Last night the weather forecast was forecasting heavy rain all day so I was surprised to wake up to it not raining, and a sunny day forecasted. After getting some jobs done I headed over to Rhialgwm to make the most of the weather.
The usual parking spot at the north side was too boggy with the car sinking on the grass bank! I was able to roll back onto terra firma to escape and instead I headed to SJ039205 where several forest tracks meet the road and there was more parking available.
I had seen a route up through the forest on the OS map and always wanted to investigate but had no idea what it would be like. There is a typical Forestry Commission style gate a short way up the track but with no markings (recent ones have NRW written on them in weld) and it was open. The track seems well used by walkers (and motorbikes) and the main track is wide, gravelly and a nice steady climb to a turning area at SJ046211. There is then a track out of the forest into the access land which leads to a short but steep climb through the heather to the activation zone.
I thought the main track looked a bit convoluted so tried taking some short cuts 
On the way up I followed the forest track that went to SJ042210 first which was OK but quite narrow, boggy and rutted in places, however the frogs seemed to like it around here.
On the way down near SJ045207 I saw a path over a little wooden bridge which looked like it would cut off a long out and back on the main track. This was ok to start with but turned into a steep and narrow motorbike run which led to a track that was on the map but very overgrown. I managed to climb over/through the brambles and fallen trees to get back to the main track - in the end it didn’t save any distance and certainly not any time.
I had planned to operate on 144/433/1296 SSB however when I got to the summit and plugged the battery into my FT817 there were no signs of life. Wiggling the powerpole adaptor didn’t help so it was declared dead to be hopefully resuscitated later. With my FT3D I managed 6 contacts on 2m FM (3 S2S), and 1 on 70cm, plus 2 on 23cm FM (1 S2S) plugging the handheld into the SG labs shiny boxes.
This route from the west is a bit longer than the other routes, but it’s another option if there is no parking at the other routes, or of either of the other paths is blocked. I’m not sure if the fallen trees have been cleared from the public footpath on the southern route, but I didn’t fancy trying to drive up that track to the parking area after all the recent rain.
