Everyone in the hostel had the same idea and we were all woken up at the same time by the chiming of alarms which were coincidently all set for the same time. I didn’t get up with the same spring that I did the day before. I was still quite tired, not fully rested but I knew that I needed to prepare for the day ahead, this was going to be the day where all the most difficult challenges were to come. Boy, I didn’t know the half of it.
A tin of Macaroni Cheese for breakfast, which was good because I needed some carbs and also I was shedding the weight of the tins which I was starting to regret packing. One of the Americans who was staying at the hostel asked what I was eating, when I told him he couldn’t believe it. Apparently its the wrong colour, quite how yellow can be the wrong colour for anything made from cheese I do not know, perhaps he makes his macaroni with blue cheese?
By just gone 8 Jonny and I were both ready for the off, we said goodbye to our hosts and made on our way. It was a grey morning, the wind was blowing and there was a slight drizzle in the air. Not exactly what you would call pleasant, but it could have been a whole lot worse.We had not left for more than five minutes, the hut still in sight and Jonny put his foot into a deep puddle. His sock soaking already we had to stop to change that, fortunately Jonny had a spare set at the top of his bag and the drizzle didn’t get the new sock too wet.
The first challenge of the day was to get out of the valley which we had spent the night in. Having walked practically the length of the valley the night before we knew this meant only one thing: up. A small stream was out waymarker. The stream had carved a notch in the hill side and the rocks which it had uncovered made the basis of the footpath that we were to be following up the side of the valley. Also this was by far the steepest of the hills so far. I decided to use the old keeping the head down method, not looking around and seeing how far I still have to go. Also to keep my mind focused I decided to count my steps going up. There were exactly 1,900 steps to reach where the hill mountain began to level off.
It was a bit of a slog and a harsh way to begin the day but it did blow away all the cobwebs and I was quite refreshed by the top. I really wish the weather had gotten slightly better at the top, from here I guess on a good day you can see most of the mountains of the lake district and also Buttermere in the distance. That would have made a great panoramic shot on a nice day, but as it was, cloudy, windy, grey, overcast and generally quite drab, not to be.
Going over the top and back down the abandoned slate tramway to Honister pass, I began to feel quite good about myself, I had none of the breathlessness of the first day, my legs were not aching, in fact nothing ached, I was walking fine. Only my knees began to give me a little bit of jip on the steep downward parts of the tram line, which used to send slate to be cut at what is now the Honister Slate Visitor Centre. We stopped in the visitor Center for a cup of tea. Jonny also got a panini. While we were having our break we talked to a Dutch couple who had also spent the night at the Black Sail Hut.
We left the Dutch pair to their tea and we carried on down the road. The footpath followed the contours of the next valley with little climb of fall, the paths were well trodden and easy to walk. The views of the valley below were great with the village of Seatoller in the distance. We passed Seatoller very quickly and ended up in Jonny’s Wood. This had nothing to do with my friend, the wood really is called Jonny’s wood. The map showed that we would not be in the woods for long, and I got quite concerned as the path continued for what seamed like hours through lush deciduous woodland. There was one section where the path went over a rocky out crop, the rocks were very slippery and both of us nearly went for a Burton on that section. The path eventually dropped and we were on the valley floor. It was lunchtime and we stopped outside the village of Rossthwaite. Rossthwaite is a tiny village in the middle of nowhere and yet it manages to support several B ‘n’ B’s a Youth Hostel, camp site and tea rooms. I guess that’s what you can do when your in a national park of such standing.
After lunch we carried along a nice, quiet, footpath, gravel underfoot that helped us make good time. The path followed the course of a fast flowing, wide river, which was nice to look at. Across the river, near the village of Stonethwaite, there was a campstie, which I remarked to myself must be a nice place to stay with the river so close, on second thoughts though, I bet on a hot day the midges would tear a man limb from limb.
The path began to climb after we passed through a gate. It was clear that this gate marked something,but I’m not quite sure what. From that point on the stones underfoot were more prone to shift and slide. There was less attention paid to keeping the walls maintained until after about half a mile they crumbled away and became more of the path material. There was no one moment where I noticed the change in the gradient as we went up the side of the valley, although I did look back at the river to find that it had stopped being as described before and just become a trickle of a thing, no more than a mountain spring.
Eventually I realised I was getting tired, I looked ahead and saw the path ascending in to the clouds, “ah crap!” I thought to myself. This one is starting to wear me out already and I can’t even be half way! Knowing I had no choice in the matter and that I just had to keep going, I concentrated on one step at a time and not how far I had to go. This worked for a while, until I had to stop to allow a group to pass who we going the other way. When I stopped and looked back at how far we had gone and how far we still had to go my heart sank. I thought we would be nearly at the top. I could see Jonny further ahead and I could see he was going to go over the edge so I couldn’t see him any more, but this was no indication that he was any closer to the top.
It took us several hours to reach the top and when we did we were in for a bit of surprise. The top plateau was a huge bog which we some how had to cross. There was no path to follow, no rocks laid down by previous walkers, much like the climb up Dent the day before it was a mad scramble of everyone for themselves, no matter how much we churn up the bog and make it even worse than it already is. Trying to find a path across took us the best part of an hour, probably only covering a couple of hundred yards. It would have been much quicker but the cloud dropped at one point and we had really just a compass to work with because we could see hardly anything. When we got to a point which we could see a clear route across the rest of the plateau we stopped for a quick snack and a Dextro tablet to keep going.
From here we thought that we would have a clear run into Grassmere, just down this hill and its at the bottom. We had forgotten that this is the lake district, and in the lake district you have to do all the walking you think you need to do and then on top of that there is another valley that you will inevitably have forgotten you need to walk the length of. After having scrambled down the other side, passing the worst of the bogs, the path began to show itself again. There was a bowl of pure green wilderness below us, where the only things to see was sheep and a footpath. We descended the bowl and back up the other side, which compared to the previous incline was nothing. From the top of this hill though, we were thinking we would see the town, but it wasn’t there. A look at the map confirmed that we had to go all the way don this hill and then follow the valley floor for a couple more miles.
On the way down the mountain we realised the time. There was no way that we were going to make it any further than Grassmere by the end of the day and out target of reaching Patterdale had been completely blown out of the water. Looking ont he map we found no camp sites anywhere near Grassmere. All there was, was a single youth hostel marked on the map. Apart from this I knew that out options were B ‘n’ B’s or wild camping. I could tell that Jonny had had enough for today. He was lagging behind and when he did catch up he kept suggesting a wild camp, which to me meant he wanted to just stop. We did keep going for long enough to reach the edge of Grassmere. I suggested that we at least have a look for the Youth Hostel which according to the map can’t be far off at all. We did eventually find it and after the day we had, the cold, the wet, it would be nice to not have to pitch a tent and curl up in a sleeping bag. £20 sounded quite reasonable for that pleasure.
After arriving and putting down our things we sat in the dormitory by ourselves, no one else was with us, a room to ourselves. We lounged around for a bit, I tended to my feet which were starting to hurt a bit, before going back to the main building to make dinner. While in there we had the use of a proper drying room and a microwave (what luxury!). The good people who worked the hostel were very good and when I told them that we had not made it as far as we would have liked to they were soon on the phone on our behalf to make sure the camp site in Patterdale wasn’t waiting for us. And on top of that they had a local brew on tap, Keswick’s Thirst Run, which I nursed in the corner of the common room while I charged my phone. Not even dark outside, we went to bed to prepare for day three.