Dublin & Wales – Day 5 can be found here.
So far we’ve been fortunate with the weather but today it’s looking grey outside. We’ll pack warmer coats and rain gear and hopefully have a lovely time in Snowdonia.
For our first hike we decide to tackle Cwm Idwal which is a glacial valley in the heart of Snowdonia. This particular trek is labelled moderate with loose scree and some climbs but a mostly defined path. My wife actually hiked it on her treadmill through the iFit program a few weeks before our trip which gave us some idea of what the UK considers a moderate hike.
It’s always nice to start a hike with a little waterfall.
Long before he went exploring on The Beagle, Charles Darwin visited this area and started forming his theories based on the fossils he found in Cwm Idwal. The rocks here were formed over 400 million years ago when this region of Wales was underwater. As a result, shells eventually became fossilized and when Charles Darwin visited the region in 1831 he recognized that this area must have once been underwater from the shells he could see embedded in the boulders. He also realized that Wales must have once been much colder as this landscape could only have been shaped by glacier movement. Both of these ideas were novel for the time as the majority of people still believed that the Earth was static and unchanging.
The pathways were clearly marked and fairly uniform at the beginning. This hike is mostly centred around the lake and thankfully there was enough of a breeze we weren’t plagued by midges.
If you look closely you can just see a path about halfway up that’s encircling the lake. There are branches that will take you up to the top but we are definitely not planning to attempt that today.
About a third of the way around we spotted these people attempting to scale the rock slabs. Considering how crumbly the rock is and how fast the weather changes, this is quite a feat. It also helps explain why Snowdonia was a training ground for Everest climbers George Mallory and later Sir Edmund Hillary.
Random hiker for scale
As expected the hike took us about 90 minutes and we stopped for a snack at the lovely beach after circling the lake.
Once we finished the hike, we decided to head off to check out another trail elsewhere in Snowdonia.
Continue reading Dublin & Wales – Day 6 continued.