Winters grip
31st January 2014
Why do we enjoy walking in the snow? Nick Groom, in his book on the seasons (an elegy to the passing year) suggests that our intimate relationship with the seasons helps us understand ourselves and our link to place. If this is true, then snow and how it transforms the mountains into a much wilder and severe environment, surely helps us understand our own individual strengths and limitations when engaged with the environment. The event of snow certainly helps us view the landscape and nature in it's extreme. Where life and death, comfort or the groping for survival are most clearly determined.
Today would be a most wonderful journey across the Coniston fells. Though it was over cast and it was cold, the cloud was high above the summits and the snow was crisp and névé like. There was a starkness, not only in the contrast between the components of the landscape, but also in the power of the falling cliffs that surrounded the walk. Each buttress edge filled with hard snow, emphasising the perspective and, therefore, my small, fragile place in amongst this place that had its own continuing narrative of work, play, life and death. I was just part of this story.
The Coniston fells are a separate, but complex group of mountains, with a number of differing valleys cutting into the massif from all points of the compass. Today I chose to walk up to the large expanse of Levers Water, a tarn captured at the end of the Levers Beck valley, then taking the steep climb up Gill Cove, a wide, rocky amphitheater and onto main mountain ridge. The route then headed onto Swirl How, a quick excursion to Great Carrs, with its steep falling cliffs, a careful descent down the Alpine like ridge of the Prison Band (especially today as it was covered in hard snow). The final pull was then up to the summit of Wetherlam, where care was required as the route crossed hard, steep angled snow. Then a relatively easy descent down the main ridge of Wetherlam, back to Coniston.
My journey had been exciting and at times scary. I certainly knew I was not the master in this landscape and passed, as long as I respected the environment, only with sufferance.
Today would be a most wonderful journey across the Coniston fells. Though it was over cast and it was cold, the cloud was high above the summits and the snow was crisp and névé like. There was a starkness, not only in the contrast between the components of the landscape, but also in the power of the falling cliffs that surrounded the walk. Each buttress edge filled with hard snow, emphasising the perspective and, therefore, my small, fragile place in amongst this place that had its own continuing narrative of work, play, life and death. I was just part of this story.
The Coniston fells are a separate, but complex group of mountains, with a number of differing valleys cutting into the massif from all points of the compass. Today I chose to walk up to the large expanse of Levers Water, a tarn captured at the end of the Levers Beck valley, then taking the steep climb up Gill Cove, a wide, rocky amphitheater and onto main mountain ridge. The route then headed onto Swirl How, a quick excursion to Great Carrs, with its steep falling cliffs, a careful descent down the Alpine like ridge of the Prison Band (especially today as it was covered in hard snow). The final pull was then up to the summit of Wetherlam, where care was required as the route crossed hard, steep angled snow. Then a relatively easy descent down the main ridge of Wetherlam, back to Coniston.
My journey had been exciting and at times scary. I certainly knew I was not the master in this landscape and passed, as long as I respected the environment, only with sufferance.