STRIDING EDGE
I first sat on the summit of Helvellyn at the age of five. I remember feeding the herdwicks cheese and jam butties, which remain staple hill food, for me at least, if not the sheep. It was a driech day and I also remember my father counting paces from the shelter to the start of the descent via Swirral Edge. I remember little else of that day, and without doubt, there was very little to be seen throughout.
I have passed the summit on countless occasions since, and though Helvellyn’s broad ridge remains to my mind, one of the less remarkable Lakeland fells, there are those days on which it offers all that is best of the fells. The last time I went via Striding Edge, we started in the pre-dawn gloom of a arctic day. Hard snow crunched beneath a soft fresh fall as we marched along the tiresome approach, cresting the ridge as the sun hit the summit above. We were the first that day, and there followed one of those hours of pure magic in the hills, working carefully along the icy arete, topping out to a sea of cloud above which only the highest of the western fells appeared.
There was no snow today bar a few small patches on the face above Red Tarn. In fact for a late December day it was remarkably mild, even before emerging in the sun as I did so many years since, on the crest of Striding Edge. To the east, cloud filled the valleys, the long ridges laid in serried lines. And once again, only Gable, Pillar and the Pike lifted the heads above the cloud to the west.
It was an inpromptu visit, a last minute decision to run. And with no camera, just the phone to hand, the pictures are poor, but capture at least something of that same magic among the hills.
