I suspect that most people consider the two halves of their walk up Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) to be the exciting (if tiring) ascent and then the rather less exciting walk down. Mind you, for many that’s a hindsight view of things; I suppose there are many who, on reaching the summit, only then realise that they are, in fact, only half way, and now have to make their way down.
Every one of the main paths up Yr Wyddfa has a half-way point, for the most part marked by some sort of feature (e.g. the Halfway café on the Llanberis path, the Halfway slabs on the Pyg track or Llyn Ffynnon y Gwas on the Snowdon Ranger path), and when I’m on the paths I’m invariably aware of two things:
Firstly, that the first half of any path, whether ascending or descending, always seems to take longer than the second half;
Secondly, that I always get more excited about the upper half of the mountain.
I guess the first point can only be a psychological one; after all, the longest half going up becomes the shortest one going down, and vice-versa, so it’s clearly all in the head.
The second point, relating to the excitement factor, relates, I guess, to the challenge of the upper half of the mountain.
Last winter, when I was at a loose end, I made gradient graphs of the main paths, not just the whole path – there’s nothing new about that – but various sections of those paths. There really wasn’t anything new there either, in that I could have predicted where the steepest or gentlest sections were, but it was useful to see it recorded objectively.
Every one of the main paths has a steeper upper section than its lower section (again, that won’t surprise many people – it’s what mountains do) but this probably accounts for one of the reasons why the upper half appeals more to me; it’s more of a challenge, it’s more rugged, and to me that makes it more exciting. The upper half also leads to the summit, and despite the hundreds of times I’ve been to the summit, there’s still an element of excitement about it.
Some people wonder how the mountain can still be exciting after so many ascents, but the fact is that it’s never the same twice. The main thing that’s never the same twice is the weather, and the fact that forecasting for the mountain’s fickle weather is difficult presents a further twist every time. It’s near impossible to have the same conditions on any two occasions, because even if it’s a cloudless sky, for instance (i.e. removing the variable of cloud cover and rain), there will be variations in the sky’s colour, in visibility, in temperature and in the wind strength and direction. Given all those variables it would be astonishing if it were the same twice. And then there’s the people on the path; they and the conversations we have are certainly different every time.
I recently came across an old newspaper report; a driver on the Snowdon Mountain Railway had worked for 34 years on the line, taking a steam train up on average some 24 times a week for 8 months of the year. Do the maths: that totals over 25,000 trips up the mountain! Now, every driver would have started as a fireman, and I’m certain that firemen consider a round trip very much a game of two halves – busy stoking the fire all the way up, then relaxing on the way down. Although a driver will empathise with his fireman, I wonder if they start to view things differently? And I wonder if that particular driver could say that he found every trip different? Certainly, as walkers we have a choice of paths up, whereas drivers don’t!