Journal Entries

Leaving Borrowdale, I start by climbing up into the clouds along the Greenup Gill (creek) toward what is described as some of the wettest and muckiest big of trail. There are plenty of nice views back over Borrowdale, though. It's a steep climb, but it still feels good to be in the mountains.

Moseying through the valleys some more. The old stone walls here are just incredible. The guidebook says there are about 125,000 miles of dry-stone walls in Great Britain. That's not too surprising after seeing just a few miles of those in the past weeks.

Most of today was spent in dropping down from the mountains into Borrowdale, yet another beautiful valley full of tiny villages, bucolic pastures, and, of course, sheep.

Still on the alternate route above the main part of the Coast to Coast, I'm walking over an old slate quarry. Or maybe some of it is still active. I don't know. It's still pretty.

Continuing on in the morning with clear skies, despite the rain all night. The more I walk up here, the more I'm amazed at how much it looks like much higher elevations.

At the end of the day I stopped at Blackbeck Tarn. Lovely sunset over the mountains I'd just walked over, a nice view over Buttermere, and a nice breezy perch. And a few sheep to yell at me (at one point I was in my tent and I got startled out of my mind by a BAAAAH right behind the tent). And, as I'm discovering is a normal thing here, I started getting rained on despite the perfectly sunny sky. Good night!

Just some more lovely views from the walk along the ridge, looking back at what I had come from. I could come back to these mountains a few more times.

And once up top on Red Pike, I got to walk along a long ridge with peak names like High Stile, Haystacks, and High Crag. While I didn't see anyone on the climb up from Ennerdale valley, once I got to the top the ridge was full of people who had come up from Buttermere, a more popular area on the other side of the ridge. Both gorgeous. I probably took a thousand pictures along the ridgewalk. The mountains here look so much bigger than their actual sub-3000 feet.

After Ennerdale Water, next came the first major alternate route on the Coast to Coast, with a climb from the Ennerdale valley up to Red Pike (Pike means Peak out here). Now I'm feeling like I'm back home-- climbing straight up the side of the mountain on barely-a-trail. Two-thousand feet straight up the side of this mountain, alongside the sheep and grass.

Moving along, day two starts with entering the Lakes District National Park. A lot of people I ran into today said that the south side of Ennerdale Water (lake) was such a nasty trail that they would take the dirt road along the north side in order to save their feet. I gritted my teeth and went for the south side. And it turned out to be a lovely trail! Very rocky and uneven, but that's what I'm used to from hiking in New England. And it helped with the tendinitis in my left foot, which must be exacerbated by the walking on dirt roads. And, of course, the lake was gorgeous.