Cast your mind back to May 20th 2007. Remember what you were doing? No? well it was the date of my last activation (SP-10 surprise surprise). Due to things that were not related to radio I had to curtail my activities and as often happens something else comes along that takes up your time etc etc. Anyway to cut a long story short we shall skip forward to 14th July 2013.
I decided I needed a day out in the hills and was going to take a radio rather than climbing gear. So to combine the 2 I decided to have a nice gentle stroll up GW/NW-006 Tryfan. Leaving Wigan at around 7:30am I arrived at the parking spot at the bottom of Milestone Buttress at 9:30am via A55 to Bangor then back along the A5.
The route was the well travelled grade 1 scramble of the north ridge. Never really exposed and easily reversible if a hard part is reached. There isnt really 1 route up the ridge, you can make it as hard or as easy as you like. I chose a bit of a mix with a couple of nasty cracks. The first was in a corner but with an undercut start and probably had a technical grade of about 4b to get into and the second a thrutchy full body thing which was made harder by either the backpack or the size of my stomach. I’m going to say it was the pack.
The sun had really burnt off any remaining cloud by the time I reached the canon stone but fortunately a decent westerly breeze helped the cooling. I got talking to a couple of guys who had done the Watkin Path on Snowdon the day before and regretted it.
Another hour of easy scrambling to the summit and several questions about what the long white pole was that was sticking out of the pack(extreme brooming was the best guess of the day). I pulled up over the last blocks to see Adam and Eve standing there with about 20 people milling around.
I chose a quiet niche off to one side and got comfy for the next hour. Was just the VX-7 and quarterwave rucksack antenna for this one. First call on 2m FM calling channel and…
A familiar voice, Mike G4BLH who sounded surprised (I hadn’t alerted) and equally pleased. I was duly spotted and I did promise 70cm after 2m but by the end I think my battery had decided enough was enough.
25 went in the log in pretty short order with some well known voices (Tom MV1EYP and Jimmy MV0HGY with a summit to summit from Gyrn Moelfre GW/NW-049) and a few of the chasers David G6LKB coming to mind from previous historical activations. Was good to hear both the old and new and see that SOTA is ever growing.
Other summit to summit contacts were David M0YDH/P on G/LD-031 Blake Fell, GW3GUX on GW/GW-005 Elidr Fawr (sorry I forget the name and my pen had overheated and was leaking badly at that point) and some real DX 
with GI4ONL/P and MI0JST/P on GI/CA-005 on Croslieve. In terms of distance its not really DX but it was across a sea so counts for me
After an hour and the obligatory photograph stood on Eve I started off on the descent of the south ridge down to Bwlch TRyfan and then west and down towards the very inviting lake of Llyn Bochlwyd. Several people had taken the opportunity to rest and dip their feet in the refreshingly cool water before the final knee jarring descent back down to the valley floor and the nectar of the first section of flat ground (the A5) since the start.
Arrived back at the car at 3pm which gave a round trip time of 5.5 hours including a 1 hour summit stop which I thought was pretty reasonable.
All in all an excellent return to activating with the mix of old and new. I hope to be out and about more than once every 6 years although my activating record was never very prolific. I am sure the some of the old timers that remember me will want to catch up at some point (a beer sounds good).
For anyone interested in photos then they can be found at
https://www.facebook.com/ian.bradbury.5/media_set?set=a.637506972934622.1073741826.100000259740629&type=1
I think I set them to public.
Hope to see you further down.
Ian
G7ADF
