pull on the tat but couldn’t jam his foot in the corner.  Impasse.  Lou tension traversed left across a slab towards a grassy crack.  There was no way of climbing it without inserting the toes in the crack.  As he rose, so did the pitch of the strange ululating noise emanating from his mouth, passing top C and disappearing beyond human hearing.  All over Snowdonia sheepdogs raced out and brought flocks down from the fells.

The last pitch fell to me.  Visibility was by now only a few yards and all that could be seen was a rib leading up to overhangs vaguely discernible in the mist.  On reaching the overhangs I found a cunning traverse to easy ground but by walking back over the pitch I was able to run the rope to make it seem I had climbed a particularly repulsive chimney.  Sadly I had reckoned without Lou’s warped sense of enjoyment and he declared it the best pitch of the climb.

Sitting in casualty at Bangor Hospital later that day, waiting for Lou to have his foot replastered (“I went to sleep in the bath, nurse, honest!”) I pondered on the stupidity of it all.  Still if we hadn’t done it we would only have watched the football or something and you could hardly write an article about that!