Monthly Walk - Black Mountains - 6th December

Our monthly walk for our Kili girls this month was to the Black Mountains, organised by our guide leader Gary Parker and always a treat for our girls we wondered what we were in for this time - Gary tends to under exagerate the difficulty and longditude of our walks so now we always ask him how long and how hard is it really going to be? (no naughty pun intended)!!!!  Well this month was no different it was extremely hard as the weather again wasn't kind - wind, rain and then the lovely driving hail - a fab exfoliator!!! We reached the ridge of the mountain we were climbing (don't know which one) and were nearly blown off - we were blown over several times, crawled along at points and the myself and Liz another fellow Welsh Walker and experience fell walker and superbly fit said the best way was to go down the other side to avoid the beating we were taking from the wind - the others I was with weren't convince and continued on, but I followed Liz and she was right!  Well we got to summit and Gary all of a sudden brought out what looked like a tent and I thought not a chance, but no it was just like a covering where we all had to catch hold of the edge and then crawl underneath for protection from the wind and to eat our lunch we had to sit on the edges of the material to stop it from flying away - yes that's right - I couln't believe that there were 10 of us underneath it, plus bags -absolutely hilarious although not at the time!!! I wasn't hungry, just exhausted, but your meant to eat so I had this disgusing lucozade jel - it was disgusting, but did the trick and gave me some energy!  Well after lunch which was delightful we started on our descent - quite an experience in the gales and hail that followed us along the ridge with massive drop to our left - very exciting - after falling a few times and hanging on to some barbed wire while trying to skirt a stream on a piece of wood to get across it we finally got back to our cars - another excellent training session!!