the path of least resistance

Following on from the Blorenge and Scottish walks described in earlier posts, a few more maps I spotted in my collection from recent outings and which I thought might warrant a mention here. Firstly, Pen y Fan. Now you'll probably be aware that I've featured ascents of this particular mountain a few times before on this blog; I won't attempt to collate all of them but you might start here, here, here and here. But it is, let's not forget, the highest mountain in Southern Britain, a slightly woolly claim but one which essentially means that if you draw a horizontal line on a map of Britain a few feet south of the summit of Cadair Idris, as I've done below, the highest point in the region south of that line is indeed the summit of Pen y Fan. Yes, granted, you've defined your terms in such a way as to get the answer you want, but it's not an insignificant thing. 

Anyway, sometimes you want to find new and interesting ways to get up and down (and you almost always can), but sometimes you just want to smash up, bag it, smash down again, bish bosh, sorted. Other considerations are who else is coming along on the walk and how much gratuitous extra distance and effort they'll be prepared to tolerate without getting all whiny and annoying, and indeed who is in charge of route planning. I get a bit twitchy if this isn't me, but sometimes it isn't and you have to take an attitude of Zen-like acceptance in the face of whatever ill-thought-out bullshit other people come up with.

Examples, you say? Gladly. Here is the walk we did for my birthday back in February, a time of year when I get a free one-off opportunity to annoy everybody by making them do an activity of my choosing, which of course is going to be some tedious outdoorsy shit. So I'd proposed a trip up Pen Y Fan, which Nia had done a couple of times before but neither Alys nor Huwie had. I can't remember whether we'd done any advance planning for the Scotland trip at this stage but I might have had the thought of using it as a warm-up for the more strenuous mountain walking that would be involved there. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law and their two boys wanted to come as well, so I thought I'd better play it safe and just do one of the quick routes. So we parked up in the recently-expanded Pont ar Daf car park and did a circular route up via the path from Storey Arms and back down the main path which terminates at the car park, a round trip of a little over eight kilometres, or five miles if you prefer, in a clockwise direction on the map below.

What's very obviously apparent both from looking at the contours and the altitude chart a couple of kilometres in, and indeed from listening to the chorus of complaining from my fellow walkers, is that the forced loss and regain of around sixty metres in height in order to traverse the mini-valley containing the Blaen Taf-fawr stream is a bit of a motivation-killer early doors, just as it's a bit of an unwelcome sting in the tail at the end of a fifteen-mile bi-directional traverse of the main Beacons ridge.

Simple, you'll be saying, just use that prominently-marked green path that swings up to the north and, at the cost of maybe an extra half a kilometre across the ground, stays on the contours the whole way. And my answer to that is I'd love to, but it's not really discernible, still less signposted, any more. If you look at Google Maps' satellite view, really zoom in, and squint a bit you can just about convince yourself that there might be a scratch in the ground resembling a path, and if you drop the StreetView man right at the start of the path up from Storey Arms you might just about make out a grassy track ascending through a break in the heather on the left, but I have walked past here a few times, and past where the path supposedly rejoins the main path at the Tommy Jones obelisk, without noticing anything obvious. Next time I'm up there in reasonable weather with no pressing need to keep anyone else fed or entertained I'm going to have a look for it though.

Similarly, while the OS map shows a few alternative paths either side of the main route up from Pont ar Daf, none of those are discernible any longer at ground level. This will be largely because of the considerable path maintenance and landscaping effort that's gone on alongside the car park improvements to reduce the amount of erosion along these heavily-used routes. That does create a feedback loop, though, in that people will then be constrained, or at least heavily encouraged, to only using those routes for ascent rather than fanning out over a number of different routes to the same end-point, and perhaps reducing wear on any individual one. 

A couple of schools of thought on this one; Cameron McNeish, author of a couple of excellent books on Scottish mountain walking that I own, is a fervent advocate of people being, as he puts it, goats rather than sheep and making their own ways up, on the grounds that this reduces wear and tear and prevents a single furrow being worn into the ground that then needs repair and reinforcement. I'm quite sympathetic to this viewpoint, though the counter-example I would offer is Waun Fach in the Black Mountains, recent-ish recipient of exactly the sort of hard landscaping and path constraining that McNeish decries, but which I don't think anyone could rationally say is a worse place to be on top of now than before. 

My second ascent of Pen y Fan this year was as part of the I Am Pen y Fan charity challenge organised by SightLife, the charity my wife works for, and at the start of which we were seen off by charity patron Ceri Dupree, who didn't join us for the walk as the fabulous sequined Welsh flag dress he was wearing would have been rather constricting, not to mention a bit chilly on a wet and windy day. You will see from the summit photo that Huwie resolutely rocked a green sequined tailcoat the whole way to the top as a tribute, though. 

Route-wise this was as vanilla as it gets, just straight up and back from the car park, with a small loop on the way up for those who deemed it desirable and/or necessary (i.e. pretty much just me and the kids) to bag Corn Du. The summit photo I've reproduced above also features in this ongoing Twitter thread and in the recently-updated mega-gallery of trig points and mountain summits.