Living The Dream

One of the most common questions I was asked, when I told people about my planned sabbatical, was “so when is your first trip?”. And I had to admit that I did not have one planned.

After a week at home I thought that I should start thinking about planning a trip and with the weather forecast looking favourable for this week I thought I would head out somewhere.

One of my last clients had talked to me about the Brecon Beacons so I decided that my first trip would be to there.

Objectives

I decided that there were a number of things I wanted for my first trip out this year:

• Based on my conversation with my client I wanted to look for the Spitfire remains at the head of the valley between Pen Y Fan and Cribyn
• Also based on that conversation I wanted to look for the memorial further east in Cerrig Edmwnt
• I wanted to test my new AlpKit tarp in combination with my AlpKit bivvy bag
• I wanted to get an idea of how much capacity I had for taking my DSLR out with me in future, including on our summer holiday to the South West Coast Path

Preparation

The weather forecast showed an area of High pressure sitting over Wales for most of this week, promising stable, dry conditions but with a chilly wind blowing in from the East. My standard sleeping bag for wild camps is my AlpKit PipeDream 400, but given the fact that it is mid March and the forecast was for cooler winds, I thought I would take the SkyHigh 800 instead. (I was going to provide links to these two bags as well, but it looks like AlpKit are in the process of updating their sleeping bag range and these two are no longer available).

I’d made a batch of flapjacks (using the recipe from Plas Y Brenin and adding some stem ginger and mixed fruit), so I took some of those, along with some soup powder and a pack of Look What We Found meat balls for dinner and a tub of Oats So Simple for breakfast.

I packed the rest of my gear together and headed out on Tuesday morning. The journey to Brecon was uneventful if a little slow. I don’t know if going the long way round by motorway would be any quicker, but the A40 just feels like a slow road sometimes. Anyway I made it to the National Trust car park around 13:00 and was ready to set out by about 13:45.

Day 1 Tuesday

The first main objective was to have been the head wall of the valley between Pen Y Fan and Cribyn. However, two items caused me to change my mind:

1. My rucksack was quite big and heavy. Any weight saving due to the combination of bivvy bag and tarp was lost by the inclusion of the heavier sleeping bag. I decided that I didn’t fancy trying to climb straight up the very steep slope with such a large pack on.
2. Snow! I knew it was going to be chilly, but I hadn’t reckoned on there being quite so much snow around.

Given these two factors I decided to go up to the summit via the main ridge, Cefn Cwm Llwch. This was a relatively easy climb along a well marked and obvious path.

The final section is very steep and some care is needed as the rocks and scree can be quite loose.

On the summit was a school group and two young ladies from eastern Europe who asked me to take their photo next to the summit cairn, which I happily did, and then asked me if I knew how to get to Brecon? It turned out that they had got a bus from Cardiff to Storey Arms and walked up to the summit from there. They now wanted to head to Brecon and catch a bus back to Cardiff. They had no map, no compass, and appeared to be lightly equipped with only a small day bag each. I pointed them in the direction of Brecon and wished them luck.

From the summit I descended down to the bwlch seen in the left of the above photo and then headed up Cribyn. The edge of the summit looks like it simply ends, but there is way off, down some steep rock steps before the slope becomes slightly gentler.

On the way up Cribyn a helicopter flew in from the South East, circled Pen Y Fan and then landed briefly on the summit before heading off to the North West. I hope those two young ladies were OK, and it wasn’t the MRT out looking for them.

From the summit of Cribyn I descended South East along Craig Cwm Cynwyn to Bwlch ar y Fan at the foot of Fan Y Big. Here I turned South along the track and headed for the woods below Torpantau. Rather than follow the track to the foot of the woods I cut across the hill slopes around Tor Glas heading for the Easterly edge of the woods, and hopefully somewhere dry and sheltered to make camp.

The change to my route and the snow had slowed me down during the day and the sun was setting as I squelched across the hillside. The woods seemed far away. Actually they looked about 1.5km away, which they probably were. But the it was hard going across the hill side and I didn’t think I was going to make it in the amount of daylight I thought there was remaining. So I headed further up the slope, looking for any bit of dry ground big enough to camp on. Eventually I found a relatively flat spot, that was quite dry and didn’t seem in any danger of being flooded, and so I set about putting up my tarp and getting the camp sorted.

Now, I always tell people to try out new kit at home before taking it into the field. When we did re-enactment we would always tell people to try new armour and weapons in practice before taking them on to the field. So guess what? Yep, that’s right, I had never put up the tarp before. I was planning to on Monday, but it rained so I didn’t get the chance. So here I was in the last hour of daylight on a breezy, chilly, Welsh hillside putting up the tarp for the first time. Luckily, I had done some preparation. I had attached a guy line to two of the corners, and I had prepared two other guy lines that I was going to attach to my walking poles. I pegged down one side of the tarp, put in my walking poles and pegged out the two guy lines, and hey presto!

I rolled out the bivvy bag, inflated the air bed and put that and the sleeping bag inside the bivvy bag.

That was fine, but as you can see from the photo it was sagging in the middle, there was not much room at the back and it was still quite breezy around the front. So a change in plan was in order. I kept one pole the original length and shortened the other. Then I brought them both back to the middle holes to create a more traditional tent shape.

This photo was taken Wednesday morning. The pattern on the outside of the tarp is frost.

This design offered more shelter but there was not quite enough room for me to sit up inside it.

I had dinner (vegetable soup, Look What We Found meatballs, flapjack and custard) and was in bed by about 19:30.

Overnight

Basically it was cold.

As the sun went down the temperature dropped rapidly and when I got into bed I was wearing all the clothes that I had been wearing during the day plus a synthetic down jacket. My feet were cold and they may have been wet, so I changed my socks which helped a lot.

I woke up about 21.30 feeling quite warm. My legs actually felt sweaty so I took my trousers off, and I felt warm enough to take off the synthetic jacket.

I slept through to just gone midnight when I had to get up to answer the call of nature. Getting back into the sleeping bag I tried to zip it up only to realise that the zip had come apart. The edges of the zip had pulled apart and it was undone down the whole length of the bag. It was too restrictive inside the bivvy bag to try to do anything about, so I tried to wrap the bag around myself as much as possible.

Fortunately this was enough, and I was able to sleep through to about 6am. It was already fairly light so I decided it was time to get moving.

Day 2 Wednesday

Once everything was packed away I headed North East from my camp site. I turned left and followed the Craig Fan Las to the bwlch, where I took a bearing and went looking for the 769m summit.

I found that OK and so took another bearing, due south and went looking for the memorial. If you zoom into the map you can see that the memorial is located just below the edge of the escarpment, but this is not obvious from a normal scale map, especially when you have drawn a route over the top of it. I knew I was in the right place because I confirmed the grid reference using my GPS, but I could not see any sign of the memorial. (On getting back home I checked on line and found that it is indeed below the edge of escarpment, so it may not have been visible from where I was, and even it is in normal conditions, covered in snow it would have looked another rock).

So I retraced my steps to the Bwlch and then followed the northern edge along Bwlch y Ddwyallt and Craig Cwmoergwn towards Fan y Big. The sun was struggling to burn off the cloud and most of the time I was walking in my own little world, with visibility limited to about 30m.

Rather than going to the summit, I headed off to the left and followed the path back to Bwlch ar y Fan.

From the bwlch I turned North and began my descent, following the path all the way down to the road and then down to the bridge at Pont y Caniedydd. There I turned left and headed across the fields to Plas-y-gaer before briefly re-entering open access land for the final stetch back to the car park.

Summary

A bit more of an adventure than I had planned, due to the snow and the cold. But still an excellent couple of days. Not a huge distance, about 23.5km, but quite hard going with about 1,200m of ascent.

I didn’t climb up the head wall, and I didn’t find the memorial that I was looking for, but I did play with my new tarp.

Links

Map

Photos

Kit

Clothing

I wore the following for most of the two days:

• Mountain Equipment trousers
• Rab base layer
• Sherpa softshell jacket

Also worn

• Mountain Equipment Fitzroy synthetic down jacket
• Mountain Equipment Goretex gloves
• Buff
• Shades
• Spare pair of socks worn overnight

Other clothing taken but not worn

• Water proof jacket
• Water proof trousers
• Spare pants
• Longjohns
• Spare base layer

Sleep kit

• AlpKit Rig 7 tarp
• AlpKit Hunka XL bivvy bag
• AlpKit Sky High 800 sleeping bag
• Thermarest mattress
• Thermarest pillow
• Silk sleeping bag liner (not used)

Cooking and food

• Homemade sandwich for lunch on day 1
• Homemade flapjacks
• Vegetable soup
• Meat balls
• Instant custard and flapjacks
• Oats so simple
• Coffee
• More flapjacks during day 2
• Water in Source widemouth 2l bladder

Food taken but not eaten

• Fruit cocktail
• Hot chocolate drink
• Jelly Babies (emergency rations)
• Kendal mint cake (emergency rations)

Misc

• First aid kit
• Head torch
• Trowel and loo roll
• Diabetes kit
• Glasses and contact lenses
• Wallet
• Phone