The Dales Way (sucks)

Dan and Pietro at the start of the trail

It has been a while since we left the dales way and it has taken me this long to start writing about it because I didn’t really want to remember it. This is not because it was bad, as it was, on balance, good fun, but because not finishing the easiest walk in England for the second time is hardly worth bragging about. I’ve never really liked step by step trip reports because you had to be there. However I do like the tangents that come from recounting the hows of what you did, and inevitably the why's that this reminiscing leads to. How I started walking in the first place really had nothing to do with walking, and far more to do with talking about walking. I have an inevitable attraction to enthusiastic people and an unnerving predilection to say yes to almost anything enthusiasm suggests, and in this case that was The Dales Way, which is apparently very easy, so the first time we attempted it in winter and we wild camped it. When I say we talked about walking I mean that we mainly talked about gear although we did at least ostensibly touch on the philosophy of it, but that obviously felt a bit contrived seeing as even then we knew we’d basically never really walked anywhere before. And that’s not really changed. We’ve obviously walked more since then, but we spent a lot of time on this trip talking about gear and ways in which we might use it to make ourselves slightly less miserable and/or heavy which is often (although it claims otherwise) the ultralight compromise. I think we talk more about gear than about walking because the philosophy of it is best kept to yourself. This is partly because it’s actually so embarrassing to be sincere but also because it almost goes without saying and like silence it seems as though speaking would ruin it. But writing, unlike speaking, is dead quiet so at some point I’ll try and get away with it. 

Pietro dressed to pull his harmstring on the first day 

This time we tried the Dales Way was different from the first in that we had a third wheel, and also because we did it in May. I made two assumptions here, one was that May would be warm as it had been in the 20s (Centrigrade) the year before. Two was that we could sit inside of pubs. This second assumption was a bit of an odd one to make as pubs legally couldn’t let you sit inside and everyone in the uk knew this including me, yet somehow I managed to compartmentalise this information, and convince myself and I think Dan as well, that this would, for some reason, be different in Yorkshire. At my most convincing/delusional I thought that maybe due to the small size of the villages on the dales, that the landlord and the law may very well be the same person and therefore emboldened to let me dry my feet and pet their dog. For one it was not that warm, and two it was full of law abiding, and in stark contrast to the first time we tried the trail, very grumpy landlords (coincidence?). What the trail lacked in warmth it more than made up for in rain and after the first three hours my feet were almost always a bit wet. 

Dan eating a homemade clify

A moment for discomfort. Discomfort when hiking is often a reaction to the elements. Being too hot is probably the most comfortable form of discomfort. Take off a layer, go for a dip, drink an ice cold coke. Being on fire is too hot, but being too hot is basically just being on holiday. Being too cold is not that hot. Being too cold is definitely not comfortable, and you could do a little run or maybe you’ve got another layer and you’ve got a fire waiting for you at home, in which case it’s just a bit of yang to your ying. But if you’re sleeping outside under a tarp and you’re cold, few things feel like they could possibly be worse. Unless of course you’re also wet. Being wet fucking sucks. Being wet should be illegal. Being cold and wet couldn’t kill you quickly enough. I also get really bad acid reflux when I’m too cold in bed which is a nice touch. 

Coupla bros

So it was wet and we were walking. The trail starts in Ilkley which is a good place to start a walk because you feel immediately compelled to walk straight out of it. And you do but for the first few hours it does feel as though you are walking through someone’s back garden. Considering most of the trail is a public byway this is often the case as you wind through farmland dotted, in may, with lambs. The sheep on the trail definitely fall into distinct personality types. The rarest and by the far the best is the curious lamb. In nature the genes for curiosity in lambs would no doubt be swiftly culled by things that eat lambs, but seeing as the lifespan of a lamb is determined unnaturally by the farmer you would have thought that curiosity might be an enjoyable trait for a farmer to breed into his coworkers. Although thinking about it I imagine this would make them much harder to kill. The second type of sheep baas back. This interspecies communication would be cool but it often accompanied by an unconvincing charge from the entire flock in an attempt to overwhelm/annoy you with relentless baaing and fear that a farmer might uck you up for issing off his sheep 

Their are other types of sheep. Terrified and indifferent, but one brings to mind grainy cctv footage of guys booting livestock, and the other is just boring. 

Where water flows the river goes

We walked at a much stronger pace this time around. When Pietro and I first attempted the dales the sun was setting at around 4 in the afternoon and considering Pietro doesn’t usually power up before 11 this meant that we had never walked far before it was dark. In this regard the season, if not the weather, was with us, and what had previously taken two days we had almost covered in one. Unfortunately after doing his masters for a year this was far too much for pietro's atrophied twiglets to handle and they buckled in the face of such relentless progress. He returned to the comfort of a seated position on the bus home as Dan and I pressed onwards. 

As we pulled out of Kettlewell, full of optimism in the morning sun, Dan's feet began to hurt. Drawing from a past life as a shaman, I suggested he use some of the abundant moss that grows on the ancient drystone walls, and I am pleased to say that moss is a viable alternative to compeed. This was, quite literally the calm before the storm. The weather was decent, the miles were flying, and the conversation had reached a level of weirdness that is experienced only in the relentless company of another. After an unnecessary pint at hubberholme, served by a landlord who was clearly quite annoyed his business had survived the pandemic, we set off into a snow/hailstorm. This, in and of itself, was not necessarily unpleasant in its novelty, but it would unwittingly set the tone for the rest of the day as this hail melted in the half hourly cycle of inclement/clement weather.

On the way to Cam Houses

The first time Pietro and I did the dales we had gotten very lost around Yockenwaithe and, having taken the ‘wrong’ road, we had ended up at the house of Jenny whose call to her husband regarding the two hikers that had just shown up, brought him swiftly back from his darts tournament. After realising we evidently posed more of a threat to ourselves then to him and his wife, he proceeded to inform us that the man who could condense the power of a fireplace (he was a fireplace salesman) into the size of a button would be the richest man alive. A thought he struggled to express as succinctly as I have here. Nonetheless, for both him and Jenny i have nothing but gratitude and, if at gunpoint, I were forced to attempt the Dales Way again, I’d pull the trigger myself. But Hypothetically, if I did, this route would be the one that I’d take. This was, of course, not the route that we took, which instead led us to Cam Houses, ‘One of the wildest and remotest farms in the Yorkshire Dales’, presumably making it perfect for obscene amounts of beastiality. The trail to Cam Houses is a 45 degree mudslide that you are constantly walking up just to go in a straight line parallel to the main river, whilst also trying, and failing, to avoid the mini rivers that run down the hill to feed it. It was shit, nothing else to it. We were losing control of the situation and decided to take a path downhill into a logging wood that I remembered as the alternative route to find somewhere to pitch. However we succumbed to the practice of ‘maybe if we walk a little bit further we’ll find something better’ and proceeded to find the exact opposite in a quagmire which we had to leave before the morning frost melted and it stole our shoes.

Bad day for Papa Smurf

From here it was a series of universal injustices that swiftly ended the walk for us. Our feet were wet, our stomachs were empty, our resolve was strong, but our self respect was stronger. Sat at a cafe it had taken multiple train rides to reach under an awning that was equally incapable of enduring the relentless weather cycles, I looked into Dan’s eyes and I didn’t see recognition, I saw the man inside with his head between his knees. It takes one to know one. We were not having fun, and if we were to continue on this path, fun didn’t seem like an imminent prospect, and where's the fun in that? We made this decision 30 mins away from the train station, at which the train we needed was due in 20, so we flew up the hill and we made it, which made me feel quite vindicated and made my face contort into what my reflection in the train window quickly reminded me was a smile. I also lost a single sock on our race to the train which, if you ever see a single sock and wonder, bemused as to how someone could lose just one, is a possible explanation. 

Said sock frozen

It’s hard to sum the Dales Way up because one, I’ve only done half of it, and two, even though I'd quite happily never mention it again, I know we’ll be back (see point one). I won’t speak on Dan’s behalf, but I was quite happy to leave the trail because doing so wasn’t going to impact my self worth. We could have finished it despite our situation but there was nothing to gain from doing so simply to say that we had. It’s hardly K2. That being said, it is the self proclaimed ‘easiest walk in England’ and it has gotten the better of me twice so for all my zen bullshit my ego will be on the line next time. Until then! 

Face down ass up, that's the way we like to ! 

To read Dan's version of events, and see more photos, click here

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