It was one of those magic mornings. Soon after sunrise, the last cloudlet dissolved and every summit pierced an azure sky. Frost etched the valley crags and a kestrel circled the high spaces. We headed directly up the moor from Capel Curig, over the leat that carries water unnaturally from the Llugwy valley, round to the head of lonely Llyn Cowlyd. Here were the heather tufts "looking to flowering time, with now no other blossom but dead snow".
It's a steep and steady climb up this southern side of Pen Lithrig-y-wrach, the conical hill that's so conspicuous to travellers heading west on the Holyhead road just beyond Capel Curig. Its name means "the slippery hill of the witch" which reminds me that it's exactly 45 years ago yesterday that we went up this way to the summit by the light of the full moon. All Carneddau was draped in frozen snow, or was lit by that big moon diffused through a veil of high cloud. It was bitterly cold, I remember, but there was no wind and we were up and down in little more than two hours. It was a simple business to kick steps in the snow crust, right up to the 2,621-ft summit.
On this shining morning, we had a super view from the top, out over the highest Carneddau and down on to sullen Llyn Cowlyd where a pair of ravens flapped by like some portent of doom. Down there, high on the hill's south-east ridge, is the compact cliff where Peter Harding and Tony Moulam put up the first route (called "Staircase") exactly 10 years before our nocturnal Christmas foray. They were pioneers on this particular Welsh peak.
The sky remained cloudless and highest Carneddau beckoned so we went down to the north-west, crossing Bwlch y Tri Marchog and up the long, broken east ridge of Pen yr Helgi Du. You get a fine view from the crest of this ridge, right down the length of Cwm Eigiau and out to the imagined green spaces of the lower Conwy Valley, hidden now by the foothills below the broken impounding wall of Llyn Eigiau.
The traverse of the airy ar te beyond brought us to the long climb up to Carnedd Llewelyn. Across to our right stood the walls and buttresses of Craig yr Ysfa, one of the great crags of Snowdonia, where the heather "scratch their bare stalks and listen for the spring".
