I could see snow speckled hills as I drove west down the A66 into the Pennines and five minutes later a blizzard swept in engulfing my immediate surroundings. We had snow! My friend, Sebastian and I had this date, February 5th to the 7th booked in the diary for a few months. This was our first planned winter hike of 2022. The only trouble was that the winter of 2022 had been very mild. Having checked the weather forecast on numerous occasions the week prior it looked like the weather gods were ruling in our favour, snow was predicted for Friday all afternoon, evening and night.

My fourth planned attempt to capture the beauty of the peaks surrounding Llyn y Fan Fach. All previous trips were thwarted by the unpredictable weather of Wales be it low cloud or howling winds. As I drove down the very tight and windy road that led to the car park I wondered in my head if I would be lucky with the conditions this time.

As we trudged up the steps in the rain through the trees and up alongside the falls we weren’t sure if we would even get a view from the top due to the weather conditions. It was safe to say we were in for a very wet hike and from a few conversations with some fellow hikers descending that it was going to be a windy one to! In fact little did we know that storm Arwen was coming in thick and fast.