Wednesday, June 3

This was a long hard day, which included the highest point on my whole trail and a hair-raising descent, and at the end I had a fascinating two and a half hour conversation with two people I met in a pub. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to write that sentence.

The day started gently enough, leaving the Craven Heifer and setting out to, surprise, climb up some hills. Do you sense a pattern in my days? On many of the trails I have walked, you descend at the end of the day to get to towns and accommodation, and then the morning starts with going up.

I’ve walked out of the closer, limestone-framed valleys of the southern Dales into the more open country of the Three Peaks on the western edge of the Dales National Park. The three peaks are Ingleborough (723 meters), Whernside (736 meters) and Pen-y-Ghent (694 meters). Today I’ll be climbing one of them, Ingleborough, and tomorrow I’ll be skirting around the side of one, Whernside. Pen-y-Ghent I leave for another walk.

But first there is a lot of getting over smaller hills and down through a few valleys. After just about an hour, I passed through Feizor, which barely merits the term village, but does have a little tea room. It was too early in the day to stop, though in retrospect I wish I had, since I ran out of water later in the day. Up the road I followed the path, which I really could only be sure was my way because of my guide book. The Dales High Way is sign-posted based on a complex formula calculating to the fifth decimal place the precise moments when a trail marker would be most useless, approximately a half an hour after you desperately wanted a marker and about two minutes after it has become self-evident where you are. And the gates and stiles, the stone stiles in particular, range from pretty to brutal. Heck, throw in some neglect and wear and tear just for fun.

I actually had a big moment of self-doubt about my trail-finding shortly after that broken ladder. The trail went onto a narrow footpath rising behind some houses. And it went on. And on. And on. Because the path was between two walls, it was very hard to get my bearings in the landscape, and after perhaps four hundred yards, I was seized by the (incorrect) conviction that I had taken a wrong turn. I looked at the guide page, I looked at the topographical map, and I just wasn’t sure. So I turned around and went back to where I had turned of the road behind the houses. I tested out the alternative for about fifty yards, and could see that I had been right the first time. So back up I went, adding eight hundred and fifty or so yards to my day. And of course, God laughed. Now that I didn’t need assurance, I got it in the form of walkers coming the other way down this narrow track. The path rose out onto high ground, and gave two infuriatingly unhelpful directions in a row: “At brow (SD 7675 7195) turn right along green path from Clapham, soon passing PBW waymarker post.” This was followed by “Watch for major left fork (SD 7686 7214) unmarked. Easy, clear, dry track.”

I should translate a few terms that make these directions less cryptic than you might think. PBW is Pennine Bridal Way, a name I’ve seen a lot, so that one is easy. The SD numbers are map grid references, but I haven’t been using those, so they aren’t helpful. I was atop a green round set of hills, with a set of little intersecting and interweaving paths. I followed my instincts, since the turn onto the “green path” (it’s a grassy hilltop; ALL the paths are green) was not exactly self-evident, and watched for what I guessed was the unmarked fork. Fortunately, I saw two women hiking ahead of me on a path veering left after coming around a bend, so I followed them. This can be a risky walker move, since people are going heaven only knows where coming from heaven only knows where, and you could end up on a totally wrong path. But I trusted my ability to match the map up to what I was seeing enough to believe that they were simply confirming what I believed.

After about twenty minutes of gradually catching up, I met them and, without admitting my doubt, just asked where they were headed. The response, Ingleborough, was all I needed. I hiked ahead. With stops to rest, we played leapfrog, them overtaking me, me overtaking them, as we climbed from about 300 meters to the dizzying heights of Ingleborough. The last time I passed them, with still about a quarter mile and 150 meters of elevation gain ahead, I joked that if they found me napping ahead, they should wake me up and force me to finish the climb. The last bit of the ascent to Ingleborough is steep stone stairs and then a rocky scramble.

 

Finally, I made it to the top, and took the obligatory trig point photo. Look how happy and tired I am. I’ve also run out of water, so I am thirsty.

There were probably fifteen people around the top, hanging around trying to figure out “Now what?” And as new people arrived, others were leaving to get on with it. The exhilaration was tempered a bit by what I knew was coming from reading the trail guide. Go back up to the photo of the trail guide directions. I’ll wait… Yes, coming down the other side of Ingleborough to get to my destination Chapel-le-Dale means “Very steep descent. Hair-raising at first site. Take care. Avoid in icy conditions.” Trail guides are not known for overstating the difficulty of things. They see a raging river crossing and say “Chances of getting wet.” They see a path going up at 50 degrees over uneven rocks and say “A rising path.” So I knew it would be tough. And I could see the people in front of me going very slowly, very delicately, down, down, down. I stowed my walking poles and used my hands to grip rocks will going down sort of sideways rather than facing front (for fear of tumbling and going head first onto rock after rock after rock). A group of four men in front of me, all around my age I’d guess, kept me going by their example. And as we reached the bottom, a group of screaming teenagers (maybe ten or twelve of them) started the descent above us. On the list of things you should not do when making a difficult descent down extremely steep rocky trails: scream. It makes everyone below you think they are about to get a hiker on their head.

After that, the way ahead was a long walk over big flat stones laid across a stretch that I suppose must get boggy when it’s wet. This went on for a long way, and I could see that one of the four gents was having a harder time than the rest. After about forty minutes of this, with me just keeping their pace about ten or fifteen yards behind them, they paused at a gate, and we chatted briefly. They had parked a car somewhere down in the valley, and now were trying to figure out the route that would demand the least hard road-walking for their friend, whose feet and knees were giving him a hard time. I could well imagine. At a turning, I went left and they went right, and I made my way down a long stretch of road (this one busier than I would prefer, with no sidewalk and barely any shoulder) to my B&B.

Which brings me to my dinner at the Old Hill Inn, the only place of business in Chapel-le-Dale. It turns out that they serve truly fine food, and the husband in this husband-and-wife operation used to be a London pastry chef. He didn’t like the pressure of London, but he loves to do fancy things with spun sugar and delicate crusts and delicious fruit flavors, so this place is an unexpected bit of fine dining.

And here I met, sitting at the two-top table next to me, the gregarious hermit and his friend. The hermit didn’t call himself that. Not at first, at least. That came out after two and a half hours of wandering chat. These two friends, men in their late 50s, make a habit of getting together for walking trips, though they live in different places. It’s possible I got their names, but there were two and a half pints of strong beer involved, so I don’t remember them, so we shall call them the Hermit and Eeyore. We talked about movies and magazines and walking trails and, a bit, about politics and health care systems. It was great pub chat.

The Hermit works for the National Lottery, and though he was a bit vague about it, I understood that he does something involving assessing proposed projects that are applying for grant money from the National Lottery. Get this: He works three days a week on some part-time pay formula. He lives on a canal boat (if you want to see a big canal boat, look at my post of July 1– those are much bigger than the ones people live one, but the same basic shape) and travels around the waterways, not living in one place. (I take it a lot of his work is done online?) He lives cheaply, and even on this walking trip with his friend, they were camping out. The Hermit was upbeat and funny and curious, asking ten follow-up questions for every answer I gave.

His friend Eeyore was having a harder time in life right now, or had a darker outlook. He was the one who wanted to take us into the darker conversational waters. He’s the one who wanted to know “What is going on with American health care? That makes no sense.” When we chatted about family, my story was of walking with my siblings. His story was about how one of his sisters makes everything a crisis, and she’d called him while he was walking today and he knew he had to answer. He seems in general to be a man in midlife malaise. He talked about looking at his job and thinking that 80% of what he does is pointless meetings and form-filling and following stupid procedure. He was vague about what he does for a living, and given his darker mood, I wasn’t inclined to ask probing questions, especially since every time he got too grim, the Hermit would swoop in and turn the conversation.

At the late stage of the chat, when it was clear we were winding down, we were talking about the pleasures of spending time alone. That’s when the cheerful one said “I’m a hermit. I love my time alone on the boat. But I’m also gregarious.” Pause here, as though acknowledging how self-evident this was after two and a half hours of chat in which he and I went on even when Eeyore looked like he would have been as happy to leave. “So I make it work. I love chatting with people you’ll never meet again. You could tell them any old lie if you wanted.”

“I suppose you’d be shocked to learn,” I said, “that I’m not a former film critic and magazine editor from Chicago. I’m a bonds trader from Taiwan.”

“You’ve been playing the long game,” he replied with a big grin, playing along. Then, more wistfully, “I’d love it if that were true. Just imagine keeping up the lie for two hours.” And on that, we called it a night. I have found my spirit animal, and it’s a person. The gregarious hermit.