Zero Carbon Adventures: December 2014

This week Trystan very kindly let me use his Nissan Leaf electric car while he was away. It's been amazing commuting into work and cruising over to the climbing wall in it while emitting zero tailpipe emissions. The performance is phenomenal with totally linear acceleration (0-60 7.9s) and great torque at all speeds. It's 80 mile range was plenty to get around and hills were no problem. The car itself is super comfy and quiet as you would expect. The only issue for me was charging, not having a driveway meant charging had to be done at work with an extension cable out of a window! It's great to feel that EV technology has arrived, it just needs more mass take up.

Also this week the first proper(ish) snow of the winter arrived on the mountains. This afternoon after picking Trystan up from the station and reuniting him with his car we headed out for a jog up through the slate quarries to hit the snowline and get a good view of the big hills.

Nissan Leaf 100% Electric Car meets N.Wales Snowline!

Jogging up into the Dinorwic Quarries

Quarries + Snow

Looking nice and wintery

Hit the snowline!

Wow! What a day last Saturday, tops off bouldering at the end of November! We had a great day checking out some new (for me) boulders in the mountains. First we sweated up through a cloud inversion up to the Mallory Boulder above the Pen y Gwryd YHA, it's still hard and scary!

After a quick coffee stop in the van we went on to walk up to Lily Savage boulders close to Georges Crack above Llyn Ogwen on the slopes of the Carneddau. I tried the amazing arete of Paul o'Grady which is an amazing problem, one of the best in the area. I'm afraid I don't have any photos as it was getting dark but I did get a great panorama shot of Tryfan sunset and moon as the cloud rolled in.

Bring on more winter bouldering days like this :-)