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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

A summer’s evening on Tryfan’s South Ridge (Route 29)

What criteria should be used to define a scramble? General agreement could be reached on the lower limit – that we must also expect to use our hands on the rock – but fixing the upper limit is always going to be controversial. My own interpretation, reflected in the cut-off point for this guide, is that the technical interest of the climbing (which in any case ought not to exceed Moderate or short passages of Difficult standard in the rock climbing classification) must be superseded by the wider interests of scenery, position and atmosphere. In other words, seeking out difficulty for its own sake, without regard to line or position on the mountain, is not scrambling but rock climbing.

Since its first publication in 1980, Scrambles in Snowdonia has served thousands of existing scrambling enthusiasts, and no doubt helped to convert many more from the ranks of hill walkers and rock climbers. This is not an entirely comforting thought. Unroped scrambling, however exhilarating it may be, is potentially the most dangerous form of mountaineering. There have been times when – alone, unroped and in trouble halfway up some remote and uncharted face – I have vowed never to go into the mountains again. I break the vow regularly, but grow ever more cautious. There is no way of entirely eliminating the risk, only of reducing it. No mountain is worth a life, yet without mountains perhaps no worthwhile life remains to be lived.

Steve Ashton, 1992