A 2-day circuit of the northern Aran mountains, following our familiar approach up the northern ridge and touring the eastern summits of the range, and returning via the very seldom trodden north ridge of Esgeiriau Gwynion.
Snatching a couple of good days in a generally unsettled weather stream again gave us some dramatic skies and excellent local clarity.
On this trip I tried the Berghaus Pro Rush Mid shoes for the first time and was most impressed at how they handled steep pathless terrain - maybe the sought after replacement for the beloved Stratos?. More testing is needed on greater distances and hard tracks - more on that another time.
5 Comments
I should go to Wales and backpack. 2004 the last time my boots landed on Welsh soil. Went two years ago - got stuck in a traffic accident and six hours later gave up all hope and came home. Maybe it is the cross country drive puts me of. The hills look good and your walk looks fine. I must make amends and find out for myself.
Definitely!.
The Arans and Arenigs are among our favourites and excellent for escaping the summer crowds of northern Snowdonia, generally rougher with fainter and far fewer paths.
A cross-country drive must be a real bind. I find that so much depends on where you live: in Cheshire we are very well placed for Wales, England and southern Scotland but the idea of driving to the Highlands is really daunting, even with the aid of motorways and fast roads most of the way, otherwise we would be in Scotland a lot more.
The roads from Norfolk are a pain to use any direction. The Arans do look wild and that appeals. I reckon they will get ticked of before the winter…new year…defiantly a training walk before the Challenge.
Hi Geoff - Another stunner of a report.
I have been looking at your routes using the OS mapping - is this available to ordinary mortals to use yet? I have a bit more time in the evenings now and could at last plot my LEJOG route onto it - it looks like it would do the job.
Thanks
Alan
Alan,
Thanks very much again - fantastic area. I’m just writing up another trip report now.
The OS OpenSpace interface is now available to anyone who registers. My routes work well at 1:50,000 but you could show your LEJOG route at other scales as well, which would be more appropriate for displaying an overview or viewing major route sections on one screen.
You can already output your route in GPX format from mapping software:- most of the work is converting those GPX lat/lon coordinates into absolute OS grid references. There are probably some free chunks of javascript that could be built into your pages (I wrote a VB program to produce mine directly from the GPX file).
No doubt we’ll be in touch by email to discuss technalities!.