#or coastal areas and im GOOD but snow?????

[ottobooty]

the plus side to having friends who live in snowy places i can always ask them HEY, HOW THE FUCK DOES SNOW WORK???

[whatson-northwales]

2020 is the year of the outdoors in Wales. In a small showcase from north Wales, we want to show you a year in the outdoors from our lives. There is nothing more amazing for me and my friends, to be out playing in the great outdoors. With so much to do here activities wise in Snowdonia, Anglesey and on the Llyn, we are spoilt for choice. I’ve listed some of the things we get up to month by month, as a little taster of what we do as locals all year round.

Outdoors sports these days for me is  all about nature and fun, I seem to have dropped my competitive spirit (as much) over the past couple of years in search for more self challenge, adventure and fun. I think its so much explorative this way.

The year of the outdoors celebrates the our wonderful country through its experiences that it offers. From walking the coastal path, to heading out surfing on one of our amazing shore breaks, or swimming along one of our blue flag beaches all along the coast. North Wales has SO much to offer from an outdoor perspective. Each day In summer I pinch myself, as I’m deliberating what to do with the day!

It’s spring time as I write this in north Wales, and we are sheltering from the wet weather and dreaming of those warm sunny days to come in the not too distant future. Life is really simple in my world, I live for the outdoors like may of you and I’m blessed to live in a location that allows me to explore my sporting desires with some of the most amazing souls. I can honestly say I’m blessed with my life. I have wonderful friends, experiences and I have a lot of fun here and the outdoors is the string that ties that all together.

So below is my way of living a year in the outdoors in north Wales, finding my flow and connection doing the things I love the most. I’ve listed some awesome ideas of what we do month by month, to inspire you all to do a little of the same, you don’t need to do as much as us, but go find your passion in the outdoors here in north Wales.

Hope the ideas bring you some inspiration, a sprinkle of adventure and some beautiful time in nature. Enjoy.

  Jan – Winter hiking in Snowdonia in the Ogwen valley with the crampons and axes. one of my favourite activities to do in the world. You don’t need to be a ice climber, just be competent on the crampons and axes. So much fun!

      Feb- Winter climbing in Snowodnia, head up Cwm Lloer to explore the winter gulleys, the deep snow up to your knees and thighs sometimes. If your up for a giggle, you could always take the skis up and head down into the Cwm below from the top.

    March – Mountain biking at Penmachno and Gwyddyr Forest in Llanrwst. So many awesome trails to bike in north Wales here, I love it. There are routes in lots of different styles of tracks from full on downhill to cross country, ill do a full blog on them soon for you all.

    April – Sailing the west coast of Anglesey, up through the Menai straits and on towards Rhoscolyn. The best way to see the Island by a long shot. Get on a boat and sail it, it will blow your mind.

      May – SUP’ing on calm eveinings on the water. Pack a picnic and have some scram on a secluded island somewhere. Calm evenings are designed for SUP’ing and its a mega way to explore the Islands little inlets.

      June – Spear fishing for dinner on the LLyn Peninsular. If your a veggie or vegan maybe skip this one! Im a fisherman at heart and by blood and one of my things is to catch my dinner in the summer months. Natures larder is ever abundant.

    July- Road Cycling the west coast of Anglesey in the Sun, whilst doing some hill training sessions. There are SO many back roads that are super old that you can explore around the island. Get an OS map and head out with it, or the strata app on your iPhone!

    August – Scuba diving from the shore at Treaddur bay and off the boat near south stack. The waters get a little clear in June and its a good month to explore the shallow bays in Rhoscolyn and Treaddur bay and see what lies beneath.

      September – Beach fires, fresh fish and beers, no summer get together is ever full without a celebration of our Welsh summer. Best locations include, Rhosneigr, Treaddur bay and Porthdaffarch.

    October – Boat fishing on the lure to see whats coming up. Shore fishing love, but a boat can get you to locations that are super different to reach. you ca also try and test different areas. Plus it’s just nice to bob around and be in nature.

    November – Wake boarding on the Menai Strait with the boys and have a sunset beer whilst we all freeze our digits off! The Menai Strait if you have not been is a very special stretch of water and apparently a rather good spot to wake on..

  December – Climbing on Holyhead mountain amidst the showers and rain! Ah climbing one of my favourites. So much amazing rock to climb in this amazing land, a life times worth in fact from Sea cliffs, to sport climbing, to trad climbing to bouldering, so much to do..

  Well I hope we can inspire you to get some activities planned out in the next year on your visits to these parts. Remember skin is waterproof so get out there and play! Have a great year of the out doors in north Wales in 2020.

Thanks for stopping by and reading our blog we appreciate every single one of you. Feel free to leave us a comment, give the blog a like and share the content far and wide.

Tan Y Tro Nesaf  / Until the next time,

  Nick

  If you want to support our work with whatson, you can do so by buying us a coffee here It helps keep us caffeinated and blogging through the long winter nights!

If you haven’t already seen our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts come and say hi, we are very active on there. Also join our whatson community newsletter here  for up to date insights of what we get up to in north Wales as locals. You’ll be the first to receive blogs, news and insights that we share with the community.

The year of the Outdoors 2020 2020 is the year of the outdoors in Wales. In a small showcase from north Wales, we want to show you a year in the outdoors from our lives.

[hellogreenergrass]

Signy Island - Week Six

18th January

Snowing again. And windy. And generally a bit Polar. Despite these clear signs that today should be an inside day, a day where you hide in your heated laboratory and bask in the technological and mechanical advances that have allowed humans to house themselves on a remote Island in the full force of the Southern Ocean. Wondering if you should put a jumper on, not because you are cold, but because it would make you feel even cosier. Or whether you should treat yourself and put your tea in the thermal mug with the Tardigrade on it that your (very considerate) friends brought you. The advantage being that you could have a large supply of hot tea on your desk without having to strain yourself to go to the kitchen to make another when you inevitably forgot about it and it went cold. Such luxuries are afforded on inside days, all the while the Polar winds whirl outside, forcing the seals into the ocean and birds back to their nests in order to wait it out. This was today.

But I didn’t do any of this. I gamely dragged myself and Iain, to be my field assistant, out into the field to drill 88 soil cores spread over hilly and coastal, weather lashed terrain. Each point to be sampled was 100m away from the other, in a grid nearly a kilometre wide and long. This sounds straight forward enough, especially when planning such things on maps. In reality, one point may be at sea level and another 100m away could well be at the top of the cliff. Or in the case of one point, over the edge of a cliff on a steep and disintegrating bank of moss and scree roughly at an angle of 60 degrees, sometimes more.  I’d set out the grid on my own a few days earlier, and whilst I followed my GPS over the edge of the cliff where it indicated the next point was to be, I wondered if maybe I should go back to base and rope up. I decided not and plunged forth, immediately regretting my decision as I downclimbed what turned out to be an unreversible move. It was later pointed out to me that when one is in a situation where they think, “maybe I should do this thing, like rope up and abseil, or call base and let them know what Im doing”, then that is probably the thing I should do. But I styled it out with an ingracious amount of bum sliding, swearing and a heart rate of at least 250bpm. Safe to say Iain and I found an alternative route, approaching the point from the ground up, rather than giving ourselves over completely to gravity and the God’s of misadventure.

Despite the appalling conditions we had a great day out. Iain is good company and made a dull job brighter, if not the weather. In part because of the large amount of innuendo about large penetrating rods into moist substrate….trust a Glaswegian.

20th Jan

I bum lifted today! No, this was not a crude endeavour you filthy minded so and so you. Nor is it innuendo, (well, sometimes it is around here) but is in fact what we call chick counting when the penguins are still sitting on them. Because you have to lift up penguin bottoms. You see, much more delightful than what you were thinking! I was Stacey’s field assistant for the day and we needed to count the Chinstrap chicks over at Cummings and the Moyes Corrie area on the West Coast of the Island. It’s beautiful around there, and the high winds that still hadn’t dissipated from earlier in the week, only added to the drama. Big waves crashed over icebergs in the bay, the mist continuously rose and lowered it’s skirts, so that every few minutes another part of the view would be teasingly revealed or tucked away. I find that clouds and mists on mountains give a good sense of scale, as if we innately equate a cloud with a certain distance. They belong in the heavens, and we on Earth, and mountains are where they meet. Us tiny specks of biology in comparison to either.Or maybe thats just the romantic in me.

Cummings Cove is also home to the Cummings Hut. A battered and bruised relic of early polar adventures, that was all the lovelier for the brow beatings that Antarctica had furrowed upon its walls. It is essentially a roof planted on short, thick stone walls, with the door attached to the roof and slotted into the allocated space, as if the whole structure came as one piece and just needed a few feet of stone to raise it up for head clearance. It felt very Alpine. The roof has recently been replaced, and just the other week Iain and Matt came out to replace the chimney vent. And on this trip Alex painted the front door to match the fascia. Its now a bright blue (Cuprinol Beach Blue in fact!) and alongside the roof and gables that are ‘BAS Green’, a sort of pale sage, it looks quite fetching. Inside, the hut contains a worktop the length of one side with an array of tinned and dried food stuffs: namely a worrying amount of processed cheese in tins, several butts of drinking water and the Tilley lamps and Primus stoves of yore that furnish all our huts. Along the other side are two bunks with fleece skins over the mattresses for warmth and a mound of down sleeping bags of varying ages, sizes and perfumes. A small Perspex window looks out from the rear gable over the cove and the dozens of fur seals that live there. We stopped briefly, leaving Alex to stock up the first aid kit and finish the paint work, before heading out to count the penguins.

To get to Moyes Corry and the majority of the Chinstrap colonies that we needed to see today, we hiked up the short but steep scree and snow slope that makes the Southern edge of the bay and Cummings area. At the top, the ridge was greener than expected (for a ridge) and on closer inspection showed a multitude of colours and textures in the diverse array of moss and lichen species present. This was Cryptogam Ridge. Naturally. (FYI: Cryptogam is a plant with no true flowers, cryptogram on the other hand is code breaking). Down the cliff from here was our first colony and out of 35 nests this year, only 2 chicks have made it this far. In previous years there have been three colonies at this spot, but today, only one. And this one doesn’t appear to be having a good year. Stacey and her colleagues suspect the combining doom of climate change and the El Nino to be the indirect cause.

Next we had to ascend a small peak and then traverse across its Southern slopes of perilously placed scree, before shuffling our way down the final descent – a 50 degree slide of snow, ice and loose rocks. Remember that here in Antarctica, the South facing slopes are the ones kept shaded and cold, not the North face! A mile more and we arrived at the biggest colony on todays survey list: A few hundred nests of chinstraps. I gloved up, armed with a spray can of blue sheep dye to mark the nests we had checked off, and got lifting! Taking a cluster of nests at a time, I offered my right hand in a distracting  sacrifice to the understandably furious pecks of the parent penguin, whilst lifting its tail up and counting the chicks beneath. Sometimes there was nothing, sometimes an egg, but usually it was a grey fluffy mass  and sprawling wings that stares blankly at you with the blackest little eyes, like beads of onyx dropped into a mound of silvery fuzz. The chicks vary in size, from the recently hatched that are smaller than my palm, to the huge and frankly ridiculous chicks that are near the size of their parents. All the more ridiculous as their parents are still sheltering them, but as they are so big now the parents are lifted clear of the ground and balance atop a massive fluff bundle. So I repeat this process for the best part of 200 times: bend, lift penguin, get pecked and hit (flippers hurt!), shout out the number to Stacey and then spray the rock adjacent blue. Sometimes the nests were at the bottom of the cliff, so I would scramble down to the surging waves, slipping on the rock as my boots – now weighing a few extra Kg with congealed penguin shit – struggled to take grip on the frictionless schist rock. Shit on schist.

At the final colony, we looked down into a wen that was flanked by hundreds of meters of soaring cliff. Stacey pointed out the nests of sea birds that I had overlooked, too distracted by the view of a Moe Island. Moe is essentially a mountain in the sea, and a spectacular feature of Signy. The island stands maybe a mile offshore, perhaps less, and the bulk of it is a mountain peak. Although the whole island cant be more than a kilometre or two in diameter. There is a brief plateau on one side, before the land gives way to a sheer cliff into the sea. Today it was snow capped and what had been huge waves crashing the beach at Cummings, now looked like sloshing ripples lapping at pebbles under the mass of Moe. The cool thing about Antarctica is that latitude has already done the work of altitude. We may live at sea level, but to all intents and purposes it’s the same as being a few thousand meters up in the mountains of Europe. So smaller peaks that we would not even consider a mountain back home, are very Alpine. Both in topography and climate. A hill of 50m above sea level  has more in common with the high mountain plateaus of Northern Norway than anything at the same level back in the UK. Stace and I both stood in silence taking it in: Just beneath us a flock of Cape Petrels floated in the sea, hundreds of them bobbing like black and white flotsam in the swell. Our view stretched to the horizon and it was exhilarating knowing that there was nothing but open ocean for thousands of kilometres, and in fact if we set sail from here and just let the winds take us, we wouldn’t make land fall again until we hit the South Orkneys from the other direction. Such are the currents of the Southern Ocean, circling around and around the continent. I felt so very very lucky to be here.