And so we arrive at the final day on the Snowdonia Slate Trail, and the last blog post until my next adventure. The trail ends with an 11-mile day, much of it on dirt or gravel or paved roads (mostly so minor that traffic is not a concern), without much elevation gain and a lot of gently shed elevation loss. Having survived a truncated hike in heavy rains, puzzlingly unmarked kilometers across boggy moors, weird little jaunts through towns that often proved hard to navigate as waymarkers either disappeared or were cleverly concealed on the sides of buildings, and so so many patches of ferns and prickly bracken, this day looked like a breeze. The weather forecast called for something like 10% rain in the morning in the valley where we were starting, and little to no rain in Bangor. This was going to be a breeze.

You’ve been with me long enough to know what that means. After a cool to chilly start hiking across high open lands through a wide valley, we curved gently to the left and saw the clouds slowly, slowly creeping over the mountains from the west.

And then we felt our first raindrops. Time to put on another layer. With the lining of my rain jacket disintegrating every time I look at it, I’d stowed that in my other bag for this non-rain-forecast day, so I was in a fleece. Tim opted for his fleece too, but Tracy, wiser, went with her rain jacket.

The rain got more serious, and we all bemoaned the deceptive forecast as we got increasingly soggy. But at least the path was easy. Ha.

The trail goes around Llyn Ogwen, a lake, after crossing the busy A5. With the A5 hugging one shore and mountains rising on either side, the trail has to ease around the lake on a hillside. It’s a beautiful lake, natural but dammed as a water and power source for slate quarrying. It’s also surrounded, at least on the north side where we had to hike, with fields of boulders and rocks that get slippery when wet, areas of dirt that turn to a muddy morass in rain, and a ridiculously hard bit at the end, just before you cross a dam/bridge and the A5 to get over to the other side of the valley. The guide had given this navigation around the lake one sentence, something like “Walk around the lake, with one 2-meter scramble just before crossing the bridge.” What it should have said “For half a mile, try to maintain your balance over slippery rocks and through cleverly grass-concealed puddles until reaching the impassable last fifty yards, on which you will have to drop your walking poles off the side of boulders, sit down on the edge and poke around for a safe purchase with your feet before taking two or three precariously perched jumps down, then go up over a collection of rocks that will wobble when you plant a foot on them, cursing nature, as you climb again only to find there is another round of the same. Overall elevation gain and loss: 2 meters. Overall years taken off your life: may vary.” I may not get a job as a trail guide writer.

But there was a cafe/information center where we paused for hot coffee or cocoa (cocoa for me!), a chance to wring some of the water out of our fleeces, and a sock change for me since these goddamned hiking boots, which looked so dry this morning, were again wet enough to make my socks the source of delightful squishing sounds.

But the day relented, sort of, as we turned north to descend our long last valley, about five miles long, to get to our final destination in Bethesda. The rain seemed to be limited to the southern end, so as we walked down into the valley we were walking into some sunshine, enough to dry our shorts and, to some extent, our jackets. And with a bit of sun, the scenery became magical rather than menacing.

We descended on a very secondary road, an old stagecoach road, on the left side of the valley in the first photo in the slideshow above. In the far distance, about three miles away, you can see that, after several days in which the slate part of the Snowdonia Slate Trail has been sort of secondary, we came to almost two miles of walking alongside massive slate tippings, the piles of scrap that was deemed commercially unusable because it is too brittle or splits badly or whatever. Only about 10% of the slate pulled out of mines and quarries was actually used, and this area has had some sort of slate mining at a commercial scale for 250 years, so these piles are massive beyond reckoning.

The path was taking us close to an active quarry, and, though we didn’t know it, and “adventure center” where a speedy downhill track has been set up for little three-wheel carts and a zipline carries people with no common sense or sense of self preservation across a massive disused quarry pit. We only know about it because a gate on the trail seemed to be locked, and we took a slight diversion toward the quarry that led us into the heart of this park for fearless lunatics, which is right by a road with huge trucks hauling slate down from an active quarry.

You’ll be dying for a photo, and I am chagrined to admit I didn’t take one. Tracy and Tim and I were all too stunned to watch people ziplining in the prone position, hanging face-down in a rig so that they looked like they’d been shot out of a cannon across the vast water-filled quarry. (You can check out photos of crazy people here.)

And that has me reflecting on all the things I haven’t mentioned, the things for which there wasn’t a photo, the thoughts and moments I’ve left out. (I’ve reflected on this before, in a different way, on a previous ramble.) Just before we got to the path around Llyn Ogwen, two military prop-engine single-seater planes came buzzing down the valley, flying low. I’d heard back on the Wye Valley Walk that the air force uses the valleys of northern Wales to practice their flying skills in tight spaces. It was cool to see them, but it happened too fast to get a picture. And then, while we were on that rocky path, two really big prop-engine planes, maybe troop carriers or supply planes, flew past, just a few hundred feet off the ground, and we watched them bank widely to the right as they turned from where the valley we were in, pointing west to east, met up with the valley that descended to the north. Utterly amazing, utterly unphotographed.

There are so many things I haven’t shown you in photographs, but also so many things I haven’t written about at all. I’ve tried to share some feeling of the journey and entertain you along the path, but things have gone unmentioned or under-discussed. This trip coincided with the one-year anniversary of our mom’s death, and I’ve been thinking a lot about that, and we talked about it sometimes on the Slate Trail, remembering things about her. (One of her dear friends used to print out my ramble posts for Mom, very computer-illiterate, so that Mom could follow what I was doing. I miss the idea of her following along.) I’ve reflected on aspects of my life, and that I am keeping mostly to myself. I’ve had moments that I forgot to write about, or chose not to write about, or simply didn’t have a way to fit into the story. But that’s the way of travel narratives, of narratives in general, isn’t it? We pick and choose the things that work, that fit what we want to convey, that make us look good or make us the clown who laughs with you laughing at him, the things that entertain. I wanted to share my ramble. I am grateful you wanted to share it with me.

Of the rest of the walk, I will just say that we got into Bethesda through a disused set of sports field and up a graffiti-marked alley, emerging on the High Street and heading a short way to the endpoint of the trail. Here we are at the end of the trail marked with a sculpture of a man blowing a horn. I like to think it is the call of the trail, the thing that keeps me doing these walks. Where next? Who knows. I am ready to start thinking about that, maybe after my boots are dry again.