Ralph's trip report

My trip started with the unfortunate surpise that my milk carton, which was half full when I packed it, was now empty, and my bag and some of its contents smelt very milky.

We were all up bright and early on Saturday, I had breakfast and started looking at maps. Max, a driver, liked the look of a walk in the area along Offa's Dyke path along the England - Wales border. I'd looked at this area before the trip and was quite keen to be involved in such a walk as it could take in the county top of Herefordshire, number 21 on my list of English county tops to summit, as well as the Cat's Back, a knife edge(ish) ridge. In the end, as often seems to be the case, my whole car group plus one chose this walk.

The carpark was thankfully quite high already so we only had a short climb onto the plateau, where we had an impressive view over mid Wales and the English Midlands. The summit plateau itself, like so many in the Brecon Beacons, was long and flat. After a couple of hours we descended into the Olchon Valley, where we had lunch. Max noticed an interesting lichen, and was about to take a photo of it when he realised he had lost his phone. We had a very leisurely lunch break while Max and Sara searched for Max's phone, and since the lunch was at the lowest point of the walk in a river valley, it wasn't particularly cold or windy unlike most CUHWC lunches. The afternoon gave us the climb up the Cat's Back ridge, a surprisingly short climb with views to either side. Me and Callum had much fun discussing the geomorphology of the ridge, but couldn't actually come to a firm conclusion on how it had formed. The walk concluded with a sighting of a fox, lots of horses and some paragliders.

Instead of returning to the bunkhouse, almost everyone decided to go to a local pub in Talgarth. When I got there it was still fairly quiet as only 8 CUHWC members where there, but after a couple of hours almost the whole group had arrived and it was getting a little bit busy. Back at the bunkhouse, I made a start on bangers and mash, which Nick insists I cook for every trip. This particular bangers and mash was spiced up by some broccoli brought by Max and Sara, who thought it sounded a bit devoid of vegetables. The advantage of cooking for 11 is that there's loads of people to do stuff, so it gets done really quickly. The evening was completed with a cake for James's birthday, the customary singing (with accompanying music) and bananagrams.

On the Sunday almost everyone decided to go on a fairly short walk in the waterfall country. We saw 4 (I think) waterfalls, including one you could stand behind and my personal favourite which had 4 levels with plunge pools in between. Sadly we were unable to secure a pub lunch for the whole group, but after cleaning the bunkhouse my car stopped at a restaurant in Abergavenny where we all had some very tasty food, followed by a drive back with an excellent playlist courtesy of the song connection game, which we won with 1 second remaining on the final song.