Day 108, 200609

Task #97 is "go walking with Matt at least 8 times." Matt and I are old friends - he was the fourth or fifth person I met when I went to University - and we used to go walking a couple of times a year. That dropped off, as these things do, but we stay in touch and still go for the odd stroll every now and then, between bouts of socialising. After a walk last October (ie, outside the scope of this project), we decided to do the Yorkshire Three Peaks, and needed to do some training runs. Unfortunately, life got in the way, and whilst we'd said "midsummer's day" for one of the walks, hopefully the full run, it turned out to be the first of our training runs, just one of the three.

When we said we'd do it, some other friends decided they wanted to come as well, which was great. I'm always up for more company when walking, as it means there's a greater chance of one of us making it back to civilisation.

Saturday was an early start, with Cathy and Mavis being taken to Horton-in-Ribblesdale for a stroll up Pen-Y-Ghent. Arriving in Horton was awful; although we'd planned to do this on the 20th months back, because it was close to the solstice and thus we'd have maximum daylight, it hadn't really occurred to us that other people would have the same idea. It was packed. We parked up in a field, and decamped to the caff where we waited for Matt to turn up. When we were all assembled there was a quick scout about the benches to see if there were any Devenish-Phibbs plaques, a trip to the loo (where I was bitten a few times by midges) and we were off.

There were steady streams of people going up and down the mountain. Because we were only doing one, I thought "let's take the easy route up" and led us along Horton Scar and along the backbone of the mountain. Everybody else was going to go to Brackenbottom and up the really steep bit which does involve some rock climbing, so we kept on meeting people on their way down. Stood at the bottom of the mountain, we could see a wave of rain crossing the valley and got our raincoats on just in time; the final stretch up the hill was done in cloud, and if it weren't for the occasional call out from the many teams of DoE expeditioneers we could have been the only people in the world, emerging blinking from the cloud into a world changed by the Singularity, or something more scary.

Downhill was awful; remind me in future to never do the route in that direction again. It means going up will kill us through exhaustion, but there were moments on the way down I thought we'd die through falling off. It was greasy underfoot, muddy on rocks worn smooth by hundreds of thousands of passing hiking boots, and there were a few unpleasant steps. Thankfully I didn't slip badly enough to fall off until it was safe to do so (but slip and fall over I did), but in future I'll wear KSB trainers and go on a nice, sunny day that's been preceeded by several other nice sunny days. And go up. I still want to set a speed time on that hill, so I may take a day off in July or August and see just how quickly I can do the round trip. As it was, we were 3h33m (GPS data will be forthcoming), and finished off the day with rhubarb crumble in the caff. Lovely to see the guys, as ever, and it was an absolute pleasure doing the trip with them. Next time: Matt sorts out an 8-mile route somewhere in the North Yorkshire moors. Should be fun!