JANUARY 2024 · ADVENTURE

New year camp between Pen y Fan and Cribyn

Central Beacons, Wales

Pen y Fan gets all the attention. It's on the list, it's where people go. On a winter weekend it looks like a queue outside a shop. I camped in the saddle between Pen y Fan and Cribyn to be below the wind, which meant I was also below the summit crowd, and also below the cloud base, which was sitting on the ridge and wasn't moving.

Olive tent pitched on moorland with valley landscape spreading below — Below the wind, below the cloud base

— Into the cloud

The fog was thick enough to dissolve people. Two silhouetted hikers on the rocky ridge in dense cloud — they appeared and disappeared as I watched. Backpackers standing on a rocky outcrop completely engulfed by white. They knew where the path was; I could see that from how they moved. The visibility was maybe fifteen metres before everything became theoretical.

The fog was thick enough to dissolve people.
Pen y Fan and Cribyn saddle — January 2024

Two silhouetted hikers standing on rocky ridge in dense fog — Appeared and disappeared as I watched

— Fifteen metres of visibility

A moorland stream flowed through sedge grass beneath the overcast, the water dark and quick, the banks indeterminate in the flat light. The tent — olive green, pitched on the moorland — held the valley view below it, the weather above it. I had a reasonable night.

Backpackers standing on rocky outcrop engulfed by fog — Visibility maybe fifteen metres

Golden hour light on mountain slopes with shadowed valleys below — Light raking across the grass at dawn

— Grey to gold

Dawn was different. The mist was thinning, pulling off the slopes in patches, and the light came in gold from the east. The mountain ridge caught it — illuminated slopes with shadow valleys below, the light raking across the grass at an angle that made everything three-dimensional. Peak backlit by sunrise. Golden mountainside. The grey-to-white-to-gold sequence that the two days compressed into a single memory.

Peak backlit by sunrise with shadowed valleys and slopes below — The ridge catching it

— The summit filling up

Birch trees scattered on the lower moorland slope with gorse and heather, catching the morning light. I descended after photographing the ridge in the sunrise. The summit was already filling up.