Howlup in the Howgills

Teamed up with Mountainmanjunior for a 6 dewey bag in the Howgills, however, things didn't go according to plan!

Original plan was to do 10 Dewey Hills in 1 long hot, sunny summer's day, but getting time away and with persistant bad weather ment this wasn't feasible. So, I planned a shorter vistit to the Howgills with a 9 hour maximum time budget including travelling. There was 2 routes, a longer west route and a short east. The west route incorporated The Calf, a Trail magazine 100 hill and one Mountainmanjunior hadn't climbed before.

The weather didn't look good to start off with but by the time we parked and set off from Cross Keys near Sedbergh it wasn't too bad. Cloud level looked to be about 500 metres. We climbed alongside a full flowing Cautley Spout waterfall and followed a wet path to The Calf.

At the top visablity wasn't good as we set off in a North-West direction heading towards a Dewey called Linghaw. THIS is were it all began to go wrong. 100 metres from setting off from The Calf's summit the track split into 2, but for some reason we didn't see it and followed the White Fell path which slowly went at 90 degrees to the path we should have taken. It should be mentioned that the main path doesn't exist on the 25k or 50k maps, just a district boundary line shows.

It was 15 minutes after leaving The Calf's summit I realised something didn't figure out. We agreed to go down a bit further and try and find exactly where we were. Recalculations came left and right through my head, but a decision had to be taken. I decided to continue down, pick up a well worn path and skirt along Fell Head.

I felt a bit sorry for Mountainmanjunior as it was a long drop down, but we had a nice sheepfold at Long Rigg Beck to have Lunch in, which if we had stayed high up we wouldn't have ;-)

Having a good look at the GPS, I think we might only have lost less the 100 metres height, if so that wasn't a great deal. Eventually we arrived at Linghaw and quickly moved onto the next Dewey, Uldale Head. The path leading to this hill was very narrow in places on steep sided hill. The wind started to become strong and unsettling in places. A steep path lead up to Uldale Head. Near the top the weather started to come down and at the top a full blast of strong wind and rain caught us out.

Back down it was clear that I had miscalculated the route completely and we were running out of time and energy. The other 4 Deweys were now thrown out of the window and it was now a question of the quickest way home!

This was the worst possible place to decide to abandon the route. There was 2 ways back to the car. My thought was to cut through 2 dales, but this ment 2 steep descents and ascents, it would have been much shorter and quicker, but much more energy sapping. Mountainmanjunior, looked at the map and decided the best route for him was to follow the ridge back to the The Calf, so that's the route we went.

Following this route in the cloud wasn't easy and we soon got a little lost. Again, we failed to see a track leading to Bush Howe. My GPS showed we were about 400 metres past the Bush Howe path. The contour map on my GPS kept coming up with an error "Void, no map data" so I wasn't able to program a waypoint. The actual GPS data was correct so it was the contouring software at fault. We lost 13 minutes looking for the correct path (this would have been crucial later on in the day for me - read the end paragraph).

Now was a long boggy trot back to the Calf and down the same route to Cautley Spout as before. At the top of the waterfall the rain came down heavily and soaked all my gear - Scotland all again!

My home by 5pm deadline was way way off the mark. It was now 5:45pm back at the car. I didn't have a rest and as soon as Mountainmanjunior packed up his gear, off we went.

I dropped Mountainmanjunior off at his house as the clouds started to really turn black. At Easington Services the heavens opened up - possible the worst for a few years. The traffic on the A19 was down to 30mph, the road was flooded and visiblity was down to 20 metres at best. For approx 10 miles the traffic was almost at a crawl, many drivers heading into laybys with emergency lights flashing. Even a Range Rover was unable to overtake me. That was SCARY!