The summit day on Kilimanjaro starts at midnight. OK, so the sharp minded amongst you are probably thinking “but doesn’t every day start at midnight?”
What I mean is that on Kilimanjaro you start WALKING at midnight, Mount Meru is far more civilised, allowing you to lie in until 2am before you lace up your boots and start the long push for the summit.
So in some dark corner of my mind it made sense that on my final day in the Lake District I got up nice (?) and early (5:30am) and walked a couple of hours in the dark hopefully getting somewhere high where, camera in hand, I could witness the most spectacular of sunrises!
Given that I would still have a six hour drive ahead of me I’d planned a short(ish) route that would take me up to White Side and along to Raise where I would then have the option of heading back along Sticks Pass or continuing to Stybarrow Dodd and Sheffield Pike.
White Side (left) and Raise (centre)
You can just about make out the path I followed zigzagging it’s way up Raise before cutting across to Whiteside
At the risk of making another obvious statement, walking in the dark is odd!
Your entire world consists the circle of light thrown out from your headtorch, and even this is an unnatural “half light” flattening textures and making it difficult to anticipate the bumps and dips on the track.
There’s no sense of the ground covered or the distance left to go and with almost no peripheral vision it’s all too easy to pass within feet of key landmarks (such as the cairn at the top of White Side) without spotting them.
The fog thickened as dawn approached and it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get the sunrise I had hoped for so after a very quick self portrait at the top of raise I headed for Sticks Pass content in the knowledge that I would have the drive home to recollect what a fantastic weekend it had been.
Darkness, fog and Simong at the top of Raise
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