It was a blog that inspired me to get amongst this about a year ago. Unfortunately I forget the name of the blog. But the name of the route? The pictures I saw on the blog? They never left me, plaguing my thoughts for months afterwards. Occasionally they would go away, but sure enough, they always came back.
The route itself follows a series of miners tunnels, ladders and chains throughout the Dinorwic slate quarries, just outside Llanberis. The second largest slate quarry in the world covering more than 700 acres and 20 large galleries, with numerous smaller workings. Slate has been attempted to be mined from the site from 1787, working almost continuously since then until 1969. Its quite simply an amazing place to be, just for the history and the views.
There's very little actual climbing on the route but in most guides it gets the grade of HVS mainly for objective danger, and trust me there's alot. Ranging from slipping off wet slate and into the void, ladders collapsing, rungs breaking, chains slipping off the edge, rockfall etc
So, onto our trip.
The plan was to travel down early Saturday morning, pop into Joe Browns, quickly buy a guidebook (as we'd never been to the quarries before) and then head off to the route, stay the night in a nice campsite and then do some dry tooling in the quarries on the Sunday. Due to a complicated series of events, we decided to set off at about midnight on Friday. The drive down was fairly uneventful, until about half an hour from Llanberis we finally realised we wouldn't be able to get into a nice campsite! This lead to an interesting search for a secluded lay-by and an interesting sleeping arrangement for the night.
After conducting said admin, popping into Joe Browns and a breakfast at Pete's Eats, we set off up to the quarries. A short walk in up a nice wide path saw us at the quarry of Dali's Hole. I was rather disappointed that the lake was lower than normal, but the path pattern on the bottom was rather cool. We searched like madmen for the "Tunnel Through Hades" but when we couldn't find this, we took the more obvious route through to Hades.
Now Hades was an awesome little working, complete with waterfall, and the exit from the tunnel from Hades. But no time to go back through it to see where it came out, we were now against the clock to beat the guidebook time of 4 hours.
Continuing through the tunnel (rather wet) you see ahead of me in the picture, brought us out in California. A huge quarry working, but at this point all my mental energy and fear was focused upon what lay just ahead of me.
The chain leading up to the tunnel back into Dali's Hole nearer Dali's Wall. This long iron chain, rumoured to be held on by magic alone had been in my mind as the crux of the entire route the whole way down and up to this point. After one of the most nervous racking up periods of my life I finally got on it.
It turned out the chain, whilst strenuous and basically requiring repeated pull ups with very bad foot placements (in big boots at least), was alot easier than anticipated, especially after these bars I'm currently stood on. At the top of the chain I did my typical trick of missing the bolts and setting up a shocking belay (this is a continuous, accidental, theme of mine). After Dan seconded, rather nervously, we went through the tunnel and back into Dali's Hole, but up near Dali's Wall.
Here we had one task, to walk along a rather short scree slope, then on a nice flat ledge find a tunnel. This tunnel was alot harder to find than expected, to avoid ruining the fun for following parties, I won't post a picture, but will tell you its in a corner, a very tight squeeze, very dark (headtorch's are against the spirit of the route) and is "sign posted".
This tunnel brought us out in Australia And phew! If California was big this working is simply colossal. The following picture doesn't show it very well, but the right hand side shoes a tiny proportion of this quarry from the top. We started way at the bottom (which it doesn't show either!)
In Austrailia a long scramble up a huge scree slope, known as Oil Drum Glacier, leads to the first set of ladders. Dan originally had hesitations about continuing with the route at the sight of this first set of ladders, but then decided to man up and lead them.
A series of ladders followed. Leading to the final set. A horror show of collapsing iron work, literally after the first ladder there wasn't one piece of metal that didn't sway in the wind. Somehow, this turned out to be my lead.
This brought us out at a large ledge full of old quarry buildings built out of slate. All very interesting. One even had a collection of coats and shoes from the old quarry workers.
Some extremely interesting route finding (we did get rather lost) and a ridiculously loose scree slope eventually leads to the Lost World. Quite a large quarry and also rather deep. A series of abseils sees you down most of the way. For my own future reference, abseiling on wet slate is rather difficult and you shall become "close to the rock".
It was pulling the rope from this abseil Dan's rope decided it didn't want to live on this planet anymore! Getting itself stuck in a sharp slate crack.
Still, we had another abseil to go (less eventful) to reach a series of two ladders and a chain to get to the bottom of Lost World. I found this descent possibly the funnest of the entire route. At this point Dan magically decided that he was probably OK without a rope...
The bottom of the Lost World actually includes a rather nice bothy that's not shouted about much. It looked rather well looked after and I intend to go back to spend the night there one night.
Back to the route, a short walk gains the tunnel through to Mordor. A massively deep (I'd estimate well over 100m) steep sided working. Skirting along the platform on this gains a long series of ladders towards the top of the quarry and the end of the route.
We finished the route in approximately 3.5 hours. The first time Dan and I have ever done ANYTHING in under guidebook time. So we decided to spend some remaining daylight wandering around the tunnels,enjoying the views and eating chocolate.
The one aspect of this route I haven't mentioned, is the Bridge of Death. To partly discourage its use by alot of people who probably shouldn't try it. On this particular day we decided not to do it, but I'm back on the 15th on May with a larger team, and the game is on then.
Another night in the car (it was comfier than expected) and Dan didn't fancy tooling in the quarries, so off we went to Masson Lees on Sunday for some dry tooling. Where we failed miserably. Back to normal then.
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