Ignored Ambience

Ok, so the blog post titles are getting more abstract, but I promised myself to do this, and try to tie it in.

Wasn’t Dr Who this week good? Martha is really becoming a soldier girl.

Right, thats the tie-in done

Anyway, exams are coming up - everyone panic!

What else, I’ve installed GeoPress for WordPress, it’s rubbish, not suitable for 2.5 yet.

I need to get my head around tagging and categorisation of blog posts - whats the difference?!

The somerset geography fieldtrip was mildly amusing, it really is odd how people react when confronted with (almost vertical hills/short walks across fields/floodplains/mud/rivers/thigh-high wellington boots (Bruce :D)). Great fun!

And even more fun was the Gold DofE practice expedition. The route is visible here, and some pics over on flickr, I should have blogged about it sooner. I’ll have to try an extract the memories otherwise.

Day 0: Familiarisation
We started from the car park near to New Houses, about 2.5km NNW of Middlesmoor, day 1’s start. There was a nice coating of snow here, as there was throughout the day. We crossed the River Nidd, and followed its bank west. We encountered our first narrow gates and our first wildlife of the trek - sheeps and lambs, baby little lambs, cute at the time. We then started climbing the hill to the west of Woo Gill (don’t they have great names here?) at our first false peak we encountered a junction and decided to head off the marked rights of ways. The path steadily degraded, and we had to cross the river at one point, we decided to follow what we thought was the path and ford the river at a narrow point (little did we know we’d be getting used to this!), at this point me and Ben decided to ignore the footpath and breakaway from the group, taking a bearing up an almost vertical hill, to Sportsman’s Rest, a little toppledown shack literally in the middle of nowhere. There was very deep snow, so what better than to make snowmen!
Our explorer map was invaluble for the next stage - straight across the moor on a rough bearing. This was a really wet and cold stage, since the heather was deep, and the snow on top of it just too cold. The Landranger map doesn’t show the fences, or the grouse butts where we had lunch, but it really was a rather bleak place. The short climb to Little Haw was our next target, an easy ‘peak’ for the day.
We headed south back to the car park, losing the bridleway several times.

The terrain was rather tricky as several of us by falling into streams/rivers/deep holes up to our necks (Tony).

I wonder how more dryly I could write my account of the expedition, should I continue?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 10:50 PM and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.