Hey it’s Dr. Dumbledore Goodbourn and Will Scarlett here and we’re talking about what we did on Friday. We started off getting ready to go and climb Mount Tryfan. We decided to leave the centre earlier than usual because we wanted to get the most out of the day (and we didn’t want to be the last back – again.)

After a driving to the car park, we set off and started our ascent. This mountain wasn’t as hard as Snowdon. We started up a normal, but boggy path which wasn’t particularly difficult. After a while the climb started to get steeper, but still manageable. We continued climbing for about an hour until we had a break, and at this time Greg realised that he put too much orange juice in so it wasn’t diluted enough. He wanted to get the water from the lake and the streams that ran through the mountain.

Even though the first part wasn’t difficult, we were still slightly tired, and we only about halfway up the mountain. Because of this, Mr Bright White thought of an idea similar to Tour De France, where the person in front would walk 50 steps and then head to the back, and the person behind them would do the same thing. At the same time, I (Dr Goodbourn) fell over (as usual) and pulled on Will Scarlett’s bag to get up. Because she wasn’t “ready,” I pulled her down and we fell onto either side of the rock.

We continued onwards, and we didn’t expect to fall over so much. Jess Combe was the first victim, where she fell into a bog and got COVERED in mud. Luckily Mr. White was there to take a photo of her (and it was luckily she didn’t hurt herself.) Generally we all slipped over. It didn’t help that it was starting to rain, so the rocks were getting slippery which would cause a lot of us to fall over later on.

Our slow but steady pace meant that we didn’t have to rest so much, which spurred us on to finish the mountain. Given our slow pace, you would expect that we wouldn’t fall often. That theory is WRONG, especially for Dr. Goodbourn, who slipped over MANY times. After about 2-3 hours of climbing, we reached the summit of Tryfan, where we sat down and ate our well deserved lunch in the pouring rain. We had a photo at the summit and we continued on.

Now that it had been raining for quite a while, the rocks were slippery which meant that we would be more likely to slip. It didn’t help that the route downwards was quite steep so we were even more likely to fall, which made our descent even more fun. The first part of our descent was climbing down rocks, which was like our ascent. We slipped but didn’t fall too much. After about an hour, we reached a man-made pathway which was still quite slippery and you were prone to fall. Us two were probably the two people who fell the most, but that was when we saw one of us fall, we saw the other person and started laughing at them and fell ourselves. We had a sense of déjà vu, because I (Dr. Goodbourn) fell and went to grab Will Scarlett’s bag and fell over onto the path – again.

At this time Jez (our instructor) went to grab the mini-bus from the car park because he knew we didn’t want to walk ALL the way back there again. The man-made path ended, so instead of rocks you could slip over, there was very boggy and muddy grass – which you could slip over. We wanted to make up time which we lost on walking down the path so slowly by jogging. We were lightly jogging and Dr. Goodbourn slipped on the mud. This caused Mr. White to turn around to see who slipped and fell over himself. Too bad we didn’t have a camera to capture the moment. We then generally got down okay, even though we did slip a few times and we put our feet in foot deep mud pits.

We wanted to show our appreciation for Jez by buying him a postcard from the Tuck Shop. We wrote on it and made it look nice. What we didn’t realise was that Suzannah had it in her bag the whole way up Tryfan, so by the time we realised it was soaked and a part of it was missing. Luckily, Mr. White had a spare postcard, so we used that instead. We still gave Jez both postcards though, and I think he appreciated them both as much as each other.

Overall we had a great day, and we had a great week. We would like to thank everyone who organised this trip.

By Daniel ‘Dr Dumbledore’ Goodbourn and Scarlett ‘Will Scarlett’ Eddy