Their story, in their words…
For our Mark Evison challenge we decided to complete 3 different paths up and around Snowdon. Although there were points throughout our walk that we experienced difficulties, we overcame these obstacles with determination and managed to achieve each goal.
We began our 9-hour journey to Snowden at Victoria coach station and travelled to Chester, where we then took a train to Bangor, followed by a bus to the hostel. Once we arrived, we spent some time familiarising ourselves with the area.
Our first hike was climbing Snowdon via the Llanberis path, where at times we struggled with the heat and hadn’t anticipated how much water we needed to bring with us. However, we made it to the summit of the mountain and back in around 6 hours, without any issues or injuries.
On the second day, we failed to take into account the effects of the first walk and therefore we decided to take a slightly easier route between the waterfalls. We took a route to Ceunant Mawr Waterfall, around Dolbadam Castle, then around Llyn Peris and back towards the hostel. We found that although this day wasn’t our original plan, we still found a way to make it challenging.
On our final day, we took the bus from Llanberis to Pen y Benglog and made the walk around Llyn Ogwen and Llyn Idwal, followed by a route to Swallow falls. This walk took us about 6.5 hours and we even had time to swim in the lake and take in the scenery, before we got the bus back.
We really enjoyed being in a small, quiet village and away from such a busy city. We also became more independent and managed to overcome issues. One example of a problem we faced was understanding how to use the buses, as we weren’t used to the buses coming every 2 hours in some cases and having to get tickets from the bus driver. Another thing that we didn’t plan for was the cramp and muscle ache that came as a result of the mountain hike. This meant we had to recover while also continuing to reach our goals.
Through this experience we were able to persevere and motivate each other when we were finding it tough. We learnt to remain determined and were surprised by how much we managed to complete overall.
