Killin September 2020

Looking back to Glen Lochay from Meall Gaordaidh

Summit of Meall Ghaordaidh

Glen Lyon from Meall Ghaordaidh

Beinn Ghlas from the nature trail

View from Beinn Ghlas

Ben Lawers

On Ben Lawers, looking to Lochan nan Cat

Loch Tay

Beinn Ghlas

Ben Lawers from Meall Corranaich

Allt a Chobhair valley

Lochan na Lairige

Leaving Lawers village

Lower reaches of Lawers Burn

Summit of An Stuc

Lochan nan Cat

An Stuc

Disappointing footbridge over Lawers Burn

Meall nan Tarmachan

Looking south to Killin

Ben Lawers

Meall nan Tarmachan

Ptarmigan Ridge

Meall Garbh

 

Lake District (Langdale 2020)

Match Day

Knowing what’s to come, I start the day healthily with a 5km run then breakfast of muesli and yoghurt, with a fresh coffee from the moka pot.  I do some tidying, some reading, then before I know where the time’s gone, Jill arrives.  We sit having a chat for a while before my stomach tells me it’s time for brunch.  There are many places to choose from, but we go for Casa de Moor.  Jill has smoked salmon while I have a fabulous falafel wrap, all served nicely by Magda.  Somewhere a distant bell sounds and I find myself ordering a pint of Efes.  And so it begins.

James is on his way, so we move a couple of doors along to the Plough.  It’s still quiet so we grab a table and order drinks.  Gemma, the landlady, is bustling around, letting everyone know she’s the boss.  The lovely Georgia is behind the bar and pulls me a delicious pint of Northern Monk Eternal before attending to Jill’s cappuccino.  James arrives and has his usual Camden Pale.  The gang’s all here and the anticipation is rising; I’m even feeling a little giddy.

With plenty of time in our pockets, we leave the pub and climb into Jill’s car for the journey to Salford.  Thankfully the motorway isn’t busy and we scoot round to our parking spot without trouble.  Jill goes off to get a coffee, James queues for a hotdog – covered in mustard which he will try, and fail, to keep from spilling down his front – while I head for the tent and pick up two pints of Seven Brothers Session Pale.  Yum.

Once everything’s settled down, it’s time to look to see who’s in.  There’s Chairman Joe in his shorts, as always, Roger B occupying his chair like a throne, Trevor and Sammo warming their voices up for the match.  Carol’s hugging everyone who comes within arms’ reach while David looks benignly on.  We have a quick chat about walking.  Anne and Mike have travelled up and we get hugs and handshakes, or both.  Col and Anthony are quietly putting the world to rights, with Andy grinning by their side.  Graham strolls past, looking above everyone’s heads and making some sardonic remark about the opposition.  It’s great to see Dawn and Tigger (the former more than the latter, of course) and we stop a while for a catch-up.

Before we know it, kick-off is approaching and it’s time to go in.  There’s still time to pick up a couple more Session Pales and to watch the lads warming up – Faf! Denny! AJ! – before going up to the seats.  Ian, Val and Bob greet us at the end of the row, Henry and Richard, for once, are already in their seats on the other side, tucking into pies.  There’s a good crowd, with everyone packed in and the atmosphere building.  You never know what will happen with Sale; they can be playing really well and have all the cards in their hands, but we’ve still been taken to the cleaners.  Graham came up with the word Hoffnungsangst, German for ‘fearful hope’.  It’s the permanent state of a Sale fan.

The explosions go off, the junior mascots wave their flags, the boys run out to a tremendous cheer.  The game flies by with entertaining controversy, stunning tries and the regulation squeaky-bum finish, where we could so easily come off second-best.  Denny scores a trademark leaping-salmon try in the corner, Faf dashes all over the pitch like a berserker, Akker scores a hat-trick (as usual), Bryn’s magnetic beard steals lineout after lineout.  The ref-link mic picks up Wayne Barnes asking Faf for haircare tips while he allows fifteen reset scrums on the Sale 5m line before James Philips drives the entire opposition pack backwards with only a little help from Ross Harrison.  Cliffy comes on in the second half and indicates precisely which blade of grass his box kick will land on for Byron to chase.  Sam James creates every try, like a magician pulling endless marvels out of his top hat.  Jono Ross tackles everything and, when he is substituted, continues to tackle the concrete of the stadium – much to its structural detriment – unable to stop himself.

It’s an excellent victory for the boys in blue and we’re full of cheer.  We’ve screamed our heads off all match, careless of the damage to our larynxes and the sore throats we’ll have in the morning.  Before leaving, we walk round the pitch to clap and congratulate the lads.  Jono always shakes hands, Sam stops for a chat, Cliffy asks after me, Faf poses with everyone.  It’s time to say goodbye to the Sale crew for now, and head into the evening.

Back in Heaton Moor, Jill drops me and James off at the Plough while dumping the car.  G&Ts for those two, a Thornbridge Green Mountain NEIPA for me.  That takes us nicely into dinner time so it’s over the road to the Heatons Tandoori.  Saleem greets us at the bar, Ronnie, Milton and Hadji say hi as they pass, Abbi – the boss – runs over to welcome us in.  There’s a refreshing Pinot Grigio to go with our meals; lamb, potato and cauliflower for Jill; fish Konkani for James; lamb saag with chapatis for me.  At the end there are complimentary cognacs, or ‘naughty’ liqueur coffee for Jill; Manik, the head chef, pops out for a chat, then James is off for his train.  Jill and I nip into Bottle to say hello to Corin, the landlord, and for a last LHG Sky Above Pale and gin fizz.  It’s late.  It’s time for bed.  What a great day it’s been, one of the best ways to spend your time – being with friends, being thoroughly entertained, being part of the Sale family.

Everest Basecamp 2019

12^th November: Lobuche – Gorak Shep

The official itinerary for the trek was to have a shorter day up to Gorak Shep and then climb Kala Pattar to watch the sun set later in the day.  However, the weather had been following a pattern of being sunny in the morning and then clouding up later in the day.  We all agreed that if we climbed the hill that evening, we would see nothing (that said, there had been a beautiful sunset on Nuptse the evening before).  Instead we swapped the days and would visit Everest Basecamp today and climb Kala Pattar the next day.

Neither Maurizio nor myself heard the alarm at 6:30.  I had to wake him and was running late.  It had been a difficult night, feeling bunged up and developing a sore throat.  At breakfast, most people were coughing now.  As Maurizio was now quite poorly – he couldn’t keep down the small bit of breakfast he tried – Lhakpa, our head Sherpa, agreed with him that they would set off in their own time and at their own pace, and see where it got them, while the rest of us would push off.

Looking back down the moraine

It was, as usual, cold out.  The valley was still in the shade, the insides of the bedroom window had been frozen.  After a short way up the valley, we climbed steeply onto the moraine above the   glacier.  It was hard going over a rough path which rose up and down constantly.  The route was very busy with people coming up and going down, yak trains clanking past, and occasionally people coming down on horseback – probably being evacuated for mountain sickness.  We passed the Australian group we had met in Phakding.  They were a day ahead of us and had been up at 4:30 to see the sun rise over Everest from Kala Pattar.  ‘You’ll love it,’ they called.

Dropping into Gorak Shep

Slowly plodding on, I was expecting Gorak Shep around every corner, but it took an absolute age to appear.  When it did appear, like all the high ‘villages’, it was just a collection of hotchpotch lodges clinging to the rubble of the moraine.  There was a large sandy plain in front of it that used to be a lake.  Lhakpa had caught us up.  ‘I thought you would be there by now,’ he teased.  There was a more serious message.  He was on his own as Maurizio had been unable to continue onto the moraine.  It had been very hard work from that point on, so I could understand that.  Instead he had returned to Lobuche where Lhakpa arranged for him to stay another night while we were at Gorak Shep.  Lhakpa worried that Mau would need a helicopter evacuation, and we worried for our companion too.

Famous sign outside Gorak Shep

After tea, and dropping a small amount of gear off at our lodge, we set off for basecamp.  At the far end of the ex-lake I spotted the famous sign, ‘Way to Everest B.C.’ that Merv and I had discussed earlier in the week, and cut across for a photo op, where everyone joined me.  At the end of the lake, we were back on the moraine.  The mountains huddled around us now, great white jagged peaks looming above us.  The glacier was still mostly dust and rubble, but in the distance we could see the rippling chunks of ice that looked more like a classic glacier; they signalled the bottom of the Khumbu icefall.  It was slow going again, up and down over bumpy paths.  A cold wind stirred the dust up into our faces.  The sun beat down.  People were dropping off the moraine in the direction of the icefall that now came fully into view below the hidden Western Cwm – you would only know the valley was there by flying over it or climbing up this high.  Reluctant to drop down the wrong path, and have to climb agonisingly back up, we paused until Pasang, Lhakpa’s son, arrived.  Having never been there before, he had to ask one of the other passing Sherpas if it was the right way!

Highest Shark in the world

On being told it was, we dropped down and then were on the glacier itself.  Here and there the glacial till was split to reveal the ice just a few centimetres below the stony surface.  And in a short time we finally arrived at ‘basecamp’.  It wasn’t obviously a camp as such.  There was a large, tilted rock upon which was written ‘EVEREST BASE CAMP’ and around which people thronged.  There were prayer flags stretched everywhere, memorials, pebbles with wishes and prayers written upon them, little stacks of rocks.  People queued for photos in front of the sign and we all took our turns too.  This was it, this was what we were here for, what the whole of the trek was aiming at, the bullseye for our arrows.  There we were, quivering in the centre of it.  A giant, surrounding cirque of mountains cupped the ice and the rocks, and us.  There were no tents but plenty of people, beaming and chatting, celebrating.  I took a moment alone to try to take it in.  Mostly I was gasping from the effort and the thinness of the air, but I could feel the sense of achievement starting to grow.  I had done it, after all those years of dreaming, following timorously in the footsteps of the giants that had preceded me, I had done it.

Our group at Basecamp

The lodge at Lobuche had provided us with a rudimentary packed lunch – yak cheese (actually quite nice, and actually nak cheese, yak being a male and therefore quite hard to milk), a boiled egg, chocolate bar, biscuits – so we sat somewhere slightly out of the wind to eat the meagre rations.   It soon felt cold so we set off back down, struggling back over the tumble of the moraine.  We were all suffering from the altitude and the effort.  As we inched back towards Gorak Shep, Merv tried to think of some obscure word that meant ‘endless’ but it was only some days later when I came up with ‘interminable’, which I quite liked.  It described the seemingly endless terminal moraine nicely.

Looking up the moraine

When we arrived back at the lodge I could have done with going for a sleep, but we had tea and dinner to order, and before I had chance, dinner had arrived, though I struggled through my Sherpa stew.  We sat around the main room, the yak dung stove perfuming the air, and chattered through the evening about our day’s adventure.  At 8pm, the lodge owner flicked the lights on and off to signal ‘closing time’ (and to allow the Sherpas to bunk down in that room), and we shuffled off to our cold, prison-cell rooms, feeling tired, under the weather and elated.

On Kala Pattar the next day, Everest a dark pyramid behind me