Pen Y Fan Sunrise

The friends I was staying with didn’t fancy it. Can’t blame them — the alarm was going off at some ungodly hour for a 2-hour hike up a mountain in the dark, on a route I’d never walked before, let alone in pitch black. I went anyway.

Pen y Fan in the dark is a different proposition to Pen y Fan in daylight. No landmarks, no sense of progress, just the path and whatever the head torch picks out. By the time I reached the summit there were a handful of other people up there — but I was the only one with a tripod, which felt like the right outcome.

What was waiting was difficult to overstate. A temperature inversion had filled the valley below with cloud, sitting perfectly flat like a second horizon. The sun cresting over Corn Du backlit the whole scene in orange and pink, and the cloud — rather than sitting still — was rolling over the ridge and cascading into the valley below in slow motion. That movement, caught on a longer exposure, is what makes the image. The star burst, the colour, the sea of cloud — all of it earned by getting up at an hour I’d rather not repeat.

Worth every minute of it. My friends missed out.