Ambleside to Wansfell Pike

We woke up Saturday morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready for the first real serious hike of our trip. After we fueled up with a big breakfast at the Lodge, we hiked the two miles into Bowness to catch a boat to Ambleside, which is on the north side of the lake. The boat docked in Waterhead, a small town a mile or so south of Ambleside itself, and we stopped by the information center to pick up a walking map for the area.

Ambleside is a base for lots of hikers, and there's a lot of really nice walks in the area but we finally decided to walk up to Stock Ghyll Force and then up to Wansfell Pike. By the way, I ought to mention that they have their own lingo up in these parts that's left over from the days of the Viking raids. Waterfalls are called "forces" and mountains are called "fells" and so on and so forth.

The walk up to Stock Ghyll Force was quite nice and easy, but the past season had been a dry one so the waterfall wasn't that impressive.

We were still pumped up and not at all tired, so we continued our ascent toward Wansfell Pike, which definitely took us off the beaten path. We eventually found a crumbly stone staircase leading up to the Pike, which went on forever.

Every so often, we turned around to see the view as we climbed higher and higher. Well, I did anyway. J was just grumpy and told me to stop taking his picture while he doggedly tackled the stairs.

After ascending 1500 ft or so, we finally reached the top! And it was totally worth it - the view of Windermere was amazing! I don't know why, but the view seemed even better because we had worked so hard to earn it. J compared it to spending an hour on the StairMaster. Heehee.

We were finally spent, but now we had to negotiate our way down into town. Put two city slickers like us in the middle of nowhere with a map in our hands, and trouble was bound to ensue.

We somehow got off the permissive path, and we ended up scrambling over a stone fence. I went first, and I came face to face with a bunch of cows and sheep who had hurried over to investigate. They weren't fazed at all to see me, and I ended up scrambling back up over the stone fence as the cows continued to come closer and closer. J near about died laughing when he saw me hurdling back over the fence, and I refused to cross the farm until another group of people (also lost, I presume) joined us and we crossed the field as a group.

We eventually found our way back into town and caught a boat back to Bowness. We were both pretty exhausted so we took a cab back to the lodge for a quick clean-up in preparation for our very fancy 5 course dinner. Let's just say that we definitely earned our dinner that day.