Angle Tarn

I got to go off on my own today. My Father's Day treat: to go for a hike to Angle Tarn. Kate and the boys were going to have a rest day, do some packing and cleaning, and mail off our surplus stuff for home. I took the car and left for Langdale, a nearby valley, at 8:00.

At the head of Langdale, as far up it as you can drive, is a hotel called the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel. There's a New Dungeon Ghyll Hotel too, about a mile below it. Both are named for Dungeon Ghyll, a stream that comes down the side of Langdale through a dark (and presumably dungeon-like) gorge. Langdale is the classic glacial U-shaped valley, and up on one rim are the crags that that are famous for climbing here, so the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel is also modestly famous as the climbers hang-out and bar. I parked in its parking lot.

(Inside the hotel is nice! High ceilings. Flowery wall paper, classy furniture. It would be fun to stay here.)

I hiked up the bottom of the U-shaped valley, which at this point is occupied by a stream called Mickelden Beck. At first it was farms with stone walls; then I passed the last stone wall and it was just green, well-cropped sheep pasture from valley wall to valley wall. It took me about an hour on a level, wide path. At one point a bridge over a small watercourse was built of big slabs of shale. The morning was heavily overcast, and still, with the cloud right at the valley rim, hiding any higher peaks. Stickle Pike, a fine tower that looked like something in Arizona, but dripping with green turf, stuck up from the north rim, and below and to its right was Glimmer Crags, a nice sweep of rock that goes up several hundred feet--but quite the approach hike to its base!

At the head of Mickleden the path divided, and you could pick between two steep routes out of the head of the valley: right or left. I went left, and began a switchback ascent of about 450 metres through the fern and grass, weaving through rock outcrops. It was one of these stairs-constructed-in-the-wilderness trails: beautiful wide stones placed in a staircase about four feet wide. It took me up a side stream called Rossett Gill, and then right up the headwall, to top out on a pass. The cloud was about 50 metres over my head now, and there below me was Angle Tarn.

Now I have to say a word about sheep, and I'll try to be restrained. They are a blight on this country. Everywhere beautiful you go, there are sheep grazing and sheep droppings. Although the water looks beautiful and clear, remember Hite's First Law of Lakeland Water: there is always a sheep above you in the watershed. The best thing England could do would be to ban sheep from the high country: from the Downs, from the Moors, from the Fells. It seems crazy to waste such valuable recreational land on animals which have so little value, which form no useful portion of the national economy, and which make all the water contaminated. There, I'm done.

Angle Tarn is a round lake, a couple hundred metres across, about the size of Crater Lake near Smithers. It's surrounded by green grass and fallen boulders, and across the back there's a cirque of stony headwalls, disappearing, at this point, up into cloud. A waterfall was chuckling away quietly on the far side, a riffle of wind moving the surface, water of indigo blue. The trail crossed the outlet stream and headed up the far side to further destinations, but this was my destination, and since it was about 11:30, so I hung out and had lunch and explored around. Unexpectedly, it was a tremendous relief to be out of sight of settled country. (I ignored the sheep.)

Those of you who know me know I have an amateur's passion for geology, and on the back of my new Harvey's British Mountain map I had both a geologic map and an explanation of the formation of the two bedrock types found in this area. There were the rhyolitic tuffs, which were formed when big volcanos poured out pyroclastic flows; and there were sandstones, formed when the volcanic lavas were eroded into shallow seas. Both types of events happened in the Ordivician, which is geologically speaking an even longer time ago than Long Ago, so both types of rock were further cooked, crushed, and metamorphosed. The sandstone was cooked into shale, and they call it 'Lakeland Green shale'; it's quarried lower down in Langdale and used for building. All the buildings in Ambleside, including our cottage, are sided in Lakeland Green Shale, for example. The tuffs are the crags on which the rockclimbing occurs here.

I spent the better part of an hour inspecting all the boulders near where I was sitting, to see what kinds they were, and glassing the outcrops above me at the back of the lake to see if I could do a little geology-by-binocular. Then I walked back up to the pass and out on a nearby height called Rossett Pike. After considerable confusion I figured out that the tuffs are much whiter from a distance, and when you get up to them they have a coarse texture like sugar that's gotten wet and has hard lumps in it. The sandstone, on the other hand, looks grey-green from a distance, but up close, where it breaks, open it is extremely fine-grained and almost black (with a hint of green). The tuffs erode to big vertical faces that look almost glassy, whereas the sandstones erode into crumbly nubbins that barely stick out of the earth at all. This occupied me for a couple happy hours in all.

At about 2:00 I started back, stopping frequently to examine rocks, and once to hang out in the shade where Rossett Gill had cut deep into its banks and three birch trees hung overhead. It had become a brutally hot day! After I'd rejoined Mickleden, the numbers of people coming up the trail increased, and I realized that it was Friday afternoon, and weekend visitors were coming in. I was particularly pleased to see a school group outfitted with backpacks and clearly intending to spend the night in the mountains, because so far that day all I'd seen was MIDDLE AGED PEOPLE (including myself). The mountains don't seem right without young people around.

Back at home I found Kate and the boys had accomplished all their tasks, PLUS a walk to the waterfront and back. We ate dinner, and completed the pack up.