This was the second day of a 2-day backpacking route, the first of which took my sister and I from Langdale to Wasdale over some fine peaks. From the Wastwater youth hostel, where we stayed the night, we took the somewhat laborious trudge back up the road to get to the foot of Yewbarrow, the first fell of the day. Unluckily for me, I discovered my platypus had a leak in it and I had more drink absorbed into the padding on the back of my rucksack than I had left in the water reservoir itself. So it wasn't a particularly good start to the day, but I had the chance to try and fix things up before we got onto the ascent properly.
So Yewbarrow was a new fell for me, and I was quite impressed with it. It's a lovely spur which takes you quite rapidly up the fell in a northesterly direction, and although there is some loose scree slopes to climb, it's OK and the crest of the ridge itself is quite solid. You get great views across the Wasdale valley towards Scafell and Scafell Pike, and also to the slightly pyramidal-looking shapes of Kirk Fell and Great Gable. There was some rather unexpected but not too difficult down climbing on the other side over Stirrup Crag, and that gets you to Dore Head. From there we ascended Red Pike, a natural continuation of the ridge, and this leads on to Steeple and then bearing east down to Wind Gap and onto Pillar. Unfortunately for us though, Pillar proved once again to not supply any views whatsoever, and we had to make do with the views down into Wasdale as we descended towards Black Sail Pass instead. My plans after getting to this point would have been to get up the other side and onto Kirk Fell and Great Gable - this would have been part of the Bob Graham round too by taking this quite obvious choice of route, but since my sister was by that time feeling quite drained of energy we ended up just skirting around Kirk Fell and Great Gable to get over to Brandreth. From there it was actually pretty enjoyable walking on almost-flat terrain to skirt around Grey Knotts and get ourselves down to Honister Hause youth hostel where we spent our final night of the trip.
User comments