Hiking up Snowdon, Using a Motorhome as a Base
In the past few days we’ve driven to Snowdonia in North Wales, with a plan for some hiking up and around Snowdown using our motorhome as a base. We’ve camped in Llanberis and I’ve run-hiked up the mountain. The sun shone (yesterday, it’s raining today, good blogging weather) making it quite an incredible experience. It was a fantastic way to spend my 49th birthday!
Wales and the Welsh Language
A quick aside if I may. We’re in Wales here, and it’s obvious from the fact almost every single sign is in both English and Welsh. We’ve only been here a couple of days but have heard Welsh being spoken out and about. It’s great, we feel like we’re properly ‘abroad’! The authorities here are currently pondering replacing the name Snowdon with its Welsh name, Yr Wyddfa, roughly pronounced er with-va. The wider area of Snowdonia’s called Eryr in Welsh, pronounced ee-rer, and Wales as a nation is Cymru, kum-ree.
Given how iconic the name Snowdon is, it seems likely a double-barrelled convention could be adopted – Snowdon Yr Wyddfa maybe (or Yr Wyddfa Snowdon)? Either way it seems to me adding the Welsh name for the mountain would give the native language a real boost. It’s got me looking up pronounciation guides anyway, we’ve been working on our Ll sound this morning, not easy!
The Llanberis Motorhome Campsite in Snowdonia
There’s a good selection of motorhome and camper van campsites in and around Snowdonia. Here’s a search for stopovers in the area on searchforsites.co.uk:
We opted to first head to the Llanberis Touring Park where we’re currently parked. We joined the Camping and Caravanning Club the other day which gave us a discount at this site, but you don’t need to be a member to stay here. It’s still around £30 a night to stay, so top end for our budget (justified by my birthday!), and it is a beautiful site with fantastic showers.
It’s in a great location for hiking up Snowdon. There are numerous paths up to the summit of the mountain at 1085m, and the longest path starts in the village.
The Llanberis Path is just over a mile from the campsite, and a return hike to the summit is around 11 miles. Several of the Snowdon paths are described here, listed from hardest to easiest, and there’s a graphic comparing some of the most popular routes below.
We’re hearing reports that British sites in such iconic locations are very busy at the moment. We’ve booked in for three days, and were lucky to get a space. Yesterday, a Tuesday outside school holidays, the weather was good and the site was full. Today it’s raining and a few spaces have appeared in the ranks of motorhomes, campers and caravans but the site is still full tonight. We’ve chatted with a few fellow campers and it’s obvious lots of folks who would be abroad in their vans are (understandably of course) staying in the UK.
Other Snowdon Campsites and the Sherpa Bus
There are several other options for camping in your motorhome and hiking Snowdon, with sites at:
- Betwsy-y-Coed (The Riverside Touring Park is popular, we only just managed to get a few nights booking ahead in September),
- Capel Curig (Garth Farm is in a spectacular location but access was tight even for our 2.2m wide 3.5t van),
- and Beddgelert (Beddgelert Campsite looks good, but we’ve not tried it yet).
One option is to get the Snowdon Sherpa bus from any of the above sites to the start of your chosen path. You could then hike up and down another path, getting the bus back to your site from there. The popular Pyg and Miner’s tracks both start at Pen y Pass, accessible via several bus routes.
The Sherpa bus runs the routes mapped out below (more details about the Snowdon Sherpa bus):
Getting to Snowdonia in a Motorhome
We came to Snowdonia from our home in Nottinghamshire (having returned from Carsington Water to pick up my trail running kit). Using our budget truck satnav, we plotted a route here, then asked the satnav to show alternatives. It came up with one labelled ‘Easy’, which was a few miles longer than the ‘Fast’ route.
We checked the Easy route against a paper map and could see it followed fast A roads and motorways almost all the way here so we picked it (the 171 miles route above). It brought us into Wales via the M56 and the A55, pretty relaxing roads. Only the last few miles were on relatively narrow routes, but no problem for our 2.2m-wide van, except when we met a static caravan coming at us at one point, when we had to breathe in a bit!
Preparing for the Snowdon Hike
Although Llanberis is a very well-worn route, it’s still going up a mountain. It’s not an easy day out, but it is a magnificent one, especially in good weather.
I’ve been training for three and a half years now, running long distances including some mountainous terrain, so I didn’t have any fitness problems. That said, my thighs don’t half ache today! Once we’d decided to come here we drove home and picked up more kit for the hike. I took the following steps to try and be safe, bearing in mind this is the middle of summer. I don’t have the kit or skill to go up in snow or ice.
- I carried a running backpack with a litre of water and orange juice, dates, grain bars and flapjack.
- I researched the routes to convince myself (ish) they were within my capabilities (www.walkupsnowdon.co.uk).
- I checked the weather at the summit as it’s colder up there (metoffice.gov.uk).
- I carried a fully-charged phone with this area’s maps downloaded into maps.me. The trails appear accurate on this map.
- I took a waterproof jacket and trousers, plus leggings and a long sleeved top, waterproof gloves and hat.
- I wore trail running shoes and carried no poles.
- I popped factor 50 sunscreen on, as there was sun forecast later in the day.
- The train station and visitor’s centre at the top are closed due to COVID-19, so I used the toilet in the van before heading off.
Hiking the Llanberis Path to Snowdon Summit
If you fancy heading up Snowdon, the Llanberis Path proved to be a wonderful way up there. From the start of the path it’s 948m of ascent. I ran some sections and hiked others where it was too steep to run. The path is very clear, pretty much impossible to lose in clear weather. The surface starts out as tarmac but quickly changes to gravel and rock and later there are sections where large stones seal the path.
The views become increasingly spectacular as you get higher, passing under the train line a couple of times on the ascent. The train isn’t currently running all the way to the top, and was fully booked during our visit. If you did plan to use the train to hike one-way, it would be worth planning and booking ahead (snowdonrailway.co.uk). You can’t currently use the train both ways and get to the top, they don’t allow enough time before the train returns.
The summit itself isn’t visible as you head upwards and I saw quite a few disheartened-looking folks who were in the final half mile of hiking. When you do eventually get close to the summit though the entire world to the east opens up. A magnificent, stomach-churning bowl of mountains cradling lakes appears, dragging you off the path to admire before the final steps to the top.
Once you’ve cranked your thighs on those giant stone steps, the highest point in Wales and England still awaits, a few more steps and you’re on the top. A brass plaque installed for the 2000 millenium bears lines pointing at every direction below you. On a clear day you can see four countries from up here. At 7:30am it was dead and I stood up there alone. When I came back at around 10:30am it was pretty busy, with a queue of about 15 people waiting to go up. I’ve read thousands of people arrive during some summer days.
Hiking Snowdon the Pyg and Miner’s Paths
You can see the Pyg and Miner’s paths up Snowdon to the bottom left of this panoramic photo taken from the summit. They both run along the lower flanks of Crib Goch, which itself is topped by a magnificent and terrifying ridge path. Incidentally, Crib Goch is the wettest place in the UK.
From the summit I went down the Pyg path to the car park/bus stop at Pen Y Pass and then back up the Miner’s Path. Both are fantastic routes, but Pyg was my personal favourite, staying higher up the side of Crib Goch for better views. Miner’s is relatively flat for a while, running lower down the mountain and gets you alongside the lake seen in the photo above. It then takes a pretty strenuous leap up the mountain and is a bit sketchy in places. Finally it joins Pyg and both take a final leap up a long section of steep stone steps to the ridge near the summit.
Over to You Folks
Have any of you been to Snowdon and hiked up? Which path did you prefer? Did you do any other paths in the area you enjoyed hiking? Please use the comments box below – we read ’em all and appreciate your help and info.
Cheers, Jay
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Glad you’re in our neck of the woods, and enjoying the wonderful surroundings. A path you may want to consider is to walk from Llanberis up to Cefn Du, and from there up over Moel Eilio, and on towards the Snowdon Ranger path up Yr Wyddfa, from the top you can descend the llanberis path to make a long circular hike. BTW, Snowdon has always been called Yr Wyddfa, the debate at the moment is about the proliferation of English place names replacing the native Welsh, which is becoming a problem for some. Mwynhewch Eryri, a gobeithio gewch dywydd braf.
Diolch Edward. We’ve moved site now but I’ll keep that route in mind for the future, sounds good. The weather’s a mixed bag but we’re enjoying ourselves in these magnificent mountainous. Cheers, Jay
Hi. We have been up twice, once using Pyg track both ways 2nd using Pyg up and Llanberis down when we stayed at same site your at, looks like same pitch😊. Try going up Glider Fawr and Tryfan if you can, less people about
Cheers Mark, those two are both on the GB Ultras 50 mile route in Sep so ideally I’ll get around them before then. My quads are mullered at the moment though and will take more days than we have to recover enough to do that route from where we are now. Next time! Cheers, Jay
We will be there next weekend with my daughter and bf. Planning to do Llanberis path, but no running up … flatish short running for us!
I’ve downloaded the Llwybrau Paths app which has all the routes too.
Really looking forward to it, especially after your pix.
It’s a cracking path that. If you can get clear weather the views are fantastic. Have a great hike Katherine. Jay
With camping sites now often costing £30+ per night, is caravanning now becoming excessively costly when compared to budget hotels?
With the highly variable UK weather, I’d much prefer to stay in a hotel with ensuite facilities, often at a lower cost than a campsite. Is caravanning now becoming relatively too expensive? It certainly is no longer a low budget way of taking a holiday.
Hi Alan
It’s a good question. A few thoughts:
1. I just did a quick check on booking.com for Llanberis and the cheapest 2 night stay in a hotel was £160, so £80 a night.
2. £30 a night is about the max we pay. Our last site was £16 a night. There are lots of certified sites, certified locations and non-affiliated locations charging less than £15 a night.
3. The UK’s always been among the most expensive countries we’ve toured in our motorhome.
4. A good number of vans are wild camping at the moment, we saw lots of panel vans in lay bys in Snowdonia, so it remains possible but I think there’s too much pressure on these spaces currently so we’re sticking to sites. There’s still the option to use Britstops too, although after you’ve bought a couple of meals and a few drinks it’s probably as cheap to use a smaller campsite.
Other than getting a tent and a push bike, I’m not sure there are many real budget options for holidays in the UK, but our motorhome still feels like a good compromise on cost/freedom for us personally.
Cheers, Jay
Dear Jay,
belated birthday greetings to you.I wish you a lot of adventures in your grace period for the following year!Stay healthy & fit. Heide
Thanks Heide. Jay
Jason, belated happy birthday to you. What a way to celebrate, climbing Snowdon is amazing. This whole area is gorgeous. I climbed with my husband and our son a few years ago, going up via the Pyg track and down via the Llamberis, could hardly walk for a few days afterwards.
Really enjoyed this post, lots of great information.
Thanks Gilda. It’s been a week and my thighs have only just recovered! Happy travels, Jay