Snowdon

Ask any kid raised in England in the 1970s what the tallest mountain in England and Wales is and I guarantee you 90% or more of them know it's Mount Snowdon in Wales. Guaranteed. 

We planned to spend nine nights in Wales and our first stop was the seaside town of Llandudno, which is located about 30 miles or so from Snowdon. We had to get to the top of this mountain on one of our eight full days in Wales. Had to. I mean how many times in your life do you get the opportunity to travel to the top of the highest peak in a country? 

Those first two paragraphs are loaded with rabbit holes and I'm going to venture down a couple of those right away. 

First, there are some strange things I remember from my childhood education in England and highest mountains in Britain is one of those (I discussed this same issue a few years ago on this blog about the year 1066...). The highest mountain in Britain is Ben Nevis in Scotland. Every '70s English kid should know that information. In fact, the highest 22 mountains in Britain are in Scotland (I did NOT know that as a kid). But as if to not let Scotland be the best at anything, my teachers drilled into our heads the highest mountain in Britain AND the highest mountain in England / Wales. There's where Snowdon becomes a household name.

Second, a mountain in Britain is not like a mountain in most other countries. Climbing the highest mountain in the the United States means expedition-ing up Denali to a height of 20,310 feet. Mont Blanc in France is 15,766 feet and you'd need some similarly professional gear and guidance. Same for Kilimanjaro, Everest, and any country in the Alps, Andes and other large ranges. Mount Snowdon? 3,560 feet. It's a hill. It's about a third of the height of Haleakala in Hawaii and you can drive up to top of that mountain. Snowdon? Mountain? Barely. This should be a piece of cake.

One last thing before we get to the meat of this post. I don't remember any teacher in school ever making us memorize the tallest mountain in England. I haven't looked it up and I have no idea what it is. I find that strange, assuming my memory is correct. 

Time to climb Mount Snowdon.

The path to Snowdon's summit.

The walk up and down Mount Snowdon takes pretty much all day. We knew this before we arrived in Wales because my cousin (who has made the hike) told us. We are no strangers to long walks while on holiday. Over the last 13 years, we'd done some pretty epic hikes. Delicate Arch in Utah. Machu Picchu in Peru. Gorilla trekking in Uganda. Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto. A couple of others maybe. We can get some steps in while we are traveling the globe.

So how does the hike up Mount Snowdon compare to those other walks we have taken on other continents? Honestly...I have no idea. We didn't walk up Snowdon. Or down for that matter. We don't see everything that CAN be walked up or to or around as a MUST walk up or to or around. And we just had too darned much to do on Snowdon day to spend the whole day walking. So we didn't hike it.

But we did make it to the peak. Only we took the train most of the way there. We did walk to the peak itself, like the last 50 to 100 feet or so.

Our chariot to the peak.

I can't imagine there are too many mountains in this world where you can take a train pretty much the entire way to the top. I mean I know there are some peaks in the Rockies and I'm sure in various other places all over the world that you can drive to. But train? Can't imagine there are too many. But there is one at Snowdon.

According to the quick briefing before we got before we boarded the Peris (that was the name of our train) for the summit, we were told that folks started visiting Snowdon for tourism purposes at about the end of the Napoleonic Wars. That would be at about the first or second decade of the 19th century, or the 1810s or so.

A few decades later, someone figured out it was possible to build a railway pretty near to the top and so they acquired the land (I guess...we were told no public lands were used for the railway) and went ahead and did it. The railroad took just 14 months from 1894 to 1896 to build. Voila! Tourist access to the top of the tallest mountain in England and Wales (but not Scotland)!

Stopped at a passing place part-way up the mountain.

I know what you might be thinking...isn't a mountain a little steep to be building a railroad on? I mean, isn't there like a maximum slope that you can really run a railroad? And not just up, but down too? Isn't this a recipe for failure? 

Well, yes, it would be. Last summer I wrote about this exact same issue with the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway after our visit to the Canadian Rockies. Railroads don't operate very well on sloped ground. The ability to move is based on the friction between the train's wheels and the tracks and the steeper the track is, the harder it is to move. Or stop.

So the builders of the railroad to the top of Snowdon designed it to be different. Take a look at the picture above. Not at our train but at the other track. That track has two outer rails like a typical railroad, but it also has two inner rails which are notched. It is these two inner rails that allow the engine to pull the cars of tourists to the top of the mountain. It's called a rack and pinion railway or a cog railway and the notched or toothed rails in the center of the track are matched with a gear on the engine itself. It's that mechanism that allows the train to ascend and keeps it in place so it will never descend uncontrolled in the event of some sort of emergency situation.

When you are being pulled up that railway you can feel the gravity working against you. The carriage shakes on the steepest portions of the hill as those teeth interlock with the track. You can also feel the whole train being held on the track on the way down. Like it's waiting to break loose but can't.

The rack and pinion railway in situ and in mockup form.

The original trains that took tourists up to the top of Snowdon were all steam powered. Today, the Snowdon Mountain Railway operates both diesel and steam trains on the same route. We wanted to take a steam train but they were sold out when we made our reservation for this mountain climb six months in advance (!!!!) so we settled for the diesel. I'm not sure the experience is much different. The hour long trip to the top and descent of the same length was still impressive and gorgeous and filled with views of sheep in fields. 

If there was a concern I had about this trip, it was the length of time we were allowed at the top of the mountain. The turnaround time between arrival at the top of mountain station and departure back down the slope was just 30 minutes. 

I shouldn't have worried. On the other hand, I could see myself worrying if I ever were do to this again.

The final push for the summit (I know I'm making it sound like we had done a lot to get close...) is not a huge effort. It's a quick walk up some steps to a monument at the top with a gold disc on top which points out what you can see in the distance from the summit. The queue to the top was slow, mostly because people were taking pictures of themselves or their traveling companions, and the way down was actually pretty treacherous, particularly if you have issues descending irregular rocky slopes like I do. After we got done with that, we made a quick stop at the souvenir store and we were back in plenty of time to make the return train.

However, that plenty of time scenario came with absolutely no view because the mountain was completely fogged in. It was so foggy that we could barely see five feet without the mist obscuring our view. I honestly would have liked to see the view from the top of Snowdon, particularly if you can see all the way to the Isle of Man or the Lake District. And I think if i had been able to see all that way, I would have been rushed.

The fog made it not an issue. 

Proof we made it to the top.

But the fog also made a huge impression on me.

I remember watching Ken Burns' The National Parks and being told that Denali (North America's tallest mountain) in Alaska was so massive that it created its own weather. I thought that made sense at 20,000 plus feet all the way in Alaska, even if it was embedded within a mountain range. I'd heard or read similar stories about flight paths that avoid the Himalayas in Asia for the same reason.

I didn't consider Snowdon a real mountain before we visited this year. Even considering when I visited Snowdon as a kid in England and had a snowball fight in June somewhere up the slope. I mean the top elevation of the mountain is about half the elevation of the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In my mind, I couldn't see Snowdon having any real effect on the weather. I took a jacket, but I almost didn't. And I only took a jacket because I thought it might rain because it can rain at any time in Britain no matter the current conditions.

But here's the thing. It was warm and sunny at the base of the mountain that day when we boarded the railway. It was also warm and sunny when we got back to the base of the mountain, as it was when we were about maybe a third of the way up. But at the top, a mere 3,500 feet or so above sea level, it was not. The weather was completely different, including a dense layer of fog that somehow the sun seemed unabel to penetrate when you were standing (or training) just a couple of thousand feet lower. How is it possible that a hill affects the weather that much? It honestly elevated my respect for Snowdon.

We visited Snowdon because we wanted to get to the top of the highest peak in England/Wales. We thought it would be a comfortable journey to the top along a standard railway and that we'd get a great view of the Welsh countryside. We didn't get that at all. We came away impressed by the railway and how different it was from anything we'd ridden before. 

But we came away more impressed with Snowdon. The Mountain named Snowdon. It was obviously wild and inhospitable despite it being late May and despite the Mountain not being really that tall compared to some other mountains we'd visited. It's not all about size, I guess.

Snowdon done! Maybe the next mountain we come to we'll walk. Or not. Maybe.

Of course there's a pub called The Snowdon. In Llandudno.