A few days of clear skies and cold nights have produced some cold temperatures, but not much in the way of snow around here.

Tryfan is not usually a great choice in such conditions as the rocky terrain becomes icy and slippery, but I was with a particularly motivated small group of students today, who’d not been to the top and were very keen to see some ice, so we decided to go and see how much ‘winter’ lay hidden up in the clouds!

We made our way on to the north ridge, via Tryfan Bach and the views were lost to the mists before we even reached the crest of the ridge! The rock soon became coated in rime ice, with little feathers covering the rocks, but not enough to impede progress. All very detailed and beautiful.

We passed the cannon stone, and a couple of lads managed to shimmy most of the way up for a photo, but it was very slippery. As we reached the north tower area, we left the crest to join a traversing path on the east face, to avoid the now covered rocks. I’ve climbed this mountain well over a hundred times now, so it was handy to be able to have a few ‘options’ on route choice in the low visibility and restrictive ice.

We passed a couple of lost teams along the way and offered what advice we could before moving into the final steeper sections. It wasn’t icy enough for crampons, but we almost deployed the rope to protect the final sections where we re-joined the ridge as some of the verglass on the rocks made things rather precarious.

With some careful ‘spotting’, we reached the summit and didn’t even need a discussion about whether it would be a good idea to try and jump between the summit rocks of Adam and Eve (it was not, in case you were wondering).

It was a slow and careful descent, as the west face had no rime ice, but lots of powdery snow which needed a lot of attention to avoid a slip on. Back at the A5, we hiked the road back to the van. A solid day, with a well deserved celebratory café finish!