We headed away from my niece’s home to head for the Ponderosa with the intention of maybe trying for both summits accessible from the Horseshoe Pass but as the craic had been mighty with Aenone and Dave we were later away than expected and only managed Cyrn-y-Brain. The Ponderosa was packed out with bikers when we arrived after 11am but we managed to get pulled up on the other side of the road, got our gear on and headed to the shortcut to the track behind the car park.

This one has a good track all the way to the summit and we ignored the shortcut through the heather as we get enough of that at home in the Sperrins! We were thoroughly entertained by sheep, birds of prey and grouse on the ascent. At the summit the end fed long wire was quickly set up and I started on 40m and quickly got 4 contacts to claim the points. I moved to 80m and onto the WAB frequency for the usual suspects – Karl, Graham, Geoff and Ken. Ian could not get any contacts on 2m so he took over on HF to get qualified. It transpired later that everyone could hear him but there was a lot of bleed over from the masts. After our coffee (thanks Dave) we took down the hf gear and moved away from the masts staying in the AZ until we could hear replies to our calls. Thankfully both of us qualified with 2m as well. At 3.30pm we started on the road back so as we had our ferry to get we packed up when we got back to the Jeep and headed for Birkenhead. This was to be our last summit in our mini trip to North Wales which saw us reach 100 miles climbing for Leukaemia Research.