Sadly not around Wastwater

We were determined to have a shorter easier walk, and with a little rain forecast we decided to stay a little lower.  I'd planned this walk, but clearly should have spent more time looking at the map...

Difficulty: 5
Walkers: Tim, Caroline, Isabelle (16), Grace (14), Evie (11), Poppy (8)
11:38, 0.0km 0h00 0m, Start (74)
13:32, 3.6km 1h54 533m, Illgill Head (609, Wainwright)
14:22, 6.1km 2h43 589m, Whin Rigg (535, Wainwright)
19:24, 15.2km 7h45 797m, End (74)

We parked at the large National Trust car park at the top of Wasdale, but instead of heading the well trod path to Scafell Pike, we turned right and up the ridge to Illgill Head.

Looking back towards the head of Wasdale and Scafell.

Poppy at Illgill Head. It's one of the ones where you really can't guess which set of rocks are the official Wainwright without a really good memory or a gps unit.

Walking across to Whin Rigg.  Evie was clearly inspired by Grace's exercise class earlier, and with the ideal sprung surface had taken her boots off and was doing a gymnastics master class.  We had somersaults, cartwheels, running forward rolls, and all sorts.  

Evie at Whin Rigg.

We headed down the hillside, as the light rain came and went.

And finally Grace got a chance to get her boots soaking wet by wading out.  It was quite amazing that she'd lasted this long with the inside of her boots dry.

And so the flaw in my route was exposed.  A very long stretch of slippery wet rocks approached, and whilst Evie and Grace were absolutely fine, and Poppy just persevered, Caroline and Jo struggled a little.  

Isabelle gets an honourable mention for helping them out, whilst the rest of us waited for them to catch up.  As we waited Evie, high from fruit pastilles, treated us to a singing & dancing demonstration - making up lyrics & dance moves to match (when she could keep a straight face).

Finally the view opposite Bowerdale, after a long time.  Around this point we noticed that Grace was nowhere to be seen, we thought she was ahead but wasn't visible and couldn't hear us shouting.  I couldn't quite believe that she'd gone so far in front, and was mentally rehearsing how much daylight we had left to go back and check for an incapacitated daughter.  However, after another trip ahead of the rest of the group I found her sitting quite calmly on a rock.

So there are warning signs at either end of this path - we'd blithely ignored them and learnt our lesson.  Taking the extra could of km to walk fully around the lake would have meant a lot of road walking but would have been far faster...

Around Wast Water

We set off knowing that this was a quite a long walk, but felt it was really worth the opportunity to do another walk from the house, get all the way around Wast Water and pick up the two Wainwrights on the far ridge.

Difficulty: 5

Walkers: Tim, Caroline, Isabelle (12), Grace (10), Evie (7), Poppy (4 1/2)

0.0km 0m, Start (113)

6.1km 547m, Illgill Head (609)

8.3km 587m, Whin Rigg (535)

15.2km 674m, End (109)

We set off with a nice walk around the head of the lake, with nice views where there was no cloud!

Look, no cloud at the lake level!  However, not looking quite so good up the ridge to the right...

This was the last photo I took on the way up - the view quickly disappeared, the path was fairly easy to find but fairly straight up until we reached the path along the ridge.

At the top of Whin Rigg it was pretty windy, raining, and not really much fun.  At this point it was actually true to say that we were better off carrying on rather than heading back, and much chocolate was awarded for forward progress.  The aim of the day was to cover up, well demonstrated by Evie - I'm not sure how she could tell where she was going, but to be honest she wasn't missing any kind of view.

It's fair to say that it didn't get much better as we walked across to Illgill Head, Caroline was putting a brace face on it, but you can tell that Poppy wasn't that impressed.  This was one of those walks where having spare kit in your bag that you can't imagine needing turns out to be really useful.

Isabelle at least was in good spirits, and checking our route.

Finally as we descended from the Illgill Head we started to come out of the clouds, which was quite useful to keep track of people walking at quite different speeds!

Finally we could see where we were going, heading to the far end of Wast Water, with Kirk Fell in the centre and Yewbarrow to the left of this picture.  As we knew the walk was quite a long one, but there was quite a flat section at the start and finish so everyone coped really well.