The Lake District weather can be notoriously fickle, especially when looking at late winter through to early spring, when it can be 10 degrees and mild one day and then into the back minus temperatures the next.
We’d planned to hopefully take advantage of one these mild, dry spells and go an explore Cam Crag Ridge, which is situated in the Langstrath Valley. The ridge promised great scrambling at a variety of grades so it made it ideal for a photoshoot showing our new season mountaineering and scrambling kit as we could make the scrambling as easy/hard as we wanted.
The weather was looking very mixed in the days leading up to the shoot with the forecast changing daily until finally a few days before the shoot, it became apparent the rumours of quite heavy snowfall would come to fruition on the couple of days before we were due to head out.
Not wanting to waste these increasingly rare conditions in the Lakes we decide to head out regardless but swap out the lightweight layers of clothing for something more substantial.
We woke on the shoot day to snow down to valley level, which made the already stunning walk up the Langstrath valley even more photogenic. The surrounding fells would appear briefly before getting covered again by the banks of cloud rolling around higher tops. The ridge showed it’s self for the 1st time whilst we had quick break at Black Moss Pot, the popular wild swimming location, and dashed our hopes of clear rock as it was firmly under a coating of the fresh powdery snow that had fallen the nights previous.
This meant a change of route and we headed up next to the ridge, contouring slowly up the fell side through soft snow following a few trods and the prints of a heard of Deer, which we spotted now resting on the other side of the beck to our left. Towards the top we were enveloped by cloud and visibility decreased as we made our way around the side of Rosthwaite Fell and headed for Tarn at Leaves.
The cloud broke as we approached Tarn at Leaves and revealed a stunning vista of snow capped fells stretching from Fleetworth Pike and the Honister Valley round to Derwent water with Skiddaw watching over it. The snow was soft, powdery and waist deep in parts as we headed left at the tarn and down towards Combe Gill. The rain that had threatened all day made a brief appearance as we made our way along the valley and back to the car, reflecting on a great day out in the fells despite having to miss out the ridge; something we all planned to return to once it was bathed in summer sun and with dry rock.
