Wales, Summer
It's not like we're driving up Mt Snowden. Consider Mt. Brandon, on the Dingle Peninsula. People walk, drive or bike up the hairpin road on the Connor Pass. Some hire folksy gypsy caravans, and try to convince their non like-minded caravan- pulling horses to drag them up. Fair weather cyclists ascend by van, and descend by bike, flying down the curves and turns--missing that noble greater sense of freedom th
at comes from having painfully pedaled up in order to coast down.
On Mount Snowden it's walk or train.
We're taking the train. Here's why:
- Riding the historical, belching, rack and pinion steam train up Mt Snowden seems a clever way to see a big mountain in a short time.
- The weather is not very nice
- It looks like rain.
- It takes three hours to hike up
- It takes three hours to hike down
- The summit cafe is closed for repair
- The summit is closed for repair
- We're already surrounded by legions of end-of-term, team bonding, mountain climbing, day out school children, headed up
- We're Americans. We don't feel like walking.
Done deal. Tickets bought, check. Walking map purchased showing route train takes, which coincidentally follows most popular(easiest) ascent trail (there are six), check. Binoculars, check. Hiking poles, boots, water bottles and rain gear, stuffed back in car, check. Here comes the train.
LLanberis (two L's make a Welsh Y with a slight choking sound in the back of the throat) Station is our launching pad. A vintage -clad conductor takes our tickets, closes the carriage doors, jumps into the engine and appears to also be driving the train. The fact that it is a generally good day for slackers means our numbers require a double car, one engine, and we fit ourselves into what is an increasingly small space. Fortunately we are not, as our some others, seated with passengers whose girth requires more than their allotted space. Unfortunately, our group includes talkers. They have a lot to say a lot about, but as they are saying it in German, it is all German to us.
A quiet man and his quiet son sit directly across from us and thankfully they stay quiet all the way up. We're quiet too. It's the quiet family and the loud family and the big family and all the rest of us in the very small carriages climbing the very big mountain. Toot, Toot (steam engines do say that, toot, really), we're off. Steam engines also say chug, chug and ours satisfactorily chugs its way, pushing us uphill through a lovely valley and a hand hewn cutting and past the happy hikers who are at the first leg of their long walk up the Llanberis Path. They wave, we wave, I am pretty sure I can hear some rude school children alluding to our laziness and we leave them in our smoke.
Did I mention that we're sitting backwards? This is what happens when Tom and I ride trains; cog, steam, diesel or Amtrak we are last in and we get the backwards seats. This is actually okay when it's flat and you're whizzing along and it's Penn Central next stop, but incredibly disconcerting when you're going backwards and uphill and the engine is behind you.
The train does its train thing and the scenery moves from valley to hill to beyond the tree line, chug, chug until the halfway station where we 'take on water' which of course is a bad thing for boats, but apparently a good thing for steam trains. There have been choruses of oohs and ahhs and there it is, by passengers who are facing forwards, which we assume means summit sightings but could of course mean dragons or oncoming trains on our track. We concentrate on looking at everything we have just passed and the legions of happy school children in their inappropriate --for-mountain-walking uniforms skipping up the trail, socking each other and grabbing a smoke.
Our train, designed to go all the way to the summit, passes through a huge rocky valley which I am pretty sure must be where they filmed Planet of the Apes but Tom says of course not, that was Arizona. The train stops. We all sit in our carriages waiting for it to start. It doesn't. The quiet father and son get out. We get out. The loud family and the big family get out and the conductor/engineer tells us this is as far as we are going. Everybody out. We're at Clogwyn Station I think, since that's what the tickets say, but there isn't actually a station.
The train sits, we stand. Everyone is out of the train, there is no shelter--and it starts to rain--a little. We walk around the bleak perimeter which ends precipitously at the top of a huge gorge which requires peering over to see down, accompanied by cries of, don't go near the edge. We look at a summit high above us but aren't sure if it's our summit or another summit (there are a number of those around here). It rains a little harder. I remind Tom that it was his idea to put our rain gear back in the car. He reminds me that I said we didn't need it because we would be sitting in a train. It's really raining. No conductor/engineer in sight. The loud family is not happy. We look up, we look around, but our looking is seriously hampered by the fact that we are in dense fog--and wet. This is a lot like being on a whale watch in bad weather, except that of course it's Wales and the biggest mountain outside of Scotland, not whales and Stellwagen Bank. Ha.
Toot, toot. The doors to the carriages miraculously open and we climb back in. The
quiet father and son are missing. No one counts heads and we begin our rack and pinion descent, our view limited to mist which is just as well because in some places we pick up speed while going straight down. Once we are back in the Rock y V alley it begins to clear a little. We can pick out familiar boulders, and wet walkers. The school children are hilarious in their soddenness, their drenched school uniforms a giddy indicator that lessons are over and summer is here.
We turn a corner and my eyes connect, for just a moment, with the eyes of our outward journey seat mates--the quiet father and son-- who are walking their way back.
Remembering the mountain foot by foot.
Slacker be gone--I wish we were, too.
