Vallentines' day in the snow.

On Valentine's Day, we went for a hike in the Breacon Beacon mountains, in Wales. It's not that far away from Clevedon (this hike was about an hour and 15 minutes from our flat).

It's one of those places that we always enjoy going to and when we get there say, "this really isn't that far. Why don't we do this more often?"

(To which the answer is, "we are lazy, lazy people.")

It had been a couple of weeks since the big snowstorm of '09, and the altitude isn't that high, but there was still a lot of snow - much more than I expected. It was fun, then kind of cold and wet then not fun, then really really not fun, then I ate a Snickers and it was fun again.

This was at the beginning of the hike, before we hit the real snow:



A scenic sheep:


A scenic Mark:


Mark checking the map:


Early on, the decision was made to go cross country, to cut off some of the distance. This meant much more snow, and pre-Snickers, this made for a grumpy Jessica, who went very very slowly (here you can see that I'm just barely edging ahead of the tree in the race to the top):


It was at this point that the snow hit the fan, the Snickers was deployed and then within about 30 seconds all was right with the world again, which you can tell from the fact that I'm smiling in the rest of the photos we took that day.

From these three photos, I think you can see how deep the snow was in some places:




We reached the top by hiking up a much steeper incline than this photo makes it seem:




And then it was time to start going back down again - this time following the path - which we think was under the snow somewhere.


There was a really neat dam in this valley, which you can kind of see through the low-lying clouds in this photo:



I kind of forgot how much effort walking in snow requires. Mark went ahead and I used the snow holes he made, but it was pretty exhausting and my knees kind of hurt for a couple of days afterwards...but I'm sure my heart appreciated it!