On completing half of the Wainwrights
Training for the Bob Graham Round has given me occasion to visit the Lake District more this year than, I think, in any years previous; and as I’m still a few months out from the Big Effort yet, I’ve been running across wholly new fells to me, rather than the well-trodden ones of the round proper, for training.
I won’t pretend that in routesetting I haven’t purposely tried to draw routes over the unbagged summits of the east, central, and south Lake District. So consequently I’ve shot up from like ~25% of Wainwrights to exactly 50% completed, as of earlier this week.
I’ve crossed most of these summits with little fanfare, or with the weary expectation of another summit yet to come; I touch the cairn or the trig point, and maybe take a picture, and maybe pause a minute or two, if the weather is good (less often than not) to look out at the fells rising all around me. I recognise a good few of them, now, which makes me feel good about myself in probably a totally insufferable way to everyone else.
I can’t help but feel, however, that I’m covering these fells more in the spirit of a checklist than a ramble, which is to say: not in the spirit that A.W. intended. His books come alive with his joy on the fellside: exploring the lesser-trod faces, poking his head into caves and down crags, taking weird lines up fields of scree for the fun of it. Like he plumbs the character of a fell and comes to know it so well, whereas I get maybe a glimpse or a vibe and then I’m off to the next one. The craggy shelves around the summit of Pike o’Blisco, the broad soggy dome of Ullscarf, are most of what I took away from my last trip to the District. If, on descending from Crinkle Crags, I’d been asked how many crinkles there were, I could not tell you (A.W. reports that there are five).
This maybe dovetails well with an ongoing fiction between Sam and me: that any Wainwrights I complete without her and Ghyll don’t really count — that I’m merely recceing their summits for our eventual family climb. Maybe the ongoing fiction, isn’t: maybe that’s exactly what I’m doing.
