I Walked Up Yr Wyddfa and Got the Train Back Down. No Regrets.
Let’s get the confession out of the way first, because I know how this looks.
I walked up Snowdon. I did not walk down Snowdon. I bought a ticket, sat on a small red train, and let a Victorian rack-and-pinion engine do the hard half while I sipped a cappuccino and looked out of the window like a man who had earned it.
I stand by every part of that decision. Here’s how it went.
Starting at Pen-y-Pass
The Miners’ Track (Llwybr y Mwynwyr) starts from the car park at Pen-y-Pass, which is already sitting at about 360m before you take a single step. That’s a free 360m of the mountain, handed to you by the road builders. If cheating is the theme of this post, it starts in the car park.
Fair warning if you’re planning this: Pen-y-Pass is small and you need to book parking in advance. I’ve seen people arrive at half seven on a Saturday assuming they’d chance it, and then spend twenty minutes doing a very slow lap of the Llanberis Pass looking for somewhere to leave the car. Book it, or use the park and ride at Nant Peris and take the bus up.
The first stretch of the Miners’ is a wide, gentle, gravelly track that makes you feel extremely fit. It is lying to you. You pass Llyn Teyrn, and then the path opens out at Llyn Llydaw and the causeway across it, which is one of the best five minutes of walking in Wales when the water’s still and you get the whole east face of the mountain reflected back at you. On the far side there are the ruins of the old Britannia copper works, roofless stone shells sitting there rusting quietly. The path exists because miners needed to get copper down off this mountain, which puts the whole thing into perspective while you’re wheezing along it in £180 boots.
Then you climb to Glaslyn, which is that unreal blue-green colour from the copper in the water, and this is where the Miners’ Track stops being a track.
The bit nobody warns you about
The final push from Glaslyn is a steep, loose, scree-covered zigzag scramble up to Bwlch Glas. It’s short. It is not gentle. You’ll be using your hands, you’ll dislodge small rocks onto the person behind you, and you’ll apologise a lot.
At the top of that you pop out by the standing stone and join the Pyg Track for the last stretch along the ridge to the summit. And this is the exact moment the seed got planted, because the path runs right alongside the railway line, and a train came past going the other way, full of people who were sitting down.
The summit
Yr Wyddfa is 1,085m and the highest thing in the UK outside of Scotland, and on a clear day you can see Ireland from up there. I did not get a clear day. I got clag. Thick, wet, sideways clag, and a queue of about thirty people waiting to stand on the trig point for a photo of a white void.
I got a brew in Hafod Eryri, sat with my back to a cold stone wall, and did the maths on my knees. Coming down is the part that actually wrecks you. Going up is lungs, coming down is joints, and the Miners’ descent would have meant reversing that loose scree scramble on tired legs.
So I went and bought a train ticket.
The train
The Snowdon Mountain Railway has been running since 1896, it’s the only public rack-and-pinion railway in Britain, and it takes about four and a half miles to get from Llanberis to the summit. Going down it, you get views that you completely miss on the Miners’ side of the mountain — the whole ridge dropping away towards Moel Eilio, the valley opening up, all of it at a comfortable seated angle.
It was brilliant. Ten out of ten. Would cheat again.
There is one bit of logistics to sort out before you hand over your card, though.
The train goes to Llanberis. My car was at Pen-y-Pass.
This is the point where I was fully braced for my comeuppance. A two hour wait at a bus stop in the rain, a taxi fare that ruins the day, something. Instead the S1 Sherpa’r Wyddfa turned up, ran me back up the pass, and I was at the car in no time at all. The whole thing was painless.
So if you’re planning the same trick: it works, and getting back round to Pen-y-Pass is genuinely not the faff it sounds like. Just check the S1 timetable before you commit, and know that you’re relying on a bus at the end of your day rather than your own legs.
I had expected the mountain to punish me for the shortcut. It quietly let me get away with it.
Which is how I ended up building an app
Somewhere on that train, staring out the window, I had a thought I couldn’t shake: how many of these have I actually done?
I’ve been walking hills for years. Bits of the Lakes, a few in the Peak, a couple of Munros on a trip to Scotland that I remember mainly as rain. And I genuinely could not tell you a number. My record-keeping was three thousand unsorted photos and a note on my phone that said “Helvellyn?? (did we do this one)”.
The other thing that struck me is that Yr Wyddfa isn’t just one tick. It’s on about five different lists at once, depending on which rabbit hole you’ve fallen down. It’s a Nuttall, a Hewitt, a Marilyn, a Furth, a county top, and one of the fifteen peaks in the Welsh 3000s. Same summit, same sandwich at the top, five separate bits of admin.
Nobody had built the thing I wanted, which was somewhere to dump all of it and get an honest answer back.
So I built it. It’s called PeakList.
What PeakList does
- All the lists in one place. Wainwrights, Munros, Corbetts, Nuttalls, Marilyns, county tops, the Welsh 3000s. Tick a summit once and it counts everywhere it should.
- Log the walk, not just the peak. Date, route, weather, who you dragged along, and a photo of the summit even if the summit was a grey wall of cloud.
- Progress you can actually see. Percentages, streaks, what you’ve got left, and how much of a given list you could knock off in one good weekend.
- Works with no signal. Because the moment you most want to tick something off is the moment you have one bar and it’s raining.
- Plan the next one. Save a shortlist so you’re not stood in a car park at 8am arguing about where to go.
It came out of one great day on a Welsh mountain and it’s turned into a thing I would open every time I get back to the car.
There’s only one rule, and it’s the rule I built the whole thing around: you have to get to the top under your own steam.
How you get down is between you and your knees.
[Download PeakList / Try PeakList free →]