| Have you ever organized a trip and jumped the gun? Although you know it's a dangerouse idea you can't go back on it cause your missus is away that weekend too and it's the reason you can't cancel. So it has to take place. You march ahead convincing everyone else it's a great idea knowing full well it's not especially when a contact at the foot of Snowdon warns you of the impendening weather conditions and you even go to the lengths of picking people up the night before just so they can't dropout when they see what kind of Hell hole mess your going to get them into? If your answer is yes then I know exactly how you felt. |
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| I knew that on the day it was cold but when I contacted Barry Gromett from the Met office today I was really shocked to find out what the temperatures truely were. As the weather station on the top of Snowdon was out of action due to the weather conditions Barry had to take the local temperatures from Capel Curig and by interpolating them came up with the following temperatures -7/-8 C that added with the gale force windchill at the top using a calculation and been very liberal if the wind speed was only 20mph which it wasn't the windchill would work out at -17.0 so when you see scenes like frozen beards and fringes it's really not suprising. Thanks Barry for working that out for us we all knew why the weather station wasn't working, It was that block of ice with aries sticking out of it........ |
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| Things really didn't get any better the further we went, the colder and more wind swept it got at one point the wind nearly blew Jamies bike off the edge. All this and we hadn't even started the decent. It has to be said that the rock gardens on the way up looked a lot worse than on the was down. A little bit of the ice had melted by the time made our way down to the lower limits of the mountain. I didn't have much time for taking pictures as I was so busy trying to take video footage and stop my camera from freezing up the footage of which can been seen form the video link at top of the page . |
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| I knew it was going to be cold when I stood at the foot of Snowdon with my body armour T shirt and a nylon rain coat, in case it rained. As I wore all of them it suddenly dawned on me this really wouldn't be enough. Luckily Alex had a windstopper jacket spare! Still, we all felt cold and it was at this point the large piece of fleece usually used to pack between the bikes came into an entirley different use, cutting the whole thing up to make 8 fleece scarfs hence modelled by all the riders. This really did make all the difference between getting to the top and bottling it about half way up. |
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