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Wednesday 13th March 2013, and an opportunity for a day out walking in the Shropshire hills. And as usual, such a day wouldn't include a hill that wasn't in Shropshire, not even in England in fact. The outward route was across the M56 and then south down the A483 to Welshpool. From here, I followed signs towards Priest Weston, and then basically followed my nose and instincts (which were sometimes wrong) into the parking spot at the start of a track on a sharp bend at SO301976.
The level track here allows you to get into your stride quite quickly, but also lulls you into a false sense of security. For the final 500m of the route has nearly 170m of ascent packed into it. That's a gradient of around 33%, or 1 in 2! I pressed on and on slogging up this slope and made the decision that I wouldn't descend this way! It felt like my calves and thighs were going to explode, although they would experience worse later in the day!
At the top, it was a bit breezy but not too bad. It was cold, but not too bad. Up went the 30m dipole, out came the HB1B, and out came the chasers, 19 of them all worked in 12 minutes on 30m CW. I descended on the more graded route that drops to a point further south on the initial access track, and returned to my vehicle for the drive across to Stiperstones G/WB-003.
During the morning of Saturday 16th November 2013, I had been trying to decide what summits to do during the rest of the day. I had two competing agendas in my mind - that of points, and that of the 12m Challenge. In the end, the latter won, influenced, I think, by a desire to visit a rarely visited (by me) summit in Heath Mynd G/WB-007. That meant I was breathing down the neck of Corndon Hill GW/MW-013, so activated it for the Challenge despite having already collected the points earlier in the year. It was the usual circular route of up the steep direct path and down the longer more graded route afterwards.
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