Snowdon: Seeking Silence on a Loud Mountain

Snowdon is cool. To start, it is the tallest mountain in the combined area of England and Wales but it isn’t just the height that makes it so alluring. Snowdon looks like a mountain should, it has immense rock walls and long serpentine paths leading to a perfect pyramidal peak. These paths are many and varied, Snowdon can be your first mountain walk or a training ground for an assault on Everest.

It is as if some mountain god created it to be an advert: here are the joys for mountain walking. An advert that works. Snowdon is thought to be the most visited peak in the British Isles¹.

I was charmed, how could I not be? I wanted to join the hundreds of thousands of people who make their way the summit every year. Yet, I didn’t really want to be among them. I desired the restive solitude of nature, not the masses of a theme park. I wanted to climb the busiest mountain in Britain, without the busy.

Such a thing did not seem possible at first, at least without steadfast winter skills which I’ve never endeavoured to acquire. A deeper search revealed another way. A few, actually, but there was a problem.

To the north of Snowdon sits the town of Llanberis. It is the most touristy of the towns in the area. As a result; it has the buses, the restaurants, and the bed and breakfasts. It is, in short, the…