Tryfan Revisited

Following on from John Hee’s blog I can say that I came to the outdoors much later in life, in my mid thirties, as an escape for the pressures of work and quite literally to gain a different perspective on the world.

I have been hillwalking for about five years now discovering new ranges to enjoy but I am always drawn back to North Wales and Tryfan in particular.

Tryfan to me is a yardstick to measure my own personal development as a hillwalker. Like any UK hill the weather is transient and each encounter a new one but underlying this is the fixed and unchanging rock oblivious to my presence.

Why Tryfan in particular then? Perhaps because it was the first serious hill I ever climbed or perhaps because it beat me at my first attempt. Is it the ease of access from the road? Is it the fact that mountain boasts so many routes at various grades? Is it the history of the place – Bonnington’s first winter gully and the inauguration of the Brown / Whillans partnership to name but two?

The answer lies in all of these but in essence it is a mountain I will neither tire of nor master. There is a certain satisfaction in getting to know one mountain intimately as an antidote to peak bagging.

I have done the classic North ridge several times but like most people never by exactly the same line; the South ridge and routes on the East Face.

I’ve been on the hill in rain, hail, high wind, fog and perfect sunshine. I’ve done it at night – subversively walking down the A5 approach road under cover of darkness and half expecting the police to arrive at any moment and whisk me off “to the Psychiatric Centre for Regressive Tendencies” like Bradbury’s Pedestrian.

So what is left for me to do on this hill? Well there are plenty of new and harder grade 2 and 3 scramble routes to attempt on the East face and the West face is yet uncharted by me. For pure rock climbing, an activity I have yet to experience, there is the famous Milestone buttress and beyond.

I have yet to “gain the freedom of Tryfan” by leaping from Adam to Eve like the handful of mad people I have watched. I haven’t walked the entire Heather Terrace to the south summit and I look forward to Ali and I taking to the mountain in winter conditions.

So I will hopefully return again and again to seek purer lines, new routes or simply to enjoy it for what it is – a classic mountain that cares not one jot for my fleeting scrambles upon her flanks.