Spring 2011 part 1: April
heatwave on Cadair Idris
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In
that
strange
dreamy state between being fast asleep and wide awake, my
mind was trying to identify the loud noise that had roused me. I
glanced at the clock. 0310 BST. The next flash of lightning
jolted me into full awareness and I shot downstairs to unplug the
phone, computer and stuff, grabbed a pint of water and went back
upstairs to watch the show. There followed a short but spectacular
thunderstorm that delivered several very close strikes including one
with simultaneous lightning and thunder, that from later conversations
appeared to have woken up pretty much the entire population of
Machynlleth.
That occurred on the morning of April 2nd, as a plume of warm, moist
air over western areas destabilised to a much greater extent than our
forecasting had predicted. It was a classic summer-style, medium-level
storm system, highly electrified as the lightning strikes plot below
illustrates (the orange marks are strikes on April 1 before midnight,
the red ones are the strikes in the early hours of April 2). The plot
was screengrabbed by a UKww member just before the storms reached the
Machynlleth area, and it shows how many areas got their best night-time
lightning display for years.
That sets the scene for this post, as a dry but fairly average March
has been followed by some superb summery weather into April, with
everything bursting into life, warm sunny days interspersed with useful
wet spells and all encouraging peoples' gardens into activity. The shot
below was taken from my fireside seat in the veg-garden and epitomises
all that is good with Spring: fine, warm weather, trees bursting into
leaf and flower and butterflies everywhere. We have made it through
another winter back into the world of life and the long greyness is
banished into deserved exile. Are there any things more worthy of
celebration?
Spring is indeed a time of activation, and on April 9th, in an
energetic moment, I resolved to have a wander around Cadair Idris.
Despite it being only a few miles to the north, I'd not been up there
for several years. If I remember correctly, the last visit, on a deep
winter afternoon, saw the weather change impressively: the cloud came
right down and within minutes everything was coated in ice-rime. This
time, no such worries were to be expected: the main hazard would be
sunburn!
The nearest starting-point to Machynlleth is at Minffordd, deep in the
Tal-y-llyn valley. On this occasion it was the only choice: the A487
mountain pass over to Cross Foxes and Dolgellau was closed after a
landslide (or more correctly a rockfall) occurred earlier in the
previous week, fortunately in the early hours as this is normally a
busy road by day. Boulders, reportedly up to ten tonnes, were involved.
At the time of writing the road remains closed, presumably while the
source of the rockfall is investigated to see if there's any more about
to come down.
The Minffordd Path reaches the summit in not many miles, but it takes
no prisoners! There is no mile-long warm-up stage: instead, it plunges
you straight in at the deep end via the steep and relentless steps up
through the woodland. I was glad to see everyone else taking a few
breathers on this section! As the path emerges above the tree-line, the
scene opens out in all directions, this being the view back to the
valley floor, 200m below:
The majority of walkers follow the path around into Cwm Cau, then
strike left up onto Mynydd Pencoed, before climbing the final summit
slopes,
but there is an alternative that is better for photographers, as I'll
explain in a bit. It strikes off NE just above the woods, at the
signpost to Mynydd Moel, crosses the stream and assaults the mountain
directly. This is the easy bit:
The path soon steepens into an upwards treadmill, but the upsides to
this are that (a) the pain is all done in the first 2 hours and (b) if
you start early enough you get the morning sun on Craig Cau, the
huge, 300m plus crag forming the east face of Mynydd Pencoed:
by
mid-afternoon it is cloaked in shadow. That's the important bit with
respect to photography - the image below was taken close to mid-day.....
By the time the
610m/2000ft contour is reached, a short detour westwards across steep
heather, rocks and scree reveals Cwm Cau, Llyn Cau and Craig Cau in all
their glory:
Here I stopped awhile, casting about to find different angles,
foreground and so on:
This spot, or more accurately somewhere very close to it, is where a
celebrated painting was done around 1774 by the artist Richard Wilson
(1713-1782). There's a big print of it hanging on one of the walls of
Machynlleth's Wynnstay Hotel; the original is in the Tate Gallery. The
picture was featured on a BBC series called A Picture of Britain, with
David Dimbleby, but their footage was shot at Llyn Cau, as opposed to
struggling up to this spot!
This is Wilson's interpretation of the scene:
The Tate's website notes: ....the
‘discovery’ of such rugged and uncultivated scenery
was greatly stimulated by the taste for the Sublime: previously it
would have seemed only raw and disorderly. Richard Wilson was one of
the first to adapt the conventions of landscape painting to this sort
of scenery, and was a major influence on other artists, including
Turner. However, Wilson has still invented landscape features and
heightened the precipice at the rear of the composition (Craig-y-Cau)
to create a more simplified and balanced composition....
I took my photo above
and in Photoshop I resized its height by 2x with the "Constrain
Proportions" button unchecked, then cropped it back to landscape format:
It's not dissimilar! However, was I to claim this is what the scene
really looked like then the climbing fraternity would have had a field
day with me! Attitudes to artistic license have changed since the late
18th Century, with much greater demand for accuracy than ever before.
In any case, the real view is stunning, with no need for embellishment:
it is also a classic example of a glacial cirque, one of the finest in
the UK, gouged out by ice action 20,000 years ago or more. More
popularly it is often said to be a volcanic crater: this is the stuff
of myth. The fact that a lot of the rocks making up the crags are
volcanic in origin is mere coincidence: most of the area between here
and Dolgellau consists of volcanic rocks.
Looking down from this lofty vantage-point, the height gained was
obvious:
150m of steep climbing remained before the angle eased to grassy slopes:
Soon, I was atop the summit ridge and sitting in the shelter on Mynydd
Moel, out of the strong SE wind which had me putting on a fleece. It
was just before 2pm so I was pleased with the two-hour time, especially
as it had involved detours and photography. The real leg-work was now
complete and I had the rest of the day to wander at leisure along the
ridge, which stretched out ahead to Penygadair, the highest peak, with
Craig Cau/Mynydd Pencoed to the left and Cyfrwy to the right:
Here's the final section to the summit of Penygadair. A lot of high
cloud was present to the west, but the best views on Cadair Idris are,
at least in my opinion, those of parts of the mountain itself - its
rock-architecture is as spectacular as anywhere....
Cyfrwy has an impressive stepped ridge - the Cyfrwy Arete, that rises
steeply up in a series of pinnacles from the screes. It provides a 200m
rock-climb around Difficult-Very Difficult in grade:
It is sometimes classified as a Grade 3 (hard) scramble, but having led
it during the 1980s, I wouldn't want to do it without a rope. The image
below is a digital zoom-in from the shot above. It shows a climber on
The Table - the large flat-topped pinnacle - with another team above.
The exposure is impressive and the rock is loose in places, especially
on the section below The Table, where the well-known mountaineer Arnold
Lunn once had an epic mishap. On August 28th 1922, he was climbing down
unroped: just below The Table, a block "10ft high and several feet
wide" detached itself as he was hanging onto it! He fell over 100ft,
landing on a ledge with a badly broken leg: fortunately people heard
the boulder go and then realised Lunn was in dire straits. Eight hours
later, he was undergoing surgery in Dolgellau after a difficult rescue,
and made a good recovery from what could so easily have been a fatal
accident. Much of the loose rock has of course been trundled now
by the passage of many climbers, but a flick through the climbing
forums reveals that alarming incidents still occur - it is a place that
demands respect and care...
Soon, the summit trig-point of Penygadair was reached:
Haze obscured the hills to the north (and in all other directions!):
here is Foel Ispri, with the village of Llanelltyd at its foot, and the
summit shelter in the foreground:
From the
summit, the next section out over Mynydd Pencoed, the cliffs of Craig
Cau now in deep
shadow, was visible:
But there was no need to hurry - the view
to Cyfrwy again held my gaze, with Llyn Y Gadair at its base and the
Arete soaring above:
The perspective from this vantage point emphasised the exposure even
more:
The Table was now deserted although another team was visible just
beneath it. Going back again to the start of the 20th Century, The
Table was described by the Abraham Brothers (famous pioneers in
mountain photography) thus: "Its summit is spacious and comfortable,
large enough for a tea party, provided the tea be not so strong that it
affects the nerves"!
Eventually I set off for my next port of call - the tor-like masses of
pillow-lava to the SW of the summit. These are one of Cadair Idris'
many classic geological features. Pillow-lavas are formed when magma is
erupted underwater. Because the water is much, much colder than the
magma, the surface of the latter is quenched, forming a skin.
Meanwhile, the molten tongue of magma continues to expand, becoming
inflated and pressurised, until the pressure causes the skin to
rupture, when a new pillow forms, and so on for the duration of the
eruption. This results in a series of interconnecting pillows, as seen
in the image below: up to a metre across, they are typically rounded
and are spherical to flattened in shape.
It's quite
something to contemplate that these rocks, almost 890m above sea-level
on a Welsh mountainside, were formed underwater, but back then - about
460 million years ago - Wales was part of a group of volcanic islands
called East Avalonia and was situated at a low latitude down in the
Southern Hemisphere. Now that's what I call history!
Leaving the pillow-lavas behind, it was time to get the last bit of
ascent ticked-off: Mynydd Pencoed beckoned, leg-muscles protested but I
was
soon up at the top....
The view from Mynydd Pencoed back towards the slopes of Mynydd Moel is
a lot
less exciting than that taken in the opposite direction in the morning,
and as far as I know, there are no paintings of this particular scene...
A fence crosses the summit of Mynydd Pencoed and dives off down a gully
before
ending abruptly, with Llyn Cau visible over 320m vertically below -
it's a monster of a cliff!
The path down from Mynydd Pencoed is one of the most frequented on the
mountain. These steps
have been constructed in order to counter the many years of erosion
which here have
turned the path into a gash of scree several metres in width. In
theory, the scree should revegetate, given enough time. This is ongoing
work and it has its fans and critics alike: however, there is nothing
visually attractive about severe path erosion and if the steps allow
the scars to heal then they get my thumbs-up.
The afternoon was drawing on as I followed the ridge down to the point
where a direct descent to the valley floor is made, just east of Llyn
Cau. Here, shadow cloaked the precipices of Craig Cau, although
Penygadair was still bathed in warm sunshine:
Where the path meets the main route up to Llyn Cau, there is a famous
roche moutonnée. It's a glacial landform - a smoothed outcrop of
igneous rock, over which the glacier that formed in Cwm Cau passed,
grinding over the rock and smoothing its features whilst scratching its
surface. Another classic geological feature of Cadair Idris, it is
illustrated on the roche
moutonnée
page on Wikipedia
as their example. Here's a shot of its ground-down flank with
Craig Cau's shadowy cliffs in the background:
From here, an easy walk of a kilometre led back to the junction of the
paths and the start of the steps down to Minffordd - a jarring descent
but over in no time and I was down by 1700, six hours after leaving the
valley-floor, after 941m (3087ft) of ascent and about 10km of walking.
This is definitely the best route up Cadair Idris from Minffordd, with
a hard start followed by a pleasant stroll to enjoy for the rest of the
day - recommended!
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