Every clear morning, cars pour into a car park 359 metres above sea level in the middle of Snowdonia and disgorge people in technical jackets carrying poles. They are aimed at Snowdon. Three of the most popular routes up the highest mountain in Wales - the Miners' Track, the Pyg Track, and the scrambling line via Crib Goch - all start here, at Pen-y-Pass. The pass sits at the high point of the road over Bwlch Llanberis, a third of the way up Snowdon by elevation, and serves as the launchpad for some of Britain's busiest mountain days. Long before the hikers arrived, this was a mining road built to carry copper ore down the mountain.
The road through Llanberis Pass was constructed in the 1830s for a purely industrial reason: copper from the mines on Snowdon needed a way out, and dragging it over the summit and down the far side to Beddgelert was wearing the miners down. The new road let them haul ore down the Miners' Track to a storehouse at Pen-y-Pass first, then onward to Llanberis. It is one of the older engineered routes in Snowdonia, and the foundations laid for slag and ore are now carrying day-trippers and weekend climbers in numbers the original builders could not have imagined. The Sherpa bus network terminates here, ferrying walkers from the surrounding villages so the car park does not have to absorb everyone.
A short distance down the road from Pen-y-Pass, where the Llanberis road meets the Beddgelert-to-Capel Curig road, stands the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel. In the early 1950s, a group of climbers led by Colonel John Hunt used it as their base for training and equipment trials. In 1953 that team put Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on the summit of Mount Everest. The hotel kept their gear, their signatures, and their stories. The room where they planned the expedition is now called the Everest Room, and the ceiling carries autographs of returning climbers: a low-roofed Welsh inn, oddly, became one of the indispensable addresses in the history of high-altitude mountaineering.
The Miners' Track is the gentlest of the three lines from Pen-y-Pass. It traces the old mining road around Llyn Llydaw and Llyn Glaslyn, then climbs steeply up the Zig-Zags to the ridge near the summit. The Pyg Track is steeper from the start but shorter; it contours below the Crib Goch ridge and joins the Miners' Track at the top of the Zig-Zags. The third option, via Crib Goch itself, is a knife-edged scramble along a ridge so narrow that walkers can place a hand on each side at once. It demands a head for heights, scrambling skill, and dry weather. The ridge has killed people who attempted it in cloud or in wind, and the rescue helicopter is a regular sight over Pen-y-Pass when the weather turns.
The building opposite the car park used to be the Gorphwysfa Hotel, a Victorian mountaineering inn. It is now a YHA youth hostel with a bar and cafe; the original walls still hold a century of climbing memorabilia. The Snowdonia National Park runs the visitor centre and an information cafe across the road. Decades of foot traffic have prompted a park-and-ride bus from Nant Peris and Llanberis, easing pressure on a car park that can fill before sunrise on summer Saturdays. From the visitor centre the noise of car doors and trekking poles never quite fades; this is one of the few places in Eryri where the mountain experience is genuinely crowded, and the National Park works hard to disperse walkers across the routes.
Stand at the car park in late afternoon, after most of the day's walkers have come down, and the geography becomes clear. To the west, the Llanberis Pass falls away towards the lakes, with the dark slabs of Dinas Mot and Clogwyn y Person rising above. To the east, the road dips and rises again past Pen-y-Gwryd. To the south, Snowdon itself hides behind the bulk of Crib Goch, only visible from the higher tracks. Cloud comes and goes in minutes. Sheep pick along the verges. A 1953 trail of association reaches all the way from this windy notch in the Welsh mountains to the top of the world.
Pen-y-Pass sits at 53.080 degrees north, 4.021 degrees west, 359 m (1,178 ft) elevation, in the central Snowdonia massif. From cruising altitude the pass is visible as a saddle between Glyder Fawr to the north and Crib Goch / Snowdon to the south, with the long V of Llanberis Pass running northwest down to the lake at Llyn Padarn. Nearest airports: Caernarfon (EGCK) 11 nm northwest, RAF Valley (EGOV) 23 nm northwest. Mountain weather is changeable; rotor and severe turbulence are common in the pass when wind crosses the ridges.