Monday 9 August 2010

Walk 31

Seatoller Weekend 6th-8th August 2010
Friday 3.5m / 900ft ascent

104. Great Crag LDW-192 1476ft
105. Grange Fell LDW-200 1362ft

Watendlath-Great Crag-Grange Fell-Watendlath

An eventful weekend this was, with no injuries apart from one broken Leki walking pole (my friend Geoff's) and the discovery that my £150 Meindl boots, purchased 9 months ago, leak.

Over the 12 WOTA summits 86 QSOs were completed, with many S2S QSOs to WOTA and SOTA summits. The best QSO I reckon was from High Stile LDW-029/LD-012 with 2I0FZK/P Alan who was on GI/MM-004 in the Mountains of Mourne, Northern Ireland. It was great to see Julian G4ILO active from home on the Saturday and out activating on the Sunday for some more S2S contacts, giving me a chance to work some Wainwrights which I could not have done from my home in Pickering.

Some of the line of sight paths from the Western and Central Fells are blocked out to the south by the bigger summits such as LD-001 so contacts with Sue G1OHH, one of the regular chasers, were few and far between.

I have uploaded some pictures and text to the WOTA Flickr site http://www.flickr.com/groups/wota/.  It would be good if we could get some more activators to upload pictures on there.

The WOTA weekend started when Geoff and I left the NT Car Park at Watendlath on Friday at 1440z (our route shown above). We topped Great Crag LDW-192 in drizzle at 1515z and then made our way to Brund Fell part of Grange Fell LDW-200 which we topped at 1605z, arriving back quite wet in Watendlath at 1650z. There wasn't time to do Castle Crag LDW-214 and to be truthful after looking down on it from Grange Fell with the equipment I was carrying I wasn't hopeful of making any contacts from it.

G4OBK/P on Great Crag LDW-192 6th August 2010
Having made the decision regarding Castle Crag we drove into Keswick for an enjoyable pub meal at The George Hotel before returning up Borrowdale to our B&B accommodation at Seatoller Farm (recommended). Borrowdale was full of fell runners - the Scafell Race was due to start the next morning at 11.00am from the Scafell Hotel, Rosthwaite.    

1 comment:

  1. I think the way to activate Castle Crag would be to publicize it in advance and ensure that there are some other activators / chasers who will be in position in range of it.

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