Bernia Ridge Traverse

After a few days of climbing we decided to enjoy the excellent weather with a mountaineering day out. We headed for the classic traverse of the Bernia, which is an excellent scramble which is like Crib Goch on steroids. For it’s entire length it has interesting and often exposed scrambling, with a very short section of climbing in the middle.

As the guidebook said that the estimated time was 5-10 hours we had a fairly early start to ensure that we had enough light, this had the added advantage that we weren’t walking up to the start of the ridge in the full heat of the day. As soon as we started scrambling along the ridge we were greeted with excellent exposure, interesting scrambling with some enjoyable down climbing.

 

We made really good time along the technical section and we were soon at the single graded pitch, which was as expected a bolt ladder which needed no gear. The climbing was up a very strange section of rock which had three vertical fins which were attached to a weird curving ridge. From here a short section of scrambling up the ridge lead to the end of the main technical section.

 

Despite the warning in the guidebook that the last section was a bit tedious and had lots of false summits, were were very surprised at how long the final section went on for and just how many false summits there were! At one point I started getting annoyed at one of the false summits having it’s own false summits.

Eventually we got to the final summit which had excellent views of the surrounding countryside, an quick descent down to the main tourist path gave us an easy walk back to the car. We were pleased to discover that the restaurant by the car was open so enjoyed a cold beer in the sun at the end of the day.