Are we there yet?

Hello everyone! Today I will be writing about our trip to a mountain range called Glyderau in Snowdonia, Wales, that took place on the New Year’s Eve 2025.

Don’t ask what time I woke up… 2:00am. We drove for almost 3 hours to our destination and arrived just before 6am. The car park on the side of the road, by Llyn Ogwen was mostly empty. A few people, locals probably, went up the steep, but shortest way to our goal mountain – Tryfan (spoiler alert! We never made it to the top). After walking in complete darkness, with our headtorches on for a few hours and stopping  for a sandwich and hot tea, we were finally rewarded with the most beautiful view of sunrise over Tryfan.

Soon we reached the first mountain on our agenda, Y Garn, where a large black bird circled above the summit. We hiked past the oversized raven and carried on down the other side of the mountain. After a short walk downhill, we arrived at a small, completely frozen lake, Llyn Y Cwn , where we couldn’t resist throwing some rocks and pebbles onto the ice.

After a while we started hiking up the side of Glyder Fawr, but near the peak it became obvious that we had gone wrong somewhere. Having wandered around for a bit in an increasingly difficult terrain we admitted to ourselves that we were not on the right path (lost, to put it plainly).  The only reasonable way out was to go back to our starting point, so we climbed back down to the lake and from there made our way back to the Youth Hostel at the head of the Ogwen lake where we had entered the mountain path. From there it was a short walk to the car park where we arrived at 2:15pm.

We hadn’t booked a table in any restaurant, so we decided to just drive along the road and try our luck in the first open one we could spot. Luckily, we found one straight away, so we went in to warm our hands up and have a wholesome meal.

The lesson to be learnt from this trip was to check that the scale of the map meets your needs before you set off so you don’t get into a challenging situation like we did 😊.All in all I think the views were amazing and I couldn’t think of a more interesting way of spending New Year’s Eve, have a look at the photos.