Llangollen hills

I went for a 10 mile day hike today with my mate, Laa. It was supposed to be a dreadful day in terms of the weather, which it was, but the worst bit was finding a section of not-very-well-used public footpath being totally annihilated in the name of some kind of commercial/forestry type operation which made about 1mile of our hike utterly exhausting to navigate through. How my ankles and shins survived I don’t know.

The weather took a turn for the worse not long after I took this photo (it had been bad earlier in the day too), so we took a short cut through the old slate quarryy instead of following the prescribed route up to what looked like mount doom, then meandered our way up the horseshoe pass to the Ponderosa, an infamous yet quite underwhelming-looking pinnacle cafe which is popular with bikers. It was shut and we had no mobile signal, but luckily we’d packed all our gear for an overnight camp so we made our way another few miles to a secret little hideaway spot with usually good signal, to hunk down for the night.

Hot food in our bellies, phone calls to our loved ones and no more rain, we were sorted for an evening of chat under the cold stars. My emergency thermal bivvy blanket worked wonders, and by morning all was perfect with a glorious day of sunshine ahead and a nice 9-or-so kilometre hike back down to Llangollen where ladySp33d picked us up.

And I loved every minute of it.