On Sunday 19th December, I made a ‘day raid’ on Fairfield in the Lake District to make use of some stunning winter conditions. I’ve been mostly reactive in my approach to winter days so far as I had some annual leave and had purposefully made no plans (apart of course from Christmas Day), so I could just go when things looked worth travelling for. To a certain extent, this kind of works well but the worst thing for me is the five hour drive (altogether) added on to what can sometimes be a gruelling day out on the hill in pretty tough conditions. This route in particular has beaten me once before, in very similar conditions, except that the previous attempt was done at night with an unplanned emergency bivouac that lasted six hours in a blizzard. You might argue this more worthy of the logbook but I felt I had not properly given it my best shot. So I did at again in daylight this time. Check out the video below:

This 18km route starts in Ambleside, and I hiked to Upper Sweden Bridge before heading west onto the main ridge line and following the wall for a long time. At the first rock band, I contoured north east and then gained some steep ground experience, zig zagging my way back up to the wall. Eventually, I summited Fairfield, to be greeted by three large dogs looking for their owner (or maybe trying to attract attention for an owner who had an accident?) I looked around a little bit and paused to hear anything but nothing other than some more barking. I’m not a fan of dogs so I headed south, as planned, on the ridgeline eventually back to Ambleside via Rydal.