The Carneddau (lit. "the cairns"; Carneddau is a Welsh plural form, and is sometimes anglicised to Carnedds) are a group of mountains in Snowdonia, Wales. They include the largest contiguous areas of high ground (over 2,500 or 3,000 feet (910 m) high) in Wales and England, as well as six or seven of the highest peaks in the country—the Fourteen Peaks. The range also encloses a number of lakes such as Llyn Cowlyd and Llyn Eigiau, and the Aber Falls waterfalls. It is delimited by the Irish Sea to the north, the Conwy valley to the east, and by the A5 road from Betws-y-Coed to Bethesda to the south and west. The area covers nearly 200 square kilometres, about 10% of the area of Snowdonia.
Second day of this Carneddau exped. Day began with weather that did not inspire leaving the tent with thick mist, persistent rain and a decent bit of wind thrown in for good measure. Dispite a fairly compact camp, in the wind only one of my two companions was in earshot from within the tent (they could communicate with both other tents) leading to an interesting process of gaining consensus to actually get on with bagging some hills. An initial decision was made to leave the tents up while tackling Yr Garn, which was on a spur from the main route, on the hope that things may have dried a little by the time we returned. They hadn`t, but picking the contour around Carnedd Llwelyn was marginally more pleasent with less gear, returning resummiting Carnedd Llwelyn was clearly the pragmatic call . We then made a course round the other hills, the day improved markedly after about 2pm and by the later afternoon/evening when we decended had become pleasant - in fact decent enough to inspire quite alot of detour scrambling on the various rock piles along the Drosgl ridge. Day of obvious QMD challenges - tricky weather, route finding, wet kit, terrrain, one (uncharecteristically) demoralised companion and a significantly more invigorating than typical morning mountain toilet visit. That may be too much information.
