Their story, in their words…
For our project, we camped in the Brecon Beacons for 6 days. To prepare to stargaze there, we visited the National Maritime Museum and asked for some advice on which cosmic events to look out for! We also made a planisphere which told us what constellations were visible every night.
Our arrival at the National Park started off with some disasters; our tent we borrowed from school had no pegs or poles, our new tent took us over an hour to pitch because the ground was bone dry and one of our campsites even shut down spontaneously. In a way it was good that we experienced the worst of it on day 1 because after that everything only got better!
We walked a minimum of 14km per day, sometimes taking detours in order to reach that goal. Day 3 was our first highlight of the trip where we saw the notorious Four Falls! Hiba and Bushra actually ended up going underneath one of the waterfalls (it was really cold). It was super cool to sit at the top of one of the waterfalls and eat our lunch there. The noodles and hot chocolate we had later that night were amazing too!
On day 4, Saleena made the hard decision to go home due to medical reasons. We dropped her off at a local train station and parted ways. Before she left, we saw the clearest night sky we had ever seen; the entire milky way galaxy was visible from our campsite! Our binoculars really elevated the experience and helped us see the meteor showers closer. Hiba struggled a lot with blisters on this day too so we questioned if with our 20kg backpacks we could still make it through the two hardest days to come.
Day 5 was the most difficult day. We walked for 20km carrying our rucksacks and Hiba’s blisters were getting worse. We questioned if it would still be safe for her to summit Pen y Fan and Corn Du the next day and hoped a good night’s sleep and some ibuprofen would do the trick (it did).
We made an early start to day 6, waking up around 4:30AM and saying our final goodbyes to the stars. As if it was giving us a message of encouragement, the Big Dipper shined extra bright that night! We set off for our longest walk yet with constant elevation. When we made it to Pen y Fan, we sat there for 2 hours just admiring the view and finally getting a break after walking for hours. We met people at the summit and had some great conversations! As if the first climb wasn’t gruelling enough carrying 20kg, we went for our second summit, Corn Du, before making our way back to Cardiff and getting home.
We all want to thank the Mark Evison Foundation so much for giving us the opportunity to improve our navigation skills, learn lots about the outdoors (especially the starry sky) and teaching us to persevere even when things are difficult (a skill we will value a lot in Year 13). We hope that what we learnt on this expedition will aid us to climb more mountains in the future!
