Patterdale – Coast to Coast (Day 4)

By Stephen M on June 3, 2015

Our accommodation was excellent and breakfast wasn’t served until 8:30am, which gave us a leisurely start for the day, in fact we didn’t leave Grasmere until 11:00am after a little sightseeing of the very picturesque village.

The weather forecast was for scattered showers and wind gusts of up to 70 miles/hr so we are getting used to having everything thrown at you. Half way up the climb we could see the rain approaching from the west, so we climbed into our wet weather gear as the rain reached us. Fortunately, the rain today was relatively light and was blown away as quick as it came.

We reached the first saddle 2hrs into the walk and the GPS was showing we had only walked less than 5km of a total of 13km. (Thank goodness I had broken the original 26km stage into 2 sections!). By this point the wind gusts were living up to the forecast, but were made worse by being funnelled up through the saddle, so we took refuge behind a very large rock to refuel and kit up with our icebreaker beanies and gloves to keep warm.

Luckily we are walking from West to East so that the wind is blowing from behind us, but even still both of us were knocked clean off our feet as we started the descent! We relied heavily on our walking poles for both slowing our descent and keeping us stable/upright on our feet!

Along the way we came across another couple frantically trying to find a pair of glasses that had been blown clean off, but with no success and also a large school group attempting to walk in the opposite direction that ended up abandoning their plans to make it over the top with such gail force head on wind gusts.

As always, the last few kilometres always seems to take forever, but we finally made it to our destination for the evening being the White Lion where our new found travelling friends (Christine and Stephen) where waiting in the bar and had reserved us a table for dinner later that evening.

We had been bumping into Christine and Stephen off and on since the start of the Coast to Coast and had up until tonight, stayed in the same accommodation venues. Both are locals from Newcastle and Stephen has walked the c2c and many of the other trails. Unfortunately, they are more sensible (better informed) and their itinerary breaks up the next stage that includes the highest climb of the walk, whereas we will be attempting it in one bite, so after tomorrow our itineraries won’t align.

(No photo post due to poor internet connection – Stay tuned)