ITERA - Presented by Open Adventure
Suffering in Snowdonia
Rob Howard / 12.08.2014
It proved to be a long night of trekking across the mountains of Snowdonia for most of the teams, and most found they had to opt out of some checkpoints in order to keep moving quickly enough through the course.
The windy conditions had meant that the scramble routes on Bristly Ridge and Crib Goch had to be taken out of the race, but the trek still began with the scramble up Tryfan which is testing enough.
Teams battled the wind all night and into day 2 of the race, and quickly began to realise what a long and demanding stage the first trek was. Fortunately the air temperature was warm, there was a full moon and it wasn’t wet, so they didn’t get the full force of the Welsh summer weather at its worst.
Even so the challenge of the Welsh terrain still came as something of a surprise to some teams, especially the visiting international teams, who have far higher mountains in their own countries. Snowdon is the highest peak in Wales at 1085m, but the difficulty of crossing Snowdonia is not measured in height alone!
French team Issy Aventure confirmed this at the end of their trek. “It was so long and hard, and we had to cut out two checkpoints,” they said. “It was so windy up there and very tough.” Even regular Open Adventure competitors Nav4 Adventure Two we caught out. “We probably overextended ourselves a bit last night,” said John Allen, “but I am sure we were not the only ones.”
Moxie Racers were one of the teams who did manage to get all the checkpoints and stay on the full course, but said it was tough. “It took us 14 and a half hours,” said Chris Caulfield. Caroline Bullard added, “It was all like this (point straight up), and or like this (pointing straight down) and in the wind we were like this (pointing sideways).”
When they began the trek over Snowdonia yesterday evening all the teams had completed the same course, but by the end of it only 10 remained on the full course route. All the others had opted for a shortened route, and those right at the back ran out of time and were ranked as uncompetitive. (Nile Swimmers currently, and Cosmic Chancers will probably suffer the same fate.)
The 10 full course teams are a very international mix with Swedish, Danish, British, Irish, Spanish and a Czech team all competing together.
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