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Start earlier than you think. All six paths up Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) are graded hard and strenuous, the shortest is eleven kilometres, and Pen-y-Pass has to be booked in advance. Or let the mountain alone for a day — walk in at Ogwen, ride the narrow-gauge line along Llyn Tegid at Bala, or take the Mawddach estuary path from Dolgellau out to Barmouth, flat the whole nine miles.

Betws-y-Coed sits where the rivers meet in the forest, Beddgelert and Llanberis are under the mountain itself, and Dolgellau sits below Cadair Idris. Harlech, Barmouth and Aberdyfi put the coast within reach, and Caernarfon, just outside the park boundary, adds a castle and walled streets.

People have been looking for a bed in these mountains for two and a half centuries, and at first there was very little to find. William Bingley came through Beddgelert in 1798 and found lodgings “so wretchedly bad” they barely deserved the name. When everywhere filled, travellers shared a bed with a stranger, took a room in a farmhouse, or slept in the carriage.

From 1848 there were two huts on the very top of Yr Wyddfa. A notice fixed to one wall in 1855 offered, in capitals, BED, SUPPER AND BREAKFAST FOR FIVE SHILLINGS. The visitors’ books survive, and a good season saw around thirteen hundred names signed in them.

You cannot sleep up there now. Hafod Eryri, the building on the summit, is a café and a shelter, open from the start of May and only on days when the trains are running. The overnight side of the mountain has come back down to the villages, which is where it started.

Before a big day, two things are worth ten minutes. The Met Office runs a mountain forecast for Eryri covering ninety peaks, and it gives you the freezing level and the odds of a cloud-free top. The National Park adds a ground conditions report for Yr Wyddfa every Tuesday and Friday through the colder half of the year.

On the busiest paths you will meet the Caru Eryri volunteers, who work shifts at Llanberis, Ogwen, Nant Gwynant and Abergwyngregyn. They clear litter and answer questions about the paths, and they are worth a word if you are not sure the weather suits your plan.

Breakfast on this coast has its own dish: cocos a wya, cockles fried in bacon fat with beaten egg poured over, eaten around Porthmadog. Sheep’s-milk cheese is still made at Bethesda, inside the park.

And when Yr Wyddfa is heaving, the rest of the park is not. Well over half a million people climb it in a year, and Cadair Idris above Dolgellau drew around 67,000 visits in 2025, a fraction of that. In June you can have whole stretches of its summit path to yourself.