Y Garn, Glider Fawr, Y Gribbin

I want to talk about this day on my week in snowdon because i learnt a very important lesson about leadership that day. My first year group were with a different second year this day and myself and two other seond years had decided to do the three peaks in the title. This was near the end of the week and from the start of this day my shoulder injury was giving me alot of pain from my rucksack. I see myself as quite a mentally strong person, but on this day my defences were worn down, i was feeling ill, my shoulder hurt and i was prett worn out. I am not making excuses for my performance on that day, i am simply stating the psychological and physilogical state i was in. On the assent of Y garn i was already struggling to keep up with the other two second years, i knew they were going to get a pace on and i was determined to keep up with them. One of these guys noticed i was struggling and started shouting me encouragement to keep going. With this encouragement i dug deep into myself and pushed forwards, when i slowed again more encouragement was shouted down. We got to the top of Y garn in under an hour, and when you take into consideration that we went up the north-east face of it, that time is quite impressive. After that the two other guys in my group came over to me to see if i was ok and congratulated me on struggling up. after a 5 minute rest we cracked out the other two peaks and we got down all within a few hours after our accent.

This day i was in a group of peers, equal in most respects, yet even in a group of peers there is always going to be a leader, elected or not a leader will emerge in a group. The leader which emerged today changed his approach that day from being very autocratic in the morning, making me continue to the top, and then later on in the day we cam across a situation when democracy was more effective.

To descend we needed to find Y Gribbin, however the clag was in and visability was minimal, we could see nothing but each other so we got a map and out decided on an appropriate course of action. We came to the conclusion that if we hit the second of the two gliders then we had gone to far and we would take a bearing from there to Y Gribbin, as the case was we stumbled accross out descent route when the high winds blew the clag away for a vital few seconds.

All in all i really enjoyed this day. even though i struggled with mental and physical exertion for the most part. With the help of my group i was able to bounce of their encouragement and complete the walk in a fast time.