Brecon Beacons Expedition 2018

Just 6 hours after leaving our Oak Road headquarters 23 of us were all safe and warm in the wonderful Tyle Morgrug bunkhouse in South Wales. It had thick stone walls, double glazing, central heating and a real log fire to keep us all warm and toasty despite what the chilly Welsh weather was doing outside.

In the morning we ate porridge for breakfast and then climbed up three peaks in the Brecon Beacons; Corn Du, Pen Y Fan and Cribyn and circled back to our start point.

Some people did it a bit slower than others and that was exactly as was expected. We regularly stopped and waited for people to catch up and nobody held us up and nobody complained of the difficulty. Of course it was hard, it was supposed to be, but we pushed on through snow, wind and freezing temperatures. At a couple of points everyone got into the emergency shelters and warmed up for a few minutes and we all ate highly calorific food to keep ourselves warm (yum!). It was also very sunny with lots of blue sky and we had incredible views of the mountainsides covered in frost.

At the finish the topic of conversation was not about how hard it was or how cold it was – instead just how amazing the whole day had been.

6.30am the next morning a loud whistle woke the whole house and after breakfast and clearing up we set off for a small stroll (compared to the previous day) through beautiful autumnal woods alongside a river running through a gorge. We explored a cave and a couple of waterfalls including the last one which we were able to walk behind without getting wet.

Back into the minibus we set off for Crawley but our adventures weren’t over. We came so close to running out of petrol on the motorway that we virtually coasted into the petrol station. We arrived back safely at 6.50pm.

We are going to do it all again next October, so put your name down NOW!

You can see the rest of Andy’s photos on Flickr here.