Exploring the Dragon’s Back Race: Day 2 Recce with Wild Ginger Running

Claire Maxted from Wild Ginger Running puts the Mini First Aid Kit & Emergency Sleeping Bag to the test.

Trail running YouTuber Claire Maxted from Wild Ginger Running recces Day 2 of the legendary Dragon’s Back Race route in North Wales. She carries the Harrier Mini Runner First Aid Kit and Emergency Survival bag just in case on a wild camp recce over the remote Moelwyns in southern Eryri (Snowdonia).

Whenever you head off into the Welsh mountains it’s wise to carry a first aid kit and emergency survival bag, but even more so when you’re out wild camping, further from civilisation for longer. So even though these items are usually in my running pack, I decided to focus on reviewing these for this leg of my Dragon’s Back Day 2 adventure as my friend Sara and I headed off over Cnicht at 5pm on a Thursday night to camp in the wilderness below Moelwyn Mawr. 

This section is 60km long and not easily divisible into sections if you don’t know how far you’re going to be able to get each day on such rough terrain, so we opted to wild camp. This turned out to be a big mistake for reasons I’ll explain later, but that evening, after a short, stiff climb up the 689m summit of Cnicht, all was well with the world as waves of green mountainside opened up before us, fading out under a blue sky muddled with white and grey.

Behind us were Yr Wyddfa and Y Lliwedd, the final two peaks on Day 1, and before us, a set of mountains hardly anyone visits, due to their loftier neighbours. While I’d climbed Cnicht in the past for Trail magazine, Sara and I had never set foot on Moelwyn Mawr, a gently triangular, 770m summit poking into a layer of sinking, soft-grey cloud. We thought we might get to the reservoir beyond this mountain for our wild camp, but our heavier packs (and our halting navigation!) slowed us down.

As the light began to fade, we set up camp beside a disappointingly dried up Llyn Croesor. We had hoped for an early morning wild dip and this was, at best, a bog. But at least we had a piece of relatively flat, un-swampish ground to camp on, and we cooked up our feast of cous cous, tofu and salty cashew nuts, washed down with creamy hot chocolate.

The next morning, we broke camp, being careful to leave no trace. This meant hanging on tightly to the blister plaster wrappers as I patched up my pre-trip manky foot before we set off, one of four from the Harrier Mini Runner First Aid Kit. Containing 22 items in a waterproof bag, this kit is great slinging in your bag for short runs or as a base to customise and add to for longer trips like this one.

There are four regular plasters of different sizes, two cleansing wipes, some adhesive tape, a sterile dressing/gauze pad, a triangular bandage, an elasticated cohesive (sticks to itself) bandage and six safety pins. You also get a little torch which is a great idea, but I didn’t take this as we both had headtorches for the wild camp. I added a few things like painkillers and foot lube, for the full list see my Dragon’s Back Day 2 film. 

As we climbed the misty, windy Moelwyn Mawr, past Llyn Stwlan, with its huge concrete-arched dam, then down past the small, former slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, we both commented on how relentlessly rocky and uneven the terrain was. Sometimes there were paths, sometimes not - it was easy to lose them. And our huge backpacks didn’t help!

As we descended to Maentwrog and climbed back up on neverending road and track around the huge reservoir of Llyn Trawsfynydd, how I longed for the lightweight ease of my Harrier Kinder 10L running pack from Day 1 - with its easily accessible pockets for food and water.

For some reason, backpacking rucksacks don’t have soft bottle pouches on the shoulder straps, nor pockets around the waist belt, so we had to stop and ask each other to get fuel and hydration out for us every single time. And to go to the loo you have to take the whole pack off or you become a belly-up tortoise! 

At our current pace, the next block of mountains - the famously rugged Rhinogydd - was going to take us too long to complete in daylight and there was a forecast for heavy rain with 40mph winds. So, we bailed to a nearby campsite on the banks of Llyn Trawsfynydd for a glorious, rainy swim, hearty camp food and an early night.

The next morning it was  day 3 of our Day 2 Dragon’s Back recce and we had no hope of reaching our car parked in Dolgellau before we needed to get back to our kids. The campsite owners allowed us to leave the tent, so we took the bare essentials (including the Harrier first aid kit and emergency survival bag of course) to explore the first section of the Rhinogydd, including Moel Ysgyfarnagod (623m) using a circular route. Rhinog Fawr (720m) and Fach (712m) would have to wait for another time. 

I think the Rhinoggyd Gods must have been offended by our plan to exclude the higher peaks, because the rain pelted us mercilessly from a veil of constant cloud. There was no view, but I can tell you what the terrain was like! Boggy and rocky, with sometimes a skinny trod-type path, but many times not - diving between blocky mini cliffs, squelchy, green gullies, ghostly dry stone walls and looming boulder outcrops topped with purple heather, skirting small lakes and up again, over whale backs of exposed gritstone, striped with white quartz, culminating in wind-rattled trig points and summit cairns. 

If we hadn’t had the OS Map App on my smartphone it would have taken us AGES to navigate using the paper map and compass bearings. The GPX track on the watch doesn’t give enough detail for that kind of terrain either. Perhaps on the race you can see people ahead of you…but you’d have to hope they were going the right way!

Stopping to consult the iPhone oracle for the umpteenth time in the spitting clag, I was definitely glad I was carrying my Harrier Emergency Survival Bag. If one of us broke an ankle on a slippery boulder, they’d stay warm enough to survive out here in the signal-less, Welsh wilderness while the other went for help.

Thankfully, the bog didn’t quite manage to eat us, although it did try for a tasty trail shoe - Sara was swallowed up to her thigh on the ‘bridleway’/river we walked back out to the road on. Back on Tarmac, we ran back to the campsite, covering more ground in half an hour than we possibly had all day in the Rhinogydd, to pack up our tent and catch the bus back to Dolgellau.

NEXT MONTH: Join me on Day Three of the Dragon’s Back Race as I try the Harrier running packs (phew!) out on the section from Dolgellau to Ceridigion.