Most people meet Moel Siabod through its numbers, and the numbers make it look like an easy day.
Six miles, five hours, a summit under 900 metres. Then they reach the foot of the east ridge, and the numbers turn out to have left something out.
Moel Siabod is the mountain where the difficulty is set by you, not by the route.
Ordnance Survey publishes three separate route guides to this one hill. Two are graded Medium. One is graded Hard.
They describe more or less the same mountain.
The three published routes
Here is what Ordnance Survey puts on each guide, side by side.
| Route | Start | Distance | Time | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daear Ddu ridge | Bryn Glo, A5, Capel Curig | 9.5 km, 5.9 miles | 4 hours | Hard |
| Circular walk | Pont-Cyfyng lay-by | 9.2 km, 6 miles | 5 hours | Medium |
| From Plas y Brenin | Plas y Brenin | 7 km | 3 hours 10 | Medium |
Distances are in miles, to match the signage. Heights are in metres, to match the maps.
The grades disagree because the ridge lets you choose, not because one guide is wrong.
Two of the three take you onto the same ground near the top. What changes is how much of it you climb and how much you walk round.
What Daear Ddu actually asks
Daear Ddu is the broken east ridge, rising above a small dark lake in the basin below the summit.
The Daear Ddu guide grades it Hard and calls it a grade 1 scramble. That is the lowest British scrambling grade.
Hands are used for holds and for balance, and a rope is not part of the plan.
The circular guide describes the same ridge and puts the choice in the reader’s hands.
You can, it says, “make it as difficult as you want to”. That means climbing directly over the rocks rather than picking your way along the path.
There is a walkers’ line and a scramblers’ line, and they run within a few metres of each other.
That is the whole answer to the grading question. Follow the path and this is a stiff walk. Take the rock and it is a scramble.
Where the choice stops being free
Two things take the decision away from you, and both are worth settling before you leave the road.
Follow the path and this is a stiff walk. Take the rock and it is a scramble.
The first is the weather. Snowdonia weather turns fast, and the safe decision matters more than the view.
The second is route-finding. The Daear Ddu guide is direct about it, warning of “some exposure and no visible path at times once you’re on the ridge”.
A ridge with no continuous path is a ridge you can wander off in cloud.
Wet rock closes the scramblers’ line long before it closes the walkers’ one. The same guide notes that on the way down “the rocks can become very wet and slippy”, and that there are still steep sections there.
Read the mountain forecast for Snowdonia the evening before, and again in the morning.
Getting there and what the day looks like
The mountain sits above Capel Curig and Betws-y-Coed, with the trig point almost 900 metres up.
Start points differ by guide. Bryn Glo on the A5 at Capel Curig, the lay-by opposite the cafe at Pont-Cyfyng, or Plas y Brenin.
The lower half is not mountain ground at all. Ordnance Survey describes a hill of “forests, quarries, lakes, waterfalls and a grade 1 scramble if you wish to the top”.
You pass flooded slate workings and roofless quarry huts on the way up. That is why the first hour feels nothing like the last one.
The mountain saves all of its difficulty for the final third.
Carry the right map sheet for this corner of Eryri, because the upper ground is where a path stops doing the navigating for you.
How it compares with Tryfan
The obvious neighbour is Tryfan, one valley north. The two mountains catch out a first-time scrambler in opposite ways.
Tryfan has no walking route at all. Every line to its summit needs hands.
Moel Siabod has a walking route and a scramble running side by side, and you commit to neither until you are standing there.
Wet rock closes the scramblers’ line long before it closes the walkers’ one.
That makes Siabod the better place to find out whether you like scrambling.
Try a few metres of rock and decide it is not for you today. You step back onto the path and carry on walking to the same summit.
Is it your next mountain?
This is the right next mountain if you have walked Yr Wyddfa and want somewhere quieter with real mountain ground.
The ground is rougher than anything on the Llanberis Path, and the summit is usually near empty.
Go on a dry day with a settled forecast if you want the ridge itself.
Go anyway on a duller one and take the path beside the rock. You still get the quarry lakes, the long ridge, and a summit looking straight across at the Snowdon horseshoe.
That view is the thing Siabod gives you that Yr Wyddfa cannot. From up there, the mountain everyone else is queuing on is the scenery.