Saturday March,23 will be remembered as atrocious, violent, back to winter freezing day, with two air masses battling over England and the cold mass won… spreading some 40 cm of snow in parts of N. England and heavy rain on saturated ground everywhere else. All newspapers headlines and most of the radio news were weather related: snow blizzards, blocked roads and power disruption in the North and East England, while here, in the Southwest we were protected from the worst of the weather and those easterly winds just caused a bitterly cold wind-chill effect and enough rain to cause landslides and walls to fall (???) . Last Easter England had a heat wave and drought warnings but since then it basically rained non-stop for a year …
Amidst all off that we are heading to Dartmoor. A’ had a Moor challenge weekend were they were planning to camp on the moors on Friday and Saturday, and navigate their way (with no teachers this time) carrying all their gear across the moor.
The weather was not too bad, to be honest on those lovely roads around Dartmoor, but a thick cloud covered the higher ground, and once I’ve start climbing I found myself driving through in-penetrable fog.
The teams were walking from about 7am, and I set up to meet the guys at mid-day some 3km from the car. However, with visibility of about 50m this was not trivial. I decided to cling to this wall and follow it around, and basically did not let the wall out of my sight. Got quite attached to this wall actually and took many pictures of it.
The first one was just few hundreds meters from the car, I just wanted to make sure I can find my way back:
Find the wall:
Eventually met the brave bunch, condition got slightly worse, its colder, visibility down to 15m max and four of us are heading back to the car. Still clinging to the wall:
All are back safe, and the guys are trying their best putting up tents with their gloves on … in this lovely Dartmoor setting:
Mostly Outdoors 