Balancing on Blue

 

Or in this case, balancing on my computer screen

Whilst I enjoy reading many outdoor blogs I confess to not always enjoying trip reports. I don’t actually find them very interesting. That isn’t a criticism of those who write them, or those who read them.  They just do not float my boat, but each to his own.  And yes, I know I write trip reports on here, which possibly shows that I am a hypocrite. I try to write what I would like to read, mainly by adding some (admittedly pathetic) attempts at humour, self-deprecation, or ‘deeper thoughts’. The latter appear to chime with some readers, come across as pretentious to others and may have some simply reaching for the sick bucket.

With that background information about my predilections (good word that) it may seem a little odd that I sometimes reach for the ultimate trip reports, books by long distance hikers such as Chris Townsend.  And often I find these enjoyable.  In 2013 I read the book The Last Englishman by a British through hiker, Keith Foskett.  Or, as Keith would emphatically argue, 'English' through hiker. It told the tale of his epic walk along the Pacific Crest Trail in the USA. Recently, Keith kindly sent me his latest book Balancing on Blue. The deal was a free copy in return for a review. I was able to write any review, of course, not just a favourable one.

Well the book arrived last week and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It is a cracking good read and I really did pick it up every spare moment until it was finished. It tells of Keith’s through hike of the 2184 mile Appalachian Trail (or AT) over almost 5 months in 2012.  Now 2184 miles, mainly through thick forest with limited views, must be incredibly hard going for the walker. It must also be a genuine challenge writing about it and keeping each page fresh.  But Keith has succeeded magnificently.  The joy of the book is that it doesn’t read like a trip report of the ‘first I walked here, and it was this far, and then I walked here and it was really tough and it rained a lot and this is what I ate and this is what I saw’ variety.  Yes that’s in it, and so it does give the reader in the UK a flavour of what the AT itself must be like.  However, the book is rich in bringing to life the characters of Keith's walking companions, their grit, determination and motivators and the towns he stopped at along the trail.  Keith describes his own emotions and thoughts and feelings and you do feel that you are walking each step with him, albeit without having to suffer the dirt, the discomfort, the smells and the constant hunger that through hikers seem to endure. Or the bears, of course. I couldn't be doing with bears.  Cows are too dangerous for me.  At the risk of sounding horribly patronising and pretentious it really is a well written book.  It feels like it has been written by a ‘real author’ who happens to through hike, rather than a passionate walker who needs to write a book to supplement his income (I guess this may be true as well though!).

The book left me wanting to walk the AT (except for those sodding bears), yet knowing that I would never have the courage to set off, or the determination to manage such a walk.  But at least I have walked it with Keith.  And I will do my best to remember his trail mantra “never, ever, ever give up” as I set out on my third The Great Outdoors Challenge (TGOC) a month today.  With luck and the right frame of mind I will have some of Keith’s ‘balancing on blue’ moments during that crossing of Scotland.  If you want that explaining you’ll have to read to at least page 95 of the book!

I’m not going to try to provide a synopsis. Go buy the book.  If you enjoy walking and reading you will be richly rewarded.

Sogginess in the Lakes

This was the first time it was dry enough to get the camera out - me in the Z Packs Challenger Death Jacket on the side of Catbells

Planning a trip for March is always a risky business.  The weather can be great. It can also be terrible.  Having arranged to meet up with Robin Evans  for a three day outing, and having booked Hyperdog into the kennels so I didn’t have to sleep snuggled up to what is, even in the best of conditions, a wet, muddy and wriggling wriggly licky thing, I was somewhat committed to making the trip last week.  Over the few days leading up to the off the weather forecast moved from ‘calm and fair’ to ‘very wet and very windy’.  As I have not the slightest masochistic streak in me, the attractions of the trip diminished more and more as it came closer, and as the forecast changed from bad to torrid.

Robin had planned a three day route in the Lakes, starting at either Braithwaite or Little Town and involving Dale Head, Grey Knotts, Haystacks, the High Stile Ridge, Starling Dodd, Buttermere, Crag Hill and various bumps in between.  In the couple of days before we set off, the route, and our planned camps, got lower and lower, and when we finally met on the Wednesday morning in Braithwaite we had committed to nothing more for the first day than a walk south along the Cumbria Way into Langstrath.  So that was easy enough and, what is more, it was dry as we left the camp site, with no rain forecast for another two or three hours.

Fifteen minutes later the first drops of water started falling from the sky; ten minutes after that we had full waterproof gear on; and within another fifteen we were starting to think we might need the phone number of the RNLI to call for assistance.  As the rain increased in intensity so did the wind.  It was horrid.

Along the path next to Derwent Water we bumped in to an old colleague of mine, Mick Guy, from the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team with his Search and Rescue Border Collie. He cackled like a very mad madman when we explained we were camping out.  We got to Grange.  We went in the café and ordered some lunch and generally dripped onto the table and the tiles.  We ate lunch.  Slowly.  We decided (well I did, but I think Robin was content with the decision) that a wild camp, even just in Langstrath, would be no fun and that we might be better back at the camp site in Braithwaite, which is only 200 metres from a pub.  Now you might think that is rather whimpy of me.  I think the opposite.  I was deciding to camp out in Braithwaite when I would be within twenty five minutes of my real bed and a log fire and a sofa and a fridge with beer and proper meat in it, and a wine rack with wine and a shelfy thing with whisky on it.  So that choice wasn’t whimpy.  It was steely.  Like the colour of my tent pegs.  The ones which complement my eyes so nicely.

Does my pack look big in this? Robin on the way back to Braithwaite

Derwent Water

Drying out in the Newlands Valley

So we headed back towards Braithwaite.  Firstly on the lane, then on the wall next to the lane, as by now the road was badly flooded in places, and then on the path that runs along the side of Catbells.  As we got towards Braithwaite it cleared up a little (of course it did, that’s what the weather does when it is being particularly malevolent) and the Newlands Fells looked quite splendiozy.

At the camp site Daphne Duplex was up in a thrice or two and Robin put up his new Tramplite tent and we did a bit of gasping and sighing and heavy breathing, what with all that glistening cuben fibre on display, and then we forgoed the temptation of a bar snack and had dehydrated things to eat and then seeing as how we had eaten dehydrated food it only seemed right to go to the pub to have some non-dehydrated drink and that’s what we did.

The Z Packs Duplex Death Tent in the murk at Braithwaite. And no Gordon, it didn't blow away.

The rather pleasant old Keswick to Threlkeld Railway path

The weather forecast remained awful for the Thursday, but with the possibility of a dry two or three hours first thing, then more heavy rain and wind and the possibility of snow overnight.  By now we were close to writing the whole thing off as a bad job and heading to our respective homes.  On the Thursday Robin wanted to have a lazier day at the tent and then possibly try for a wild camp if it remained reasonable, but I wanted to walk so I headed off alone and did a low level walk from Threlkeld, combining the old railway line path to Keswick with a diversion up Latrigg. And today the weather must have been feeling pretty guilty for its treatment of us the previous day, as apart from the little incident when it tried to blow me off the top of Latrigg it remained dry until I was taking my boots off back at the car, and then it did what it does best in the Lakes ie it tipped it down.

Keswick in the clag from Latrigg - where the wind was so strong it was almost unstandupable

And despite the apparent lack of endeavour in these two days I did walk a total of 32 km with 870 metres of uppy bits, and I did carry full backpacking gear on both days to give myself at least a semi-decent workout.

I've walked this path dozens of times but never noticed this before.  It had an old water pipe thing up the back and must once have had a tap or something on the front at the top. I think.

Walkies

A Frozed Up Angle Tarn

So yesterday evening I says to Hyperdog Moss “Where do you fancy going for walkies tomorrow?” and he just looks at me and wags his tail a bit, so I says “Come on help me out here, we have the whole of the Lake District or the North Pennines to choose from", but he just wags his tail a bit more and walks off and brings back Bill. Bill is one of his toys. It’s a sort of knobbly green rubber thing. Actually, there is no ‘sort of’ about it, it is a knobbly green rubber thing. I then had to throw Bill for him to catch for the next three hours and that was the end of that conversation.

So I had to choose. The day being claggy and generally yucky we decided not to drive too far and to stay relatively low, so we walked from Patterdale to Angle Tarn via Boredale Hause, as you do, it being the obvious way to go.

There was a lot more snow than this but that was until Hyperdog ate most of it

 

You can never have too many photos of Angle Tarn I say

The sun looked like it was coming out as we headed through Side Farm, but that was a trick it was playing on us, because the clag soon came back, along with intermittent snow showers.  Most of the snow had gone below the Hause, but there was some left above that, and a few icy stretches on the path, but nothing difficult that couldn’t be avoided so the spikes stayed in the pack. This lack of snow didn’t stop Hyperdog suddenly and inexplicably flying sideways off a grassy bank into a big drift, and not yet being an expert with snow he decided the best way to get out of the drift was to eat the snow which wasn’t very effective but he seemed to enjoy it.  When we got to the Tarn he also decided to test out the ice but I shrieked at him and he came back sheepish like and sheep dog like ie slinking like he was about to round me up. I explained the dangers to him but he just looked bored. Teenagers never take it in when you tell them of the dangers of whatever it is that you are telling them is dangerous but they usually learn eventually.

And then we went back down again.  As it was brightening up a bit, and we hadn’t gone too far when we were almost back in the valley, we took the higher path above Side Cottage and Side Farm that runs parallel to Ullswater and went over and down to Silver Bay and watched a group of youngsters having fun in a large rowing boat from the Outward Bound School on the other shore.  And that was it really, apart from my cunning trick of enticing Hyperdog in to the lake down in Glenridding by throwing a stick in for him to chase.  He thinks this is a game but it is really to get the mud off him and what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him as I always say.

Outward Bound - but not to Henley Royal Regatta any time soon

Ullswater, Glenridding, Sheffield Pike, Birkhouse Moor etc

TGO Challenge Training in the Snow

Helvellyn from Arthur's Pike

This blog is just a gratuitous excuse to post some photos taken on a couple of smashing walks I did this week in the Lake District.  The weather here has been winter at its best – very cold, dry air, and quite a decent amount of sunshine and brilliant blue skies, following a few days of snow.  This makes a wonderful change from the usual cold, grey and damp that is all too common at this time of the year. Views have been spectacular.  For the last couple of days the wind  has been moderate.  This is just as well, as when I left my cottage yesterday it was still minus six degrees at half nine in the morning. In these conditions the mountains are just fabulozy.

Looking over the Vale of Eden to Dunn Fell and Cross Fell in the Pennines

A Panorama over Ullswater from Helvellyn to Blencathra

As a weirdly obsessive maker of lists and keeper of records, I always log my walks in the hills. But these from the last two days have also been put down on the list of my training walks for the TGOC (The Great Outdoors Challenge).  This May I will be doing my third TGOC, walking coast-to-coast across Scotland.  If all goes to plan my chosen route will see me walking for fourteen days, a total of 322km (daily average is 23km) and climbing 9679 metres (daily average is 691m).  My longest planned day, distance wise, is 32 km but probably the toughest will involve 27km with 1172 metres of height gained.  This may be nothing to the tyros, but to me this really will be a challenge. 

I guess all Challengers will have their own approach to getting fit for the event.  Some will (or claim to) take the devil-may-care approach of going to the pub regularly, and will leave getting fit for the Challenge itself.  I reckon if I tried that I would be giving up by the first time I reached a place with public transport.  Others walk regularly enough in the hills with their backpacking gear not to need any special regime.  And others will do some form of training routine, its nature partly dictated by where they live and how easily they can get to the hills.

Blencathra from Arthur's Pike

For the past two years I started my training proper in the January before the event.  I probably averaged a training walk a week from January through to March.  Nothing spectacular or hard.  By ‘training walk’ I mean one where I put a pack on my back weighing about 10kg , with the weight provided by various tins of baked beans, tomatoes etc.  I tried to build up distance, time walked and height gained, although the latter was not always successful, given one of my favourite walks was along the Llangollen Canal where the only inclines are next to the locks.  Once the evenings started to become lighter (I am not in to lying in a tent for 14 long, damp hours in winter) I also managed a few nights out backpacking in the Lakes, including the 2014 memorable Pre- Challenge Daunder organised by Alan Sloman (who wrote up the experience as he imagined it to have been on his excellent blog, which can be found by following this link). An accurate account ie my own can be found here.  Few of my training walks reached the typical daily distance or height climbed on the Challenge.

A rare chance to practice in my crampons

I almost certainly didn’t do enough training in 2013 or 2014 and found the first couple of days on the Challenge quite tough.  But I did finish, so the routine just about worked for me. This year I was going to do more but, surprise surprise, so far I haven’t.  However, I am now trying to ratchet this up, and these fabulous short walks in the snowy Lake District Fells have spurred me on.  I will leave you with some more photos of my efforts…….

Hyperdog Moss admires the view from Arthur's Pike

 

Skiddaw

A roll in the snow

The North Western Fells over the Vale of Keswick

 

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