Shelved beneath Mount Snowdon and embraced by the Welsh mountains is a small, cosy hostelry called the Pen-y-Gwryd. It seems like the last staging post before a final push up into the mountains. If you ever find yourself there, cast your eyes to the ceiling. It is covered in signatures. In the centre, in bold scrawl, Sir Edmund Hillary has signed his name; next to it is Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and all the other members of the 1953 Everest Expedition. For the Pen-y-Gwryd was where most of the team based themselves to practice their mountaineering skills before their assault on the highest mountain in the world.
The 3,000ft peaks of Snowdonia may be dwarfed by the 30,000ft ranges of the Himalayas, but they share with them the real elements of the mountain experience: beauty, peace and a challenge.
If your mountain experience to date has been following footpaths in the hills, but you want to pursue more challenging options, then you need to have some basic skills. Without them, the mountains are just one big accident waiting to happen.
You would be hard pressed to find a better place to learn than the Plas-y-Brenin mountain centre in Snowdonia. Only a mile down the road from the Pen-y-Gwryd, the centre was founded in the 1950s following the enthusiasm for mountaineering inspired by the conquest of Everest. Formerly a hotel, it sits in a picturesque spot on the shores of a lake and accommodates 70 people in shared and separate rooms. Its facilities are impressive: all the climbing, camping and walking equipment you could need; state-of-the-art climbing walls; dry ski slopes; and kayaking and canoeing facilities for the lakes and rivers in the national park. The centre is owned by the Sports Council, but run by the Mountain Training Trust, a registered charity set up by the British Mountaineering Council, and exists as a comprehensive school for people who want to be outdoor instructors. It also offers to the general public everything from entry-level introductions to the mountains to advanced climbing tuition.
With my fingers burned from a near-disastrous trek in the Pindos mountains, in northern Greece, I enrolled on the five-day mountaineering skills course, which would "develop the necessary techniques of navigation, route finding, expedition camping, basic ropework and hazard awareness needed to look after yourself and your friends or family in the mountains". This includes a two-day expedition with an overnight camp.
That's mountaineering, not climbing. Mountaineering is about travelling across mountain terrain, reaching summits, carrying your pack from staging post to staging post. As a "mountaineer", just to clear up a popular misconception, you climb mountains without having to go up them vertically, knocking bits of steel into a sheer rockface and scaring yourself stupid by hanging on a thread in the process. Careful route planning and learning how to "read the mountain" will enable you to scramble rather than climb up it. And that's a necessity since you have to carry a pack, even on a day-long trek. That said, mountaineering requires some climbing skills, with the use of a rope sometimes necessary for difficult stretches of ascent and descent.
There were three of us on the course and our teacher was Franco, a half-Italian dynamo with the patience of saint.
On the first day, having taught us how to read a map and take a bearing, Franco had us out on the hills orienteering. As we walked, he fired quick questions, such as: "Where are we, exactly?" When we at last started getting the answers right, he showed us how to "pace a route": knowing how many of your paces make 100m and applying that to sound knowledge of where you are on the map and your direction of travel. "You'll find it useful when we do our navigation exercise on Chnicht peak in the fog tomorrow," he said. "It will help you get yourself off the mountain." How, I thought, could he be so certain it would be foggy?
Simple. Among the many other things that Franco could read (Welsh, Italian, mountain flowers, bird flight and maps) was the weather and, as we sat on the mountainside, he indicated a cloud formation that would mean fog and mist in 16-20 hours. He continued the weather tutorial later that day back at the centre, explaining how weather systems worked and how to interpret forecasts.
He was right. The mist came down the next day as we tried to reach the summit of a mountain that, Franco said, had a stunning view out to Angelsey. Instead, we had to admire a close-up of our maps.
With navigation coming along nicely, we were introduced to ropes and shown how to get past a tricky bit of a climb by creating a belay system, or else helping to lower someone over a nasty step by abseiling or improvising a harness. This was all done in the safety of the centre. Franco said it was all a bit academic, really, because, he claimed, you could always find a root up the mountain by "reading the rock" (another language he was fluent in). Nevertheless we would be using our new-found skills on our overnight expedition.
The next day we packed: bivvy bags, stove, fuel, ropes, helmets and food. In addition to the absolutely necessary, one could afford some "essential luxuries". I thought of chocolate and whisky. Franco suggested insect repellent and toilet paper.
We set off and made base camp by a lake, then started on a day-long climb that tested all we had learned so far. A steep gully in the side of the mountain took us to the summit and the Castel-y-Geynt (castle of the winds). It was exhilarating and the views were magnificent. But Franco didn"t like the sunny weather. "It means midges," he said with disgust. When we got back to base camp, we saw what he meant. Swarms of them. We cooked our sup per and camped out under a clear night sky, now midge free with a little breeze.
The sun got us up. We struck camp and made back for the centre, a day's walk away with some great climbing in between. Franco adapted the pace of the climb or descent according to the strengths or weaknesses of the group and we reached Plas-y-Brenin in good spirits, feeling like seasoned mountaineers.
And that was what we (almost) were. We had been out in the mountains for 36 hours, and climbed peaks tested out by the 1953 Everest team, which were suddenly more accessible to us. Today, you can pay pounds 50,000 and ascend Everest, the mountain that took hard training to conquer, as a tourist. You only need to be relatively fit; you don't even need to understand the mountains. But £300 or so at Plas-y-Brenin will get you expertly guided round the beautiful mountains of Wales by people who love and respect them and who will equip you with the skills you need to enjoy whatever other mountains you might one day wish to climb.
The practicals
Mark Espiner attended the Mountaineering Skills course at Plas-y-Brenin national mountain centre, which costs £320 for five days. The course includes full board, use of all specialist technical equipment, transport and instruction. The centre will arrange for you to be picked up and returned to and from Llandudno station which is on a direct line from London"s Euston station at the beginning and the end of the course. Tel: 01690 720214. Website: www.pyb.co.uk
What you"ll need: Fitness: enough stamina to walk for long stretches with a packed rucksack. Although the centre will loan most equipment if you are signed up for a course (including waterproofs and rucksacks), it is a good idea to have your own walking boots.
Recommended reading: Mountain Navigation by Peter Cliff (Cordee, £5.50); Scrambles in Snowdonia by Steve Ashton (Cicerone, pounds 9.99); Mountaincraft and Leadership by Eric Langmuir (MLTB, £14.99)
