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RE: October 2014
Walking not running… but hey… it was outside and in the mountains.
We have had this weekend planned for a long-time… a pilgrimage to the Lake District, just me and my Boy to conquer the mighty Scafell Pike together. His first time; my fifth.
Given it is the last weekend in October, I had been keeping a close eye on the weather, and it wasn't looking particularly good... Weatherline reports as follows:
• Last week the weather forecast was horrendous.
• On Thursday the weather forecast was horrendous.
• Yesterday the weather forecast was horrendous.
• Today… it was horrendous.
But we’re not going to let a little weather stand in our way, so at 9:30 this morning after a full English at the hotel, we were setting off from Seathwaite towards Stockley Bridge. It was windy, but at least it wasn’t raining (yet). At the bridge we turned left to follow the trail up Grains Gill and into the rain.
I can do hills… I’m quite quick going up hills… but the Boy (all 11 years of him) is something else. We raged up the hill, overtaking the only other silly sods out there this morning. But the weather! The weather really was going for it… It lashed, it howled, and it screamed with rage, with gusts topping out at 70 mph, straight into our faces.
We realised at this point that the Pike was going to be beyond us, but we still had Esk Hause in our sights. When I say in our sights, we couldn’t see a bloody thing. I pointed out to the Boy where Great End should be, but although we went past it twice, we didn’t see even a glimmer of it.
The higher we got, the windier it became, and when at last we peaked onto Esk Hause, the wind was just incredible. We crawled to the cairn at the top, tried to throw a stone on top, and then quickly turned around and crawled back.
To add a bit of diversity to the trip, we decided to come down via Sprinkling Tarn. This is when we discovered that thus far the weather had only been teasing us. Take a gale force wind, mix it up with a little rain, and then funnel it down a high altitude valley. Just horrendous.
It was at this point that the Boy slipped and landed flat on his face – hands, knees and chin covered in dirt and blood. A few tears, a quick cuddle and we picked up the pieces and carried on. There’s little choice in those conditions. What a brave little soldier he is (much braver than his Dad that’s for sure).
As we approached the final descent down to Styhead Tarn we experienced something that was both amazing and terrifying at the same time and something that I will never, ever forget. The Gill we had been following down the hill reached a point where, in theory, it was meant to tumble off the edge to cascade down as a waterfall… but the wind was having none of the usual laws of nature; instead, in a gravity defying feat, the waterfall was heading back up hill again straight into our path. All we could do was hunker down on all fours while each gust went over, and then run a few yards before the next one hit. The Boy was in tears and I wasn’t far off myself.
20 torturous minutes later and we made it down to Styhead Tarn for shelter behind a big rock ready to re-fuel on chocolate brownies and to have a chat to lovely guy who joined us for a while behind our rock. With the chat and brownies gone, the Boy was up ready to go on.
Now the wind was on our backs, but we still had to watch every step as the wind was just waiting for any excuse to pick us up and fling us over the fells. A little while later we made Taylor Gill Force and the last scramble down to Stockley Bridge before the final mile back to the car.
It was horrendous, it was wet, it was scary, but the Boy had a grin on his face from ear to ear… we had done it… we had made it. And as we stripped off the wet stuff and climbed into the car, he asked whether we could do the Cat Bells tomorrow!
Why not, I said. Work will wait, we have mountains to climb!
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