- Hills: Hard Knott
- Classification: Wainwright (181)
- When: Saturday 13 April
- Who: Me, the mountaineering minion, and Tiny Paddington
- Distance: About 6 miles, though felt much longer (yet again).
- Weather: Foggy, thoroughly soggy and windy. Urgh!
- Conditions underfoot: Fine walking up the pass. Quagmire in parts on the hill itself.
- Post walk drink: Cabernet Sauvignon
- Post walk watering hole: The Screes Inn, Nether Wasdale
- MAMBA factor: Saw 2 other people on the hill as I was walking down. Nobody else mad enough to be out there (though lots of people mad enough to drive on the road)
- Uses of the arse crampon: Not required
- One that got away: Harter Fell (Eskdale)
- Mishaps: Conditions underfoot; weather; believing the weather forecast; a navigational mishap coming off the summit; footwear
Well where to start with this one? The title probably says it all! It was hard work, and really not much fun, unless you consider it to be type B fun i.e. the sort that is far more fun in the pub afterwards than it really was at the time.
After my walk on Great Borne on the 11th, the weather forecast for the Friday 12th was grim – and I had also had the email of doom from work which meant I would need to work in the afternoon. With that in mind and with the cloud basically at valley level I opted to can any idea of a hill walk in favour of a short walk up to Ritson’s Force and possibly a swim in it. The waterfall was impressive but there was way too much water coming down it to make a swim remotely sensible, so I settled for a rather foggy swim in Wast Water instead, which was less cold than I thought it would be, but not exactly scenic given that the view was mostly limited to the inside of a cloud! However, there was a chink of hope in the forecast for the day after, with Met Office saying that the cloud would start to lift late morning and clear up in the afternoon. With that in mind, a late start and a relatively short walk seemed like a good option.
Of course, when there are various forecasts available it is all too easy to pick the one which gives you the best answer (in this case Met Office) rather than the one which doesn’t (in this case MWIS). MWIS does have a habit of being overly pessimistic and I have walked on days where the MWIS forecast has been pretty rubbish and the day itself okay. That said, I have also walked on days where MWIS has promised a lovely day and I’ve ended up underneath a cloud inversion! I guess the lesson is that any forecast can still get it horribly wrong and sometimes one has to take a punt. The forecast for Sunday was better but I was due to go home then and engineering works meant that the journey was going to take considerably longer than usual, so not conducive to a walk. The decision was made – take a punt at Hard Knott which did not look that hard (apologies for bad pun).