29th August 2008 – Stickle Tarn
From the car park we could see the route we needed to take but Pavey Ark was completely lost in low cloud and remained so until we reached the severe horizontal of Stickle Tarn. The wind was still and the surface smooth and highly reflective. Patches of weed, floating in rafts and tiny islands holding natural bonsai trees contributed to a landscape drawn by Hokusai.
Without definition of its height, Pavey Ark could have continued into the stratosphere. The sense of having arrived into a different landscape with its different rules of physics was compelling.
We entered the tarn from the right hand side of Pavey Ark and decided to swim the length and back beneath it.
Throughout the ascent, ants were swarming in the humid air and were flying with their once in a lifetime wings in order to breed. Thousands lay on the water, some dead, some still locked together in a wet coupling in a forlorn attempt at continuing their gene strand but were essentially drowning, We pushed them aside with our strokes as we swam through.
After reaching the far bank and pushing off again to return, it was soon apparent that Richard was feeling the cold more than me. His face took on increasingly desperate angular features as if the air pressure around his head was intensified. The further we swam the more his breathing became laboured and exaggerated. Checking in regularly with him brought words of reassurance that he was okay but it was clear he was reaching the limits of his tolerance to the cold.
By now Pavey Ark was clear of cloud and somehow its gaze upon these two small insignificant people was both reassuring and threatening. Reassuring as if the mountain had chosen to reveal itself to us, but threatening because of the immovability and permanence of the mountain simply emphasised our frailty. When we finally pulled ourselves ashore, the need to get warm was urgent – hot coffee with whisky gave an instant hit.
Richard had brought a thermometer and we had deliberately not tested the water before our swim. It read 15 degrees from the shallows and surely out in the deep middle it must have been a degree or two colder.
We started the descent quickly in order to warm up. Towards the bottom, a young family had immersed themselves fully clothed into a pool fed by a waterfall in full flow. Their screams and laughter rose as they entered the falls, etching a permanent memory that would never be lost.
