donal's blog

Date: 20 June 2010 Description: Described as a moderate walk in the Lonely Planet guide, I found this tougher at the start than I had expected (about the same intensity as the steep section of Lough Bray). After some messing around at the start (we failed to locate the gravel path Gary had mentioned and end up scrambling up the river bed), we finally hit the ridge and took the shortest path up (straight up!). We found a forest road that brought us up to 350-400m approx and then followed a grass path up to 500m approx (nice stroll). The final climb to the first peak (677m) was strenuous but not too bad. Following the saddle over to the 698m peak was straighforward. Heading over to the reservoir was also fine. The guidebook indicated that finding the path through the heather was a game of luck and our findings agree (even from the top of Camaderry we saw no visible paths down towards the streams). Instead, we headed over to the reservoir perimeter road and then followed the stream back...

Last sunday, Rafael (a colleague from Google) and myself went hiking in Glendalough (following the white route up along the ridge and then back along the valley to the visitor centre). We were fortunate to find a gap in the rain over the weekend - it was lashing rain and extremely windy at 3am and more rain showers arrived towards the end of the hike at 2pm (kudos to www.met.ie having rain radar on their website and to O2/Vodafone for coverage in the area). We warned a few hikers setting out later than us that heavy rain was on the way (particularly 2 folk who didn't look particularly well kitted out) and I'm guessing they got rather wet on top of the ridge. Overall - has a great time on the hike and it was really good to get out and about early on a sunday (loads of people had a similar idea).