Cloud Inversion: Great Langdale

It was a clear bright day in the English Lakes. One walk in ten’s like this said a man on the top of Bowfell. We were walking down from the summit—Tim, Dad and me—towards Great Langdale where we would camp for the night. Later we would go for tea at the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel and Dad said it looked like the Climbers Bar had barely been dusted since he used to go there with his mates from Liverpool University’s climbing club in the 1970s. There was great climbing in the Lakes, Dad said as we walked, but a lot of the best places were hard to get to. You had to carry your gear a long way up the steep fells. He pointed out Gimmer Crag across the valley and I imagined long scrambles up there with ropes slung over shoulders and metal jangling from belts. And legs much stronger than mine. We were walking slowly. My knees were giving in after two days heaving up and over Dale Head and Great Gable. That morning Tim had carried my backpack and his for the last few hundred metres up Scafell. It was a hard slog to the top. The Bob Graham Round map we were loosely following notes without exaggeration that There are NO easy ways out of Wasdale!  But it was worth it to see everywhere we’d been and would go and the sea on three sides of us. And now we were on our way down The Band from Bowfell. Dad told us about a time in 1973 or 1974, he thought, when he’d been with a group staying at the climbers hut in Langdale. They were hoping to get some routes ticked off but when the morning came the whole valley was full of mist and rain. Most people, he said, rolled over in their sleeping bags.  There would be no climbing that day.  But a few of them decided to go for a walk up the well-marked and well-trodden path out of Langdale.  They trudged up The Band through the morning mist and rain, Dad said, in the hope of salvaging their weekend.  They would have been quick, I thought, without all the ropes and gadgets weighing them down.  Some minutes earlier I’d heard a discussion from a few feet back about whether Tim-now would have kept up with Dad-then—or vice versa—and I thought about Dad-then walking up briskly in the morning mist and rain and us-now walking down slowly in the early evening sunlight.  And then, Dad said, when we were nearly at the top of Bowfell we stepped out into blue skies.  All the valleys were full of cloud but you could see the tops of the highest fells poking out like islands.  It was, he said, spectacular: a classic cloud inversion.  Of course, he said, I didn’t have a camera then.  So he would have stood up there in the clear bright present with so much concealed all around—including the thought that in forty years’ time he would remember this story and tell it to his grown-up children in this same place and one of them would walk down The Band thinking very clearly about him walking up it all those years ago and then think to write all of these things down.