While I was Yorkshire 3 Peaking last weekend, Chris went for a run on the Pennines for a few hours. He liked the terrain underfoot and constantly changing vistas so much, we went back yesterday…
…to have a stab at simulating Day 1 of the OMM!
Rather disappointingly, the weather was fine and visibility good. Fortunately however, as those of you who have ever had the pleasure of wandering off the Pennine Way will know, featureless peat hag looks very similar to featureless peat hag, which is a great help when you’re looking for pretend control points in featureless peat hag! Cleverly, we got ’round this problem by using streams as handrails, given that these were the only features not made of peat. This led us to the discovery that streams are sometimes streams and sometimes not, depending on how they feel, and are sometimes mapped and sometimes not, accordingly to some random formula that was obviously way beyond us ever figuring out.
My navigation is well known for being a little dubious at the best of times, but I can honestly say I have absolutely no idea how you’re supposed to micro nav through that stuff. Tish – you should get yourself out there for some ML practice and put me to shame!
Navigation aside, we had a reasonable day. 31km in 8 hours or so is a bit slower than I would have liked, but we lost a lot of time trying to figure out what we would do if the vis was bad or it was dark and we had to find the ‘real’ controls. We were carrying good speed when the ground allowed and both felt we could carry on for another couple of hours or so if needs be.
Looking at the Dartmoor map (cheating?!), there seems to be a greater variation in height over smaller distances in comparison, and not so many potentially fickle streams, so I’m reasonably confident my nav will be up to it. I’m hoping there might be a little more in the way of runnable stuff too, so we should be okay on balance.
Feeling tired today, but no major aches or pains, so we reckon we’d be okay for Day 2 once we loosened up a bit.
No point over-doing though, so tea and biscuits are the order of the day today!
Blimey, is that peat hags terrain natural? Or has some been dug to kick off the erosion?
Hmm, peat hags….. I remember a couple of days navigating on Kinder many years ago. It might as well be pitch dark, or a white out – visual features are useless.