Snowdon - Camping - Meteors - Fundraising - Sunrise - Amazing....
A few months back I got an enquiry from Claire asking me if we could take her family up Snowdon, but her son Oli wanted to camp out too. A little think later I thought what better way to do this, then build it up to be a bit of an expedition for the young lads - establish base camp and then leave for the summit under darkness.
It threw it down for most of Saturday, but fortunately by the time we met at 3pm the worst of the rain had passed but the cloud was still around. None of us were being too optimistic for a clear night or morning. We set up Camp about half way up Snowdon, just as the Miners Track climbs steeply to join the Pyg Track, leaving us a 1 hour hike under darkness in the morning. We had our tea and went to bed with the feeling the chances of seeing any of the sunrise, let alone the meteor shower, were slim. I woke at 10:20pm and thought I'd stick my head out of the tent to see a clear starlit sky and then 'Whooosh' a huge Meteor lit up the sky. I woke the rest of the group once I had seen a few more to make sure I wasn't just seeing things. We stood for 30 minutes or so soaking up the calm night sky which was being increasingly littered with amazing meteors.
4pm came round all to quickly and our alarms went off - time to leave base camp and head for the summit. After a spot of breakfast we made great progress up on to the Pyg Track, enjoying the start of the orange sky out to the east. On the summit right the sun popped it's head over the horizon so we stopped and snapped away. This turned out to be a blessing as a large group of 30 or so came down off of the summit as we continued on up.
We climbed the final few steps on to the summit of Snowdon, and feasted our eyes on the ever increasing beauty - these things never go to plan, but this morning was better than we would have all thought. Several thousand pictures later we descended in the warm morning sun back to our base camp, packed up and made our way back to the vehicles at a busy Pen Y Pass.
In the process of doing this, the family raised over £400 for King's College Hospital which is just excellent - well done all, especially Oli and Emmerson who are natural mountaineers for sure.