Lake District
The weather forecast was quite good for this weekend so we decided to squeeze in a couple of days in the Lakes with George. We were too disorganised and tired to get our stuff ready on Thursday night to drive up on Friday night, so we had to get up at 6am today instead so we could get here in time to do a decent walk.
We were on the road just after 7am, and it was a lovely morning with clear blue sky promising a great day. But then it started raining somewhere around Preston, which also reminded us that I'd forgotten to do something about George's horrendously squeaky windscreen wipers, and the day took a turn for the worse. By the time we'd arrived in Ambleside, it had stopped raining but still looked a bit dodgy. It looked like one of those days where the hills would be in and out of the clouds all day, with regular showers, usually at lunch or snack break time.
We paid an extortionate £7 to park, plus an extra 20p each to use the toilets at the same car park (yes, I'm still annoyed. Not sure whether the car parking price or the having to pay to use local parish council facilities funded by the parking fees is more annoying, but moving on...). We decided to stick with our original planned walk, which was the Fairfield Horseshoe - a rather ambitious walk really for a winters day starting in Stoke on Trent, taking in 8 Wainwright peaks, with the possibility of some snow to slow us down.
We set out from the car park in Ambleside, up past some nice looking B&Bs and a very cosy looking pub with miniature daffodil window baskets, up to our first summit, Low Pike. The Wainwright summits are nothing like the Scottish Munros or even the peaks in Snowdonia. You get at least 3 for the price of one in general, in that there are always a couple of fairly insignificant "summits" tagged onto every peak of significance. In the case of the Fairfield horseshoe, I reckon there are probably 3 summits at the most out of the 8 that people would bother going up in their own right. Some of the summits you don't even really notice as they're just part of a ridge! Anyway, by the time we reached Low Pike, we were in the cloud, and we stayed in the cloud for the majority of the day. I do wonder sometimes if I'm a cloud magnet. On the plus side, it wasn't particularly windy and it didn't rain.
We continued on along the eastern side of the horseshoe. Fairly early on, we noticed a black and white spaniel worrying a sheep further down the hill. It was too far away to do anything about, but I reckon the dog would have been shot if the farmer had been around. Then around the next crag, we came across a couple of studenty type lads, both dressed completely inappropriately in chinos, smart (well, they were smart...) leather shoes, and T shirts. We noticed smugly that the chinos were mud encrusted to above the knee and walked swiftly past.
Continuing on, we stopped for a sandwich and were overtaken (temporarily I hasten to add) by the muddy boys and a couple with a black and white spaniel. I managed to stuff enough sandwich in my mouth to prevent me from giving them a piece of my mind about letting their dog off the lead. Claire said hello to the woman, and established that they were the owners of the same errant dog from earlier, but the man was too busy trying to answer his mobile phone to speak.
After lunch we quickly passed the spaniel couple, who were clinging to a stone wall trying to avoid getting their feet dirty. A bit later, we passed the muddy boys who asked us with no shame whatsoever "where are we because our map's useless". They seemed quite happy with our answer and we thought that would be the last we saw of them. But following several re-layering of clothing stops, they caught up with us, and this time asked us what time it was. At this point, we were above the snow line, it had started snowing, and my sweat had started freezing on the outside of my clothes. My knee was also hurting and I had PMT. The response they got from me this time was "you boys need to sort yourselves out. You're in the wrong clothes, you don't know where you are and you don't even know what time it is". Claire didn't get a chance to put her two penneth in before I'd stomped off. We didn't see them again, and think they may have turned round and gone back the way they came!
We reached the high point soon after that - the summit of Fairfield. There was a fair amount of snow and as we'd carried our ice axes and crampons all the way up there we decided to use them.
As soon as we were kitted up ready for an alpine expedition, we were confronted by our third group of village idiots for the day, who had no map and were using printed instructions which were rapidly washing away. This group not only asked us why we were wearing ice picks and stuff (who "wears" an ice axe?! (or ice pick for that matter)), but where the summit of Fairfield was and how to find it. I told them to keep going up until you couldn't go any higher and stomped off before I even start on about the difference between ice picks and ice axes with a bit of Sharon Stone thrown in (just in case you're not sure, an ice pick is a spike thing used for chipping off ice to put in drinks, or for murdering people if you're in Basic Instinct. An ice axe is an axe to use in snow and ice).
As we started coming down from the summit, we finally started getting a few gaps in the clouds. We managed to get a couple of photos before the clouds closed back in.
Despite the mist and all the idiots on the hill today, we had a good day - much better than we were expecting from our drive up. It was good to finally use our crampons and carry our ice axes round like pros. And we did see plenty of people who knew what they were doing and where they were going, and had the right outfits on. It's just that those sort of people aren't very blog worthy.
After we'd got our boots off and Claire's blisters had exploded, we headed off over the Kirkstone pass to our campsite. We'd decided for various reasons, that we wanted to stay on a site this weekend, and I'd managed to find one that was open all year round with it's own pub! It's called Sykeside Campsite and so far seems pretty good. We had dinner in George and then headed up to their pub for a couple of beers and a stodgy pudding with custard.
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