Re: TR - Expedition (longish)

I had planned to meet up with the other expeditioneers on Friday evening,
but due to circumstances beyond my control I failed to get packed in time,
so I decided to rendezvous with them at the start of the start of the
Saturday walk instead, at 9:30am.

Fran wrote:

And so it was that at around 07:30 on Saturday morning Tracey appeared
at the door just as I was finally checking the weather forecast for
the day. Heavy rain, with a high sun index apparently. Huh? How
does that work then?

Forecast for pilots flying above the clouds! :-)

We (Charlie, Robert (18), Thomas (11), Nicholas
(8), Tracey and me) set off at around 08:00, arriving at the
rendezvous point at around the same time as everyone else.

I'd intended to set off at 8am at the latest, but failed to leave until
8:30am, which only gave me an hour to get there. This meant that I was in a
bit of a rush. Armed with a single waypoint for the start point my GPS gave
me an ETA of roughly 9:15-9:20, but that of course didn't take into account
the shape of the roads and any delays finding my way around Abergavenny (I
really should have put in a few more waypoints). It also wasn't aware of
the road works at the end of the Heads of the Valleys road which proved
infuriating.

After one wrong turn I traversed some very narrow lanes in the general
direction of the waypoint and to my relief they didn't lead me to any dead
ends. I arrived at the start point at EXACTLY 9:30am, to find most of the
others there, except for the campers, who were almost the last to arrive.

The usual discussion ensued about which way to go,

Interestingly, although Martin proposed this walk, he didn't seem to have
planned an actual route, so we just played it by ear, with lots of cooks (no
pun intended Phil) getting involved in the broth.

and Paul got his camera out
for a 'here we are at the start' group photo. There we are, fit,
active and rarin' to go. Make the most of it. Things are about to
change.

Yes, we actually had a little bit of sunshine in the car park.

The start of the walk was over a stile and up a steepish field, and
right from the start there were mountain goats and stragglers.

That always happens when a walk starts with a steep ascent. There are
always those who like to start with a sprint whilst others prefer to pace
themselves and warm up slowly, but in this case most of the blame should be
placed on the stile, which was a serious bottleneck. It took so long for
everyone to get over it that the first ones over already had a good
headstart, even if they weren't sprinting.

Onwards
and upwards, to a more or less level bit (hooray!) and thence to the
Sugar Loaf. Stragglers straggled again; Thomas found a seat to sit
on; Nicholas found a 'cave' in which to hide, and hid in it.

Where was that? From the photo that looked like a good spot to shelter in a
downpour.

And
onward, and upward... wahey! There's a trig point at the top of the
Sugar Loaf, so I took a photo of my three boys thereat. It was
pleasantly cold and windy, so we all found various bits of ground or
rock to sit on for an elevenses break.

Yes, it was surprisingly windy on top. Cool but I wouldn't call it cold, I
found it very pleasant after the recent heat.

I'm not sure if the wind was affecting my GPS altimeter but the
auto-calibration didn't seem to do a very good job on that day, even though
it had plenty of time to adjust. It tended to read high all day. Just
before I reached the trig I got a blip of 616m in my track log which was 20m
higher than the summit (596m), although the waypoint at the trig recorded
608m, 14m too high. I wonder if the wind at the summit was affecting it?
After our rest I marked it again and this time got a far more sensible 598m,
only 2m too high. Both times I took an averaged reading (GPS altitude, not
the altimeter) and got 600m and 599m, so the GPS altitude was more
consistent than the altimeter, and only 3-4m too high which is not bad.

After a bit some of us were getting a bit chilly (yes, honestly)

Not me!

so we
headed off down the Sugar Loaf towards the slopes of Bryn Arw. The
path down could have been a little more obvious;

Comparing the track with the 25k map, that wasn't actually a path! Who
decided to go straight down? If we'd checked the map we should have walked
to the SE or NW end of the short ridge at the top and descended from there.
The aerial photos confirm that this is where the paths are.

however we found
something that went in the right direction - and then discovered the
reason so few people bother to try to bag all the Marilyns, viz, that
some of them are damn' near inaccessible. Footpaths to Bryn Arw are
marked, but they're not much used. We know this because we saw signs
to the hill which lead clearly and inexorably to eight foot high
bracken and no way of getting through.

In retrospect we should have continued straight on instead of turning right
as we descended Sugar Loaf, heading to PO and up to Old Coalpit, but of
course it's easy to say that after the event. The route we took seemed
perfectly valid at the time, we just weren't aware that the paths were
overgrown.

Paul, meanwhile, had located the farmer on whose land we were happily
not-quite trespassing.

Not actually the farmer, but someone working for him.

Have you ever played that game 'Do you want to go on a lion hunt?'
whereby various obstacles are overcome on the way to the lion's den?
"Through the long grass swish, swish, through the bracken push,
push..." That's exactly what it felt like.

That's all part of the fun of going where no man has gone before, even if
they have and it's become overgrown since. You just can't trust these
rights of way. A check of the aerial photos doesn't show any obvious paths
up that way, even where we found a path.

We finally found ourselves
on a proper path though, and plodded on. By now we'd all put jackets
on and were getting rather wet. Two weeks of solid heatwave and we
were all soaked.

Well I wouldn't say soaked, just damp. The rain was quite light really.

Typical.

Very pleasant IMO. I really wouldn't have enjoyed doing that walk in a
heatwave, which we would have done if we'd stuck to the original date.

We got to the top of Bryn Arw and then the
argu^H^H^H^Hdiscussions started. Where was the actual summit? Here?
No, because that bit over there is clearly at least an inch higher.
And so it went on.

Personally I wasn't that bothered since it I'm not "doing" the Marilyns, but
it was still fun to wander about a bit to see if my GPS altimeter was
accurate enough to enable me to determine the highest point. It turned out
that the highest point recorded in my track, which is also where I marked
the waypoint, was approximately 15m north of the spot height on the map, so
they're pretty close. Given the numerous patches of gorse and bracken it
wasn't easy to see a distinct high point and I couldn't be bothered to
wander into every gorse bush to find out.

My GPS altimeter recorded 394m for Bryn Arw, 10m too high (it's actually
384m), while my averaged GPS altitude recorded 387m, only 3m too high, so
again the GPS altitude was more accurate than the altimeter. Perhaps the
pressure was changing faster than the auto-cal could compensate for as the
frontal system passed over us?

A bit later we came across what looked remarkably
like a cairn, but it couldn't have been because Martin didn't
dismantle it stone by stone.

It looked like a little bit of quarrying had been going on, given the
ditches around it.

We rested at the not-cairn for lunch,
and then when the chill was starting to really set in

What chill? I was too warm with my waterproofs and fleece on.

and we were all
pretty wet from being in the cloud for too long we started the
descent.

Well after a couple of tiny ascents on the ridge anyway. The last waypoints
I recorded were at the end of the ridge, at the "old summit" cairn which I
gather is 381m. Both the altimeter and averaged GPS waypoints recorded 387m
for this, both 6m too high.

The end of the ridge was actually quite interesting as various small crags
started to appear out of the mist. It was nice to see a bit of rock in
amongst all that bracken. Might have looked even nicer with a view, but it
was quite atmospheric.

It seemed to take forever, not least because by now my feet
were moving far too freely in my boots and the tips of my toes felt
like they should be black and blue. The path down was interesting.
Every now and then there was a patch of bracken short enough that I
could see over it; other than that I could have been the only person
around.

The path down was much steeper than I'd anticipated and my right knee
started to play up as a result, even with the aid of walking poles. I
really should have put my knee support on at the top of the descent, I
didn't realise how bad my knee would feel by the time I got to the bottom.

The rest of the party were waiting for me when I finally hobbled to
the bottom of the hill. Sorry for keeping you hanging around, but
thanks for your patience.

Not a problem, I was happy for the rest. I got stung by nettles while Phil
complained about the flies.

Martin was all in favour of carrying on to pick off another Marilyn;
however most of the others had had enough. The 'fit and able' faction
went back to the cars the straight way (up, along a ridge, down),
while the 'old crocks' (Paul, Fran, Tracey and the children) took the
less straight but more straightforward route of using the road.

Yep, I had no problems walking uphill or on the flat, but I didn't fancy
subjecting my knee to another descent on the other side of the ridge.

We hadn't gone
far when the convoy of cars met us and we all went off back to the
Farmer's Arms in Cwmdu.

Which turned out to be a tad too small for the number of people in it.
After Fran and co left we drove to Crickhowell to seek out a chip shop and
stopped at another pub on the way back, the White Hart I think, which had a
far more pleasant people to seats ratio. Roger would have been happy to
stay longer but I for one was knackered after being awake for 24 hours (this
weekend did not synchronise well with my erratic sleep cycle).

In spite of being so tired, I kept getting woken up by cars passing on the
nearby main road, and was fully awake at 5am.

Today, my feet and legs have disowned me.

My legs were aching a lot simply walking to the loo in the morning, as were
Roger's. Although my knee felt fine, the rest of my legs didn't, and I
didn't want to temp fate with another walk on Sunday, so I departed early,
along with Roger, leaving only Martin and Phil to bag a few more Marilyns.

My original desire to visit Mynydd Troed and Llangorse was scrapped, even
though that was the reason we chose that campsite in the first place. They
will have to wait for another day.

Why were some of the paths so difficult to find?

Paths are a strange concept. What's shown as a path on the map doesn't
necessarily exist on the ground. They were there, they just haven't been
used for a long time.

Unusually, there
seemed to be very few maps in the group.

I think we had plenty of maps between us, but most didn't bother to get them
out. These days they tend to be just backups to the GPS...

There were
plenty of GPSs though, so that was OK.

Well it would have been if anyone had bothered to actually plan a proper
route beforehand and upload some relevant waypoints. That way we'd never
have needed to look at the maps, until we got to the bracken of course, even
the waypoints wouldn't have helped much there. Although if we had planned a
proper route, we probably wouldn't have gone that way.

Some (most?) of the GPSs had
maps on them; however not all GPSs with maps showed footpaths. Oh
well, never mind.

With the right software it is possible to trace paths and add them to the
GPS. It's fiddly and time consuming, but may sometimes be worth the effort.
Still no guarantee that the paths actually exist on the ground though,
unless you trace them from aerial photos.

Paul


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