A flare of sun, a rush of endorphins, and the cloud scatters like a flock of birds to reveal the Patterdale fells, snowbound and sublime. There was not a speck of snow in overcast Glenridding but as we climbed the snow cover had gradually spread, until this sudden sunburst at about the 700 metre contour marked the feeling we had crossed from the valleys below to the winter hills above, a world charged with adventurous promise.
Our aim is Helvellyn’s Striding Edge, but I find myself being absorbed by the sculptures resulting from the combination of deep, drifting snow and mountain wind. The sinuous patterns in a banked-up gully are mesmerising, interlocking and racing downhill like river currents; ripples radiate across a snowdrift like the surface of a windblown lake; miniature cornices shaped like cresting waves create the illusion of a rolling sea frozen in time. Water is flowing everywhere, but without motion.
My eye is also drawn to the long dry stone wall that follows the ridge line. In places it is almost completely covered, but elsewhere the eddying and twisting of the wind as it hits the wall has whipped the snow into wonderful meringue swirls around it.
The “true” winter conditions craved by mountaineers, skiers and climbers, with hard, consolidated snow and iced-up crags, can be ephemeral in Britain, particularly south of the Scottish border. But with these conditions in full force on Helvellyn today, the mountain is a giant playground full of adults.
There are queues of crampon-clad, ice axe-wielders on Striding Edge, and the joyous squeals of people on winter skills courses practising the “self-arrest” technique – which involves learning to stop a slide by repeatedly practising one – rise up from the slopes below. Our friend Will reports superb winter climbing conditions in Red Tarn Cove.
The odd Siberian blast belies a long-term trend towards warmer, wetter winters; with climate change, some meteorologists have warned that British winters 50 years from now could be snow free everywhere except the sub-Arctic extremities of the Scottish Highlands. It is a bleak prospect; days like this are excursions into the extraordinary.
