Pen-y-Fan

We walked up Pen-y-Fan on Saturday 20th (I know, it's taken me ages to write this!).

A group of us from work went, all of which are doing the 3 peaks on the 17th.

The attendees:
Dave H (the guy who organised it)
Dave R
Ian
Mark
Mike
Susan
Lorraine
Toby
Paul (Me)


Mark, Mike, Susan and Lorraine, I was meeting for the first time.

We were due to all meet up at at the Pont Ar Daf car park at 9:30, just down the road from the Storey Arms Outdoor Center. Despite Dave H writing an excellent document about the trip, I still managed to misread it, and went to the Storey Arms itself. I stayed there for 10 minutes, but didnt have any signal on my phone, and didn't see anyone I recognised. Happily, I printed out his document before I left, reread it, and went the quater of a mile down the road where I hooked up with the other members of the team. 10 minutes late, but for anyone who knows me, that's a fairly normal expectation.

The weather was cloudy, but dry, the wind wasn't too strong. Looking around, everyone was wearing long trousers, but I opted for shorts. I figured if it was cold I could just put my wind/rain proof bottoms on. Dave H, who is the most experienced of our group was wearing shorts, so I wasn't too bothered.

When we set off, the cloud was only a couple of hundred feet above us, so it was obvious at least some of our walk would be in poor visibility, although the weather was forecast to improve later in the morning.

The walk up to Corn Du, the first peak we were going to was very straightforward, except the fact we were almost immediately emmersed in thick cloud. Not particularly tiring, although I did manage to get through a lot of my water. When nearly at the top, we stopped to put on our jackets, gloves, hats, etc. The wind was absolutely howling and feeling a little cold. Once we were all sorted, we carried on for the last few minutes walk up to Corn Du. The views were entirely none existant, we could barely see the person in front.

We stopped for a little while on Corn Du for a bite to eat and a little rest after the walk up, although the walk itself was pretty tame. After a false start - we wandered off in the wrong direction because of the poor visibility - we made our way over to Pen-Y-Fan itself, which is just a short walk, and very short incline from Corn Du. After a quick photo shoot on the top of there, we then started to head off on the next leg. Once more, we took a wrong turn, and dropped about 300ft only to get out of cloud and realise we're not where we thought, so we had to walk back up again to the top of Pen-Y-Fan, then find the correct path down.

On the correct path, we continued our walk off the peak, down to some grass land at the bottom, then around on ourselves through the valley, and back up the otherside, rejoining us with Corn Du. At the top of this second ascent was a monument called "Tommy Jones oblisk", a memorial to a 5 yr old kid who lost his way and died in 1900.

From there, we high tailed it off the side, and back down to the Storey Arms, and back to our cars. A final group photo shoot. And home.

The walk all in was about 9 mile.