Well on monday it was my first outing on the path to the BGR and it was some bloody adventure. Here is a summary of the days events.

The weather started 'iffy', with low cloud and hill mist. This mostly settled above 300 metres. Which was a pain as were spent the entire day above 400 metres.

We summited Steel Fell quickly and quite easily. Calf Crag was harder, and took a few minutes to find the summit despite a brief respite in the thick cloud. Then the mist came in thick. Sargeant man wasn't too difficult. We needed a compass bearing to be sure of the right path up High Raise. There were bogs-a-plenty, one of which pulled my shoe completely off.

The visibility steadily worsened. Another compass bearing off High Raise took us to Thurnacar Knott, and then to harrison Stickle. The top of this was a climb/scramble. I was thankful for the poor visibility as I think this one could have been scary. Similar with Pike of Stickle.

Things then went a bit wrong. We took a slightly long detour onto Rossett Pike, then in terrible visibility got lost. We thought we'd summited Rossett and were heading up Bow Fell but things were clearly wrong. After a while of 'walkabout' (nearly an hour!) trying to re-find ourselves things got cold and scary. An emergency escape route was sought. This actually resulted in solving our problem - we hadn't quite summited Rossett.

With the new info we re-found ourselves and decided to go for one more peak - the massive Bow fell. Our route in virtually zero visibility involved climbing extremely steep, loose rocky crags, through and across snow-filled gullies, up to a height of 900metres. One bad slip would have been potentially fatal.

The summit was a cold, dark and scary place to be. We had to take another compass bearing just to find the escape path off the top.

Once safely back down it was obvious that we wouldn't be attempting a Bob Graham in those conditions. It was a useful exercise and good learning experience, and we did well to make 9 summits in reasonably good time. Unfortunately we didn't get to the Scafell massive, but it is probably as well.

All in all about 17 miles and 5,700 ft of climb the first day.

On the second day we went over the Yewdale fells (around 400m climb here) from Little Langdale (our base) to Coniston and then over to Tarn Hows which was beautiful before my legs decided they had had enough :-) Another 13 miles and 2,200 or so climb here.

Lots to think about moving forward. The technicality of those mountains is like nothing down here. Was way out of my comfort zone which was both exhilirating and scary to say the least.