Paul’s Place!

Paul’s Place seems an odd title for a hiking blog entry. Some of you may even be asking where it is?

Let me provide three photographic clues:

Ben Nevis!

Scafell Pike!

Mount Snowdon!

Three mountains….

What could it all mean?

And what’s the connection with Paul’s Place?

Paul’s Place is a charity that specifically supports adults with physical and cognitive impairment in the Bristol area. They are trying to raise £6,000 to send Jo and her family on a holiday of a lifetime after her family’s tragic story.

You can read more about her story and possibly donate toward the fund-raising effort by visiting Jo’s JustGiving page.

For those that have visited the above page, you will now have understood the full significance of the three photos above.

These photos are of the mountain peaks that form part of the Three Peaks Challenge!

This challenge forms the focus of the fundraising effort for Jo.

The week had been a very odd one for me….

I was due to start a 4 day solo Exmoor walk on Friday, but had received a gracious invitation to join the Three Peaks Team engaged in the above fundraising effort.

So here I am!

Although I have climbed all three of these Mountains, it will be a very different experience from my previous climbs.

For a start, there will be people – many people! Around another 15! I normally hike alone, so that in itself will make the Three Peaks walks very different.

The other big difference will be the kit that I will need to carry. All of my previous climbs were part of multi-day walks, which necessitated taking a lot of equipment and their associated weight up the mountains.

However, this time around I will just be carrying a lightweight day-sack. It will be interesting to see how this affects my performance!

In terms of kit, I will be bringing along two new items:

Water-To-Go (http://www.watertogo.eu) have kindly provided me with a free filtered bottle to test and review. The bottle will get its first outing on this trip!

First up is the Water-To-Go filtered water bottle. This bottle was kindly provided by Water-To-Go free of charge for review purposes.

I was going to review it on the four day Exmoor walk, but will instead do an initial review on the Three Peaks walk. This will eventually be followed by a more detailed review when the Exmoor walk is rescheduled.

The other new item of kit is shown below:

New carbon fibre hiking poles – a pair of Black Diamond Carbon Cork’s. These are very light and use a different locking mechanism to my previous poles. They are also keyed specifically for left and right hand use as per the labels. Will have to make sure I use the correct pole with the correct hand!

After the success of the Mountain Warehouse Compact Walking Poles, I have decided to invest in a more expensive lightweight set. In the end I plumped for Black Diamond Carbon Corks.

Weight is important to me, especially in the case of hiking poles as they will spend a fair bit of their time stowed on the rucksack.

I have to admit that I was a little wary of the fact that these poles are made of Carbon Fibre. This material is very strong, but can break if subject to stresses in a direction that they are not designed to take them in.

It will be interesting to see how they perform!

The overall kit muster looks like:

The kit that I will be taking. Only a small subset of the kit will be taken up each mountain using the smaller day-sack. This should result in much lighter loads than I’m normally used to!

The weather forecast has been checked and it looks like that an on-the-day decision will be required for each mountain to determine if it is safe to proceed. Hopefully the weather will settle down when we reach each of them!

In the meantime, I will leave you with three pictures of the summits of each of these great mountains – the summits that we hope to reach over the next three days!

The summit of Ben Nevis!

The summit of Scafell Pike!

The summit of Mount Snowdon!

Laters

RobP