Welsh sunburn, now there’s a rare phenomenon but on Saturday’s hike we all finished the day sporting a varying degree of sunburnt necks and arms; looking more like Brits in Benidorm than hikers in Wales.
I’d picked Moel Hebog, the hill of the hawk, as our mountain for the day purely based on the delight of ice cream at Bedgellert at the end. There needed to be an incentive for my friends who were newbies to climbing mountains.
Moel Hebog turned out to be a good choice as the cloud around the summit cleared quickly while Snowdon remained shroud in cloud till lunch.
It was also guaranteed to be crowd free unlike Snowdon. 
We headed up the track and then headed right to walk up the summit ridge.
It was a bit of a slog up, but great as we were already off the path exploring, having fun on the rocks, route finding and checking out the plants, including finding sundews, one of the UK’s native carnivorous plants.
After a long lunch at the summit we headed south off the top and then picked our way down through the rocks and grass. It was a steep descent and being off the path resulted in convincing friends that it was ok to head down, first down the grass and scree and then following the Afon Goch river.
Once down to the forest line we contoured around to walk through the woodland and cross the Welsh Highland railway, just at the right time to meet the train. 
