Father, Son and the Pennine Way

One morning in early June, I woke up in Troutbeck, England -- near Windermere lake in the Lake District.  I had hiked there from Grasmere the day before, in beautiful early summer weather, and had eaten a great dinner at The Mortal Man pub.  My hike through Westmorland had just two more days to go.

But hark!  Was that rain I now heard outside my window?  Not just rain, a downpour.  It rained all through breakfast, it rained and soaked through my windbreaker within minutes of my stepping out the door.  It rained all day -- I mean it poured -- as I walked the fifteen miles to my next night's stop in Kendal.  The raindrops pounded on my phone screen, changing the page as I tried to consult a map.  In fact, the phone finally slipped from my cold fingers, fell to the ground, and suffered a serious screen fracture.

But my 15-mile hike was on level ground.  Where the designated path now passed through rain-drenched bogs, I cheated and followed roads.  Half way to Kendal, I stopped at a café for a perfectly nice lunch.  It was a wet day, but not a debilitating day.  But it gave me some appreciation for Mark Richards's sufferings as described in his humorous and moving account of a novice's introduction to hiking, Father, Son, and the Pennine Way (2016).

The Pennine Way has been described as the oldest official hiking trail -- and one of the toughest -- in England.  It runs 268 miles up the spine of England from northern Derbyshire to a point just across the Scottish border. 

Mark's hiking background?  Unimpressive.   His age was 61, and he weighed 232 pounds before he began training.   He had walked his dog four miles along the beach.  But his youngest son Alex was 17, soon bound for university and, Mark feared, a less close relationship with his father.  Therefore, in February, with some trepidation he nervously asked Alex the question:

"Do you want to come for a walk with me?"

"With Pepper?  I'm busy ..."

"No, not with the dog.  Further than that.  The Pennine Way.  5 days: 80 miles.  In the summer holidays."  ...

Alex looks at me.  He shrugs.  "Sure," he says.  "Why not?"

Fortunately, they were not attempting the entire Pennine Way path.  They hiked from Malham in North Yorkshire north to Dufton in Cumbria (historically in Westmorland) (just 3.7 miles from Appleby, where I began my own Westmorland hike).  But they were averaging over 16 miles per day.  Their last day was their longest, at 23.77 miles.  I may have hiked 23 miles in one day, but I can't remember when.  By comparison, on my hike through Westmorland in 2017, I was averaging just 12 miles per day, with little elevation gain.

Mark makes quite a point of the climbs involved in their hike.  The elevation gains don't seem particularly impressive, by American standards, but some of them -- notably their first day climb up Pen y Ghent -- do seem steep.  And Mark obviously suffered from a certain amount of acrophobia, as well as a bum knee.

But it wasn't just the daily mileage and the elevation gains that made their hike impressive.  Overlying those little difficulties was the fact that -- in August -- it rained constantly every day.  And when it wasn't raining, they were wading through thick fog.  I recall how demoralizing just one day of hiking in torrential rains was for me in 2017.

The author emphasizes that his book is not a guide to the Pennines (although it contains some interesting information for potential hikers), and is not aimed at experienced hikers.  Besides being a travel guide, it is at least as much a love story between a father and his teenaged son.  Alex was experienced with hiking as part of England's Duke of Edinburgh awards program, and he often found himself rolling his eyes at his father's blunders.  But the mutual affection between the two was obvious.  You don't survive in good spirits five days of exhausting hiking, being wet, losing your way, sinking into bogs, and falling to the ground and breaking your fingers -- without killing each other -- in the absence of mutual respect and affection.

I had all the respect in the world for the father -- a newbie who had bittem off almost more than he could chew.  But I also admired Alex, who maintained his sense of humor throughout -- and who willingly admitted his own mistake the one time he was seriously wrong about directions.  Their conversations while hiking were humorous and intelligent.  They made great hiking companions.  As Mark concludes:

Because he's like me in so many ways, he understood that the walk wasn't just about walking.  He understood it was an internal journey for me as much as an external journey; that talking to Custard-and-Ice-Cream, breakfast at Tan Hill and saying 'thank you' as we walked down from High Cup Nick was every bit as important as reaching Dufton.

And he was funny.  We kept each other amused.  We were pals.  He stole my  joke, but I'll forgive him that.

Would he do it again?  No, he says.

It was a one-off.  I don't want to spoil the memories.  As long as I live I want to keep the image of Alex walking up the hill into Dufton and the setting sun.

But two years later, after Alex had completed his A-levels and his first year at the University of Edinburgh, they paired up again for the final portion of the Pennine Way, from Dufton to the Scottish border.  Another hundred miles.  There's a book, of course.  I may have to read it.