Our home for the 24 hours on Bleaklow
It's the beginning of March there's snow in the peak and it's fooking cold outside.
Must be time for the High Peak Marathon again, all the loony fell runners come out of the woodwork for this 42 mile fell race around the Derwent watershed and just to make it harder they start at night and most of the course doesn't follow any paths making the HPM a unique race.
This year we (as with the last 3 years) were checkpointing on Bleaklow Head, It's quite a long walk in up form snake pass and this year had a massive amount of snow to contend with.
We left snake at around 16.30 after helping set up the tents for the food checkpoint there, we got up to the top at about 18.00 which was really good as we could set up the tent before it was pitch black and quite impressive considering how bad the vis was once we got up above 600m.
After setting up the tent we settled in for a long night of not sleeping, listening to radio (obviously we gave some extremely helpful banter during the night) and devouring our cheese board. Our dinner that evening was very enjoyable as we always pre-cook meatballs and sauce before heading up then we settled down as we have nothing to do till 05.00.
At around 04.30 we decided that it was time for breakfast and i fired up the stove to make some bacon sandwiches which went down very well. Then we saw the first team (Flippers Gang) powering across Bleaklow at 05.51, after that we had teams coming through quite regularly all morning.
However we were not too busy as we had time to build our very own igloo as proof of the amount of snow.
The last team came through at 10.23 at which point we dismantled our tent and waited for the all clear so we could walk down to snake and get the bus back to Edale for some well deserved stew and a cup of tea.
It was a cracking night up on the hill and all went off with very only a couple of small injuries, big thanks to Ali and Nick for awesome organisation and everyone else that helped out.
Our igloo on top of Bleaklow.
Results up on-line: http://www.highpeakclub.union.shef.ac.uk/hpm/
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