I have no plan to be here. I simply turn left instead of right, hoping for somewhere quiet to make rest for the night. It is quiet – very much so. No people. No cars. Just an empty road beneath an exposed ridge.

My knees complain of the stress they’ve already endured, my stomach lets its unfed appetite be known. I feign ignorance of their calls.

I cast my eyes to the ridge. Rocks cut sharp into the afternoon air – acute vertices that crosshatch in grey and gold. Above, the sky looks to clear. The last of the day’s clouds are being blown with haste to the east, away from the setting sun. My phone says seven o’clock, and there is little time to linger. In minutes I’m at full stride, gaining ground on the peak.

It’s not an intimidating hike. A gritstone-chip path wanders up the incline for me to follow. At first, I’m meandering through mostly open heathland. The occasional rounded boulder lays at rest beside the walkway. But heather is what dominates on the lower slopes, its pink flowers softly breaking the uniformity of green hillside grasses. Ahead, the heather gives way to a thin strip of woodland. The sun is already transforming leaves from green to flaxen.

I step into shade and the silence is no more. My breath is heavy, and the songbirds are in full chorus. It sounds like Chaffinch. A male comes to perch on the low branches of a sycamore a few trees to my right. I stop in stride to watch him forage for insects. Aware of my presence, he cocks his head, but quickly continues to browse the bark for food. Its soothing to not be an intruder here, to just be an audience and spectate the happenings of nature.

A pastel palette of evening warmth blanketing the countryside below

I spend another minute listening to the birds and watching them hop from sycamore to pine, then it’s time to move on. A gentler path swings off to the right, seemingly looking to circle the fragmented ridge face up to the top. Between the trees, I see the sun fall further in the sky, and I want to keep it in view as I climb higher. I look to summit another way.

I divert left until I see a fresh trail cut straight towards the rockface. I follow the scarcely trodden earth in search of a vertical scramble to the open air above. Hope is rewarded.

Lumps of sandstone rocks layer like nature’s stairway up towards a stone archway. Beyond, just the emptiness of sky.

I make the first step with confidence, still holding my camera in hand rather than using both to climb. The gritstone feels clingy underfoot, my trail runners gripping the rockface. I step again. And again. And again. The severity of the incline takes me higher with pace. Another five lunges up and I’m already abreast with the pines. Their crowns are now fully aglow, an ethereal veil cast across the woodland canopy.

The end of the ascent is effortless. Flatter ground carries me the final few meters, and at last my head rises above the ridge. The prevailing wind is belligerent but welcome, and I drop my pack to cool the sweat that licks my back.

Colours bleed from the sky to the west – a pastel palette of evening warmth blanketing the countryside below. Verdant greens are all but bleached. Golden hour is here.

I roam with camera in hand, skipping from rock to rock in service of the innumerable compositions. I stoop for some and stretch for others. Hilltop heathers make for appealing foregrounds in my frames. Great rocks surge and plunge in the distances, the rise and fall of a ridgeline shaped by water and wind.

The Pembrokeshire coast offers some of the best limestone trad climbing in the country, if not worldwide.

Marking the end of two weeks of blanket snow cover in the region, the forecast called for a picture perfect sunrise before the return of familiar warmer and wetter weather and thus the inevitable thawing of the sublime conditions.

“This was to be the end of what was a good run of New Year snow in Wales,” says Jethro. “It may have been more suited to skiing than walking and ice climbing but very welcome to those who were lucky enough to be local. All the weather apps showed a glorious dawn before the thaw started to kick in the following day, so an early start was on the cards.”

Setting off from his nearby home, Jethro loaded up a pack of winter mountaineering and photography kit and hopped on his mountain bike pre-dawn in order to capture these last moments of beauty.

Like most people it was about sticking to relatively familiar and straight forward local territory

“It was a chilly starlit climb up Llanberis pass up to Pen Y Pass, to get set up for Crib Goch to see the sunrise,” he says. “Like most people it was about sticking to relatively familiar and straight forward local territory.”

Even despite his close proximity to the mountains, he knew he’d still be scrambling to make it up to the ridge before the sun. Having miscalculated the effort of climbing the pass though, the sky’s fast changing colour palette only added pressure to the sitution.

“I’m more used to a road bike than these fat tires and a rucksack full of gear. So once off the bike a bit of a power walk ensued to make it to the ridge before sunrise. Fortunately though, I knew a friend was going to be on the ridge that morning and I’d seen his head torch in the distance so I knew I’d have a subject to photograph when I got there,” tells Jethro.

Drenching the landscape in hues of pink and orange when the day’s first rays did appear over the horizon, the landscape stood before him resembled something closer to the formidable summits of the French Alps rather than the more modest snow speckled peaks of North Wales that he’s used to

“As far as the skiers and snowboarders are concerned it probably hasn’t been this good for decades,” he says. “Obviously, the ongoing lockdown is restricting where and what people can do though.”

Those lucky enough to call these mountains home were no doubt pretty smug about their own life choices cementing their lives here. Pause and listen for just a moment though, and you can almost hear the distant collective cussing of those stuck at home, battling with the knowledge of what the conditions had in store.

“There was only one other early morning group ahead of me on the ridge. A couple of local friends appeared up the North Ridge as I was packing up to leave and a few people were heading up as I was on the way down. As I was getting back to the bike, a team from the local mountain rescue stopped for a chat whilst they were on a ski tour checking out the conditions, but the whole route was very quiet overall,” tells Jethro. “Before setting off home I had chat with the park warden and generally it sounds like people had been observing the travel restrictions, but there were a few people still travelling to get to the mountains, they were turned back by the police patrols with a warning though.”

Past a narrow col at six thousand metres, the ridge sweeps northwards. From the 6,150m summit of Mentok II, it looks like the vapour trail of a banking plane: a thin white line stretched across the sky. To the west, the highest summits of the Indian Himalaya’s Zanskar range shimmer against the cold blue air. To the northeast, the bulk of Lungser Kangri (6,662m) looms vast and silent, an icy giant watching over the silent waters of Tso Mori lake 2000 metres below.

We’d been on the go since two in the morning. Endless moraine, steepening icefields, a rocky spur, and a final snowfield led us to the summit ridge. To descend, we must make a long traverse of the horseshoe-shaped ridge, two miles at over 6000 metres, before we can descend an easier angled spur to the moraine. The next few hours on the ridge are amongst the best I’ve ever spent in the mountains. The air is an impossible, crystalline blue. The upper world stretches beyond the horizon in every direction: north into the Chinese Karakoram, east to Himachal Pradesh, west north-west to the lonely summits of Kashmir. Like an early aviator, I trace the unknown liminal between the earth and the air.

Like the defensive structure of an ancient city on an unimaginable scale, the scree seems impregnable

It’s just after six in the evening before my team reaches the moraine. It’ll be dark in less than an hour. Here, at 5,800 metres, the temperature will drop like a stone. A series of colossal scree-spines extend out from the glacier for several miles, separating us from base camp. Like the defensive structure of an ancient city on an unimaginable scale, the scree seems impregnable.

Dark falls fast as we traverse the scree-spines; it’s like walking up and down several 200 metre hills covered in boulders the size of footballs. After two hours, the lights of base camp are still invisible. Finally, we reach a tiny stream I recognise by the light of my head torch from our ascent. After a while, lanterns and shadows appear. Like bright apparitions swaying on the black air, our base camp crew meet us on the terminal moraine with hot mugs of steaming chai and lemon squash. We’d been on the go for nineteen hours.

Some places inscribe themselves on memory more than others, and I’ve been fortunate to lead several mountaineering expeditions to Zanskar and Ladakh in the Indian Himalaya over the past fifteen years. During the past year of travel restrictions, it’s these mountains I’ve thought of more than almost anywhere else. Those endless interlocking ridges of black and orange rock against the gold-blue sky. The pale green poplar trees growing tall beside surging rivers of glacial meltwater. The ice-capped summits shining like polished marble in the morning sun, and beaming the moonlight back into the atmosphere at night. And, of course, the ultra tough, bright-faced locals.

As winter sets in, the mountains of Zanskar and Ladakh fall silent, the frozen domain of the bharal, the lammergeier, and the snow leopard. Yet when spring returns and the world reopens, they’ll still be there.