Browsing the web one-night last week I came across a brilliant black and white image of a man sitting on an outcrop of rock. Wearing two boiled wool hats, a marvelously well-worn twill overhead jacket, plus fours with wool socks pulled up underneath. Wearing proper leather walking boots, around his neck was a long piece of knotted rope with a carabiner which he was holding in one hand and a finished cigarette in the other looking into the distance.

As I looked at the image, Josh walked into my office with a cup of tea for me, looked at my screen and said ‘oh Joe Brown, he was an amazing climber, lived in the village. He passed only last month’. I had never heard of Joe Brown but I had heard of Joe Brown’s shop in Llanberis where we live.

Have you ever heard about or even tried wild swimming? Think of all the bodies of water you may have walked by, lakes, seas, streams, waterfalls - instead of just walking past would you ever consider taking the plunge and stripping and dipping!

Wild Swimming can be quite addictive and I’ve been told that swimmers find ‘the nip of the water and the zing of a wild swim exhilarating.  Also know as “Open water swimming”  it is classed as a discipline which takes place in outdoor bodies of water such as open oceans, lakes, and rivers with more people seem to be “going swimming” but not in traditional indoor swimming pools but in the great outdoors.  Most say this is due to the best selling book “Wild Swimming” by  Kate Rew, also the founder of the “Outdoor Swimming Society”

With Crashpad Lodges Josh and I have tried to go against the norm of what is expected. 

Remote lodges, “off - the - grid” accommodation providers, in-fact quite a few of the outdoor centres in the UK are usually thought of as basic, a place to lay your head, paid for per bed and generally cold and unwelcoming places.

When we first acquired the lodge, it was operating as a pay-per-bed bunkhouse generating a good income.  We could’ve kept with the existing business model but we knew we had to do things differently.  We began by carrying on the business as it was – all of our money had gone towards raising mortgages

Welcome to my first blog post of Escape to the Lodges, tales and tribulations of life at Crashpad Lodges. 

My name is Lynsey and along with Josh we own Yr Helfa, a remote, self-sustained mountain lodge on the slopes of Mount Snowdon, North Wales from which we run our business Crashpad Lodges.

I won’t spend too much time here introducing myself as it’s all in our about page but