What are the Welsh 3000s?
The north western part of Wales is characterised by it's mountains. The Snowdonia region is an impressive collection of rugged and unforgiving peaks and valleys with Snowdon as their centrepiece.
The Welsh 3000s are the 15 mountains which have summits at or above 3000 feet (914m) above sea level.
Geographically these are split into three ranges. Snowdon itself stands alongside two other smaller summits in the Snowdon Massif. The Glyderau (the English often refer to them as The Glyders) containing six summits and the Carneddau with the remaining seven make up the full set. Yes, that does make a total of 16 summits - one extra was added in the Glyderau. Some say the challenge only has 14 summits as one of the Carneddau is little more than a bump on a ridge.
The idea is to stand on all summits within a 24 hour time limit (usually set as midnight to midnight).
The route from start to finish is around 26 miles but as you have the initial walk in and out at either end it's more like 30 miles in total.
This is not a challenge for the faint of heart. It's a seriously tough ask and not one to be taken lightly.
The Full List
- Snowdon - Yr Wyddfa
- Garnedd Ugain - Crib y Ddysgl
- Crib Goch
- Elidir Fawr
- Y Garn
- Glyder Fawr
- Castell y Gwynt
- Glyder Fach
- Tryfan
- Pen yr Ole Wen
- Carnedd Dafydd
- Carnedd Llewelyn
- Yr Elen
- Foel Grach
- Carnedd Gwenllian
- Foel-fras
How It's Organised
Firstly, you'll need to do a lot of training (unless you've already done a lot of training already). There's little point trying this one unless you're pretty fit and capable in the mountains. Each one of these summits is a good day out on it's own. Each of the ranges can make for a fair challenge. Putting them all together is huge.
This challenge is more serious than either the Yorkshire or National 3 Peaks efforts.
The usual plan is to get dropped off an hour or so before midnight at Pen Y Pass and to make the climb up to the summit of Snowdon. The intention is to be on the summit of Snowdon ready to start at midnight.
Then we complete the summits on the Snowdon Massif, head over to work through the Glyderau and finally make our way onto the Carneddau to finish (hopefully before midnight). Once complete we descend back to our pick up point.
A vehicle will be on hand throughout in case anyone needs to drop out. We move as a team together and the ratio is no more than 6 participants per instructor.
Due to the physical requirements of this challenge we would need to have suitable evidence of capability before booking and it would likely need to be planned well in advance (if there were more than 6 participants I would need to find guides capable of completing it - there are some but not many).