I take a hike along the valley in the afternoon sunshine. Craggy escarpments loom like castle
ramparts above. Giant boulders lie strewn across the path, deposited by mighty glaciers that long ago melted into a puddle and joined the Irish Sea. Only a few lonely cottages and farmhouses punctuate the immensity of snow, heather and open space. In character, the Ogwen feels like a rogue glen from the Scottish Highlands that got lost, marched south, took a right turn and ended up in North Wales.
Rising to the northeast are the contours of the Carneddau range – mountains named after the last Welsh princes who fought English invaders to the death, on whose summits hikers from Coventry now eat cheese sandwiches and Kit Kats. To the southwest is the Glyderau range, their silhouettes mirrored in Llyn Idwal, a cursed lake across whose waters, legend tells, no birds will fly. And ahead rises Tryfan – the peak that disobeys the symmetry of the Ogwen, jutting out like a middle finger between the two ranges. If you know where to look on its buttresses, you will find scratches left by hobnailed boots just over a century ago, long before the 1953 Everest expedition, when an earlier generation of mountaineers came to North Wales.
A few of these scratches were likely left by George Mallory, a vicar’s son from Cheshire who as a boy would climb up his father’s Norman church for practice. Mallory made his first British rock-climb on Tryfan’s north ridge. As a young man, he would often cycle 40 miles west to Wales with climbing ropes slung over his shoulder, sleeping in barns on balmy summer nights, and conquering vertical rock faces by day.
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