This was Joy’s last hurrah before going back to full time work so we made the effort to get to the mountains and find some snow.
We did a simple route that I thought we could do quickly and then extend if we had time to spare, though I over-estimated our speed. We did a round of Tryfan, going up to Bwlch Tryfan from the Cwm Bochlwyd side and back again down Cwm Tryfan.
From the road the path is almost immediately rough scrambling and very wet but with glorious weather. Dazzling snows on the summits, plenty of colour low down, very little wind. It started to cloud over as we approached the pass but still good weather.
Snow conditions up to the pass were easy but the snow was much deeper on the south side with some exciting traverses across steep slopes. No footpaths were visible under the snow so we relied on map and compass, backed up by footprints. These only mean someone else went this way, not that they got where they were going. This proved true as we dropped further down into the valley. We followed the map and compass and used our mountain sense to find a sensible way but it was very slow going along rough boggy ground, still under snow.
Eventually I reckoned I could predict where the proper path was so I took a look and hey presto! there it was. This speeded us up a little but it was still a five hour round trip back to the car.