I really enjoy hiking. This is something that I don’t think I enjoyed much as a child. I ‘think’ I probably did the usual whining and ‘are we nearly there yet’ and my poor parents probably carrot and sticked my sister and I around various walks until they got to a point where they got fed up and didn’t bother taking us out on hikes.
Fast forward a few years and when I started work I realised that I actually quite liked hiking. I would often go across to the Lakes either with a boyfriend at the time or to meet up with an activity group. Then I met my husband. He was a very keen hiker so we often spent Sundays walking in our local area (which luckily for us was around Hadrian’s Wall!). We then had our kids and got them interested too with both boys completing their Gold D of E and the youngest and oldest having spent time doing ‘thru hikes’ in Costa Rica and Borneo respectively.
Over time, I have begun to get lazy, not physically, but with where I walk. I stick to the routes I know, I go in walking groups whose leader will plan and, well, lead or I leave it to R to navigate. So this weekend, hot on the tail of my solo trip to Ecuador, I decided to up my game and be less of a follower and more of a ‘knower’. I signed up for a three day ‘Straight to Silver’ navigation award with the NNAS in the Peak District.
Millie and I set off on Thursday afternoon to head to our campsite in Edale for the weekend.
The weekend consisted of finding specific points on Kinder Plateau using a map and compass, bearings, steps and features and then planning and guiding a section of a route. I am not a map-ignoramus. I love maps, I take after my dad and my eldest and just enjoy looking at them, but my skills for reading them are rusty, think GCSE Geography (in 1988) rusty!
I must admit, despite being at university really close to the Peaks, I barely know them. I have probably explored them via the little towns and villages, Hathersage, Bakewell, rather than the peaks and valleys. This was, therefore, a real learning curve for me.
The weather, for our instructor, was perfect, cloudy, zero visibility, making his job lots of fun as we couldn’t see the things we needed to find on the peaks (including a WW2 plane wreck!). For the four of us, it was tricky and very cold, meaning we had to have our wits about us.
At times I struggled with holding my compass or my glasses steaming up as it was very cold but I was really hot from the walking uphill. That said, there wasn’t one minute where I wished I was somewhere else. I would have loved a view, obviously, but that wasn’t the point. I can go back in the Spring or Summer to get up to Grindslow Knoll and see the view. This time I can plan my route not feeling concerned that I don’t know what I’m doing. Obviously, for the most part, the Peaks are well signposted (actually, you can probably just follow the crowds!!), but I am in the Lakes in a couple of weeks time, so taking these skill over there will probably mean a lot more, knowing how to read contour lines and seeing which might be a safer or better route fills me with a lot more confidence, and that, frankly, was the aim of the game!
In summary, I really felt my big gains from the weekend were:
- reading contour lines and knowing the distance between contours enabling me to work out how high or steep something is.
- Understanding the differences between the different paths, which were open access, permissible etc.
- knowing how to use my step count to help me find a distance in the fog.
- Finding a bearing and using a compass efficiently.
- Reading a map properly and knowing what the symbols represent.
- Simon also taught us some simple first aid (primarily hypothermia recognition) and kit necessities (this bit I already had a grip of).
I used MountainXperience if anyone is interested in doing something similar. Simon, our instructor and the owner, is based in Snowdonia, and runs a whole heap of other courses. You don’t have to do the straight to silver, there is a bronze level too as well as lead walks. It doesn’t qualify me to do or be anything and that wasn’t the point of the weekend for me, but it’s good to know that I have been trained to that standard and can now (mostly) find my way out of a paper bag!
