Their story, in their words…
Our challenge was to climb the 15 peaks in Wales over 3000ft. We made our way to Snowdon on the first day and slept on it so we could tick it off first thing in the morning. After hitting Crib Y Ddysgl, we went back into the valley to walk to the next ascent. It was difficult. With 20kg on our backs, we had to climb 800m in less than 2 miles but we made it to Elidir Fawr. Then, battling through cramps and more steep slopes we made it to Y Garn. After that, the path turned rocky. This hurt our already blistery feet and soon, on the next ascent we had to scramble up using our hands.
We were now at Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach, one of which we had to climb up to like we were bouldering. Then we approached a drop off. The map said the path was off the near vertical slope. There was no other way down so we had to take it, but we had to take it slow. When we reached the bottom, it was straight up again to Tryfan which is well known for a reason it is perilous. Fortunately, we could drop off our bags at the bottom as we would come back the same way after summiting.
It was again almost vertical but this time on rocks bigger than us that we had to climb up. Once we had summitted Tryfan, when we made it down to the road we were running low on water and time so we had to make a choice. After this road was one more big ascent then a nice and easy flat all the way to the finish, but our feet were destroyed and we were nearly destroyed. We made the call to finish early because of the conditions.
All day there had been no cloud cover and we had been exposed to the sun so we had used a lot of water. It was also getting late and we didn’t want to risk our safety in the dark. I was gutted. It felt like we had done the hardest part and we could see the finish line. However, usually the toughest decision is the right one in the end.
In total we did 50,000 steps, 28km, and ascended 1.6km, which when looking back on it is an achievement in itself though it hurt abandoning the challenge at the time. We learnt a lot about how we might go about it in the future and I am sure we will return to the challenge again one day.
