Tuesday, 29 April 2014
Posted with Blogsy
Day 01 - Edal - Crowden (25km) pictures 01
Total distance covered so far : 25 km
It was a long day. I think the ups and downs add distance that the map doesn't include. Well I know they do! It's longer and harder than you'd expect. Yes, when it got squishy, it was largely paved and I'm still praising for that! But still, it was still a long way.
And in the last km or so, I was having to stop, give myself a little talking to and then carry on. Because the path was two feet wide, erratically up and down, intermittently covered in slithery mud, edged by a two foot no-mans-land (at best) followed by you don't even want to know how far down it dropped. Let me tell you! Mediation has its benefits! Switch mindfulness of breathing for oh my dear God, mindfulness of what the hell is right in front of me and absolutely nothing else and you got the picture. I don't like heights it seems! And this drop was about 170m over a distance of about100m. That's two thirds the height of the Shard with a slope so steep that a single slip means you're really not stopping on the way down! There's no barrier btw! Naturally!
Here's the pictures from a first lovely but tiring day!
The real start of a very long walk!!
Yes it really was there and so was this.... Right in the middle of absolutely nowhere. On the paved steps of Jacobs Ladder. Made me laugh!
Day 01 : Is it right to pave the moors?
Edal - Crowden (24km)
When I was a teenager, my fellow Venture Scouts and I hiked across Bleaklow and Featherbed Moss and it was in all honesty, complete purgatory! Scary, endless dread of slipping into the black, and for all we knew bottomless ooze, squishing around on matts of weeds that seemed to cling together and hold our weight by tenuous entanglement. It stuck in my mind for a lifetime. And today I hiked across there again. It's changed!
To my total relief, it's been paved! Yes it has, for miles and miles and miles! (And miles....) You can take a stroll across those same boot-sucking bogs and not even get muddy! It's fantastic! The open moors, the wild vistas, none of the pain!
But is that really so great? A year or so ago, a friend and I hiked across another area of peat bogs and it was just as it ever had been. Leg-trapping black ooze! Exhausting ups and downs of the peat groughs! Disorientation in the labarynth of gullies! Fantastic! Really? Those same areas are fenced off now so that they can be allowed some respite from the thousands of hikers tramping them to oblivion. Millennia of slow peat growth trashed to gravel in a century! Is it really so good that nature is left untouched?
The paths that I whizzed down today gave me everything I got from that hard trek years ago, except the soaking, the dread, and the unintended erosion. Sanitised yes, less memorable yes, but also less awful and I got some miles covered and left no trace!
So the taxpayer footed the no doubt breathtaking bill and the wild open spaces are wheelchair accessible.... Almost! (don't go planning a trip if you really are in a chair! I beg!). I spent a day in the open air and harmed nothing. The birds are still breeding, the bogs are still oozing, the peat is still growing and all is as nature (guided by the alarmingly transformative hand of man) intended.
Whose up for a larger community charge then to pay for it then?
Monday, 28 April 2014
Is saltwater on the boots good for the soul?
The Pennine Way starts in a small village in Derbyshire, known to outdoor enthusiasts for that reason but which is frankly, the middle of nowhere. A few hundred miles later it ends in a small Scottish village, again nowhere special. So I guess I'm struggling with the question 'Why there?'. If you take a look at a map it's probably fairly self explanatory but still! Every other long distance path I've hiked has started on a coast and ended on a coast and somehow you buy-in to the fact that you went as far as you could. The end can be glimpsed a day or so before it happens and the entire trip is framed by the geography of our island. But not this time! Middle of nowhere to middle of nowhere! Damn it! I want my seaside moment! I'm lost without it! This is going to be a challenge! No more dreaming of the coast where it will all finish. No visible target. Just Kirk Yetholm at the end of 18 days of hiking. Snuggling at the foot of a hill where a finger-sign no doubt quietly announces that the Pennine Way has yielded to the St Cuthbert's Way. And that's it! On God! There's a hell of a lot of hills, woods, fields and bugger all between here and the middle of nowhere! One foot in front of the other. One kilometre after the next. Pinching myself and muttering over and over that life is about the journey and not the destination. The journey, the journey... The journey starts tomorrow.
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