By: Blonde Two
This weekend something very exciting is happening, you might even say (if you lived in Up-North) that something ‘Champion’ is happening.
We Blondes will be heading up to a particularly lovely Dartmoor bunkhouse and welcoming some of our fellow Ordnance Survey Get Outside Champions to their very first Dartmoor frosty camp.
A frosty camp doesn’t quite do what it says on the tin. I went on my first one when I was a Scout leader but that was in the days before I had experienced ice on my tent and all night shivering. Frosty camps require a few key ingredients:
1. An inside space so that you can get as frosty as you like but still snuggle in the evening.
2. A fireplace around which you can gather and tell yarns of adventure (or play very silly games!)
3. A kitchen to keep the cooking Blonde happy (I am beginning to wonder if B1 is after my cooking hat, she was talking about polenta the other day!)
4. Some frosty weather. This cannot always be guaranteed but you can get just as chilly in the rain so we are hopeful.
5. Some excellent Get Outside type activities. We have offered our guests walking, historical artefacts, night navigation, wild swimming and off-road mountain biking. They might also like to sit around and chat!
We will obviously be taking lots of ‘Champion’ type photos and letting you know how we get on. For today though, there are preparations to be made!
PS If you are a Champion and you haven’t told us you are coming, get in touch, we still have some spaces!
Tell you what: one of your group should agree to take a copy of Annapurna (by Maurice Herzog, leader of the French expedition and later to become a cabinet minister in the French government) and you should intersperse your chat and games with readings from the juicier bits. The book describes the first successful ascent of an 8000 m peak (in 1950) at a time when equipment and especially clothing wasn’t much better than the tweed jackets that Mallory and Irvine wore when they were lost on Everest.
A cautionary tale, then, since you and your mates are going to profit, as you say, from tents, sleeping bags and anoraks designed and manufactured to keep the frost out. Many things went wrong on Annapurna and the book, a classic at the time, was the first to eschew the stiff-upper-lip style which Brits adopted in their accounts of earlier Himalayan expeditions (“things became a bit tricky for X but after a few months in hospital he was back in the hills making light of his disabilities…”) and to tell it all in gruesome detail.
Herzog, badly frost-bitten, described having to give himself a long-needle injection (without anaesthetic) in an area of his body where, even now, it gives me the heeby-jeebies to recall; I’ll say no more. Then there was the problem with necrosed toes. “I took the scissors and looked at the toe, now quite black. I tried to decide if there was any sentimental atachment to what was a part of my body. Then I snipped…”
Pass the book round from tent to frosty tent and then you can all raise a bumper to the inventors of lightweight yet super-efficient fabrics, non-leather boots, etc, etc, and utter personal thanks for being born when you were born and thus able to do dangerous things where – thank goodness – the risks have been somewhat reduced.
And another bumper (in some kind of decent French wine) to the fortitude of Herzog, Lachenal, Terray and Rebuffat who are part of the reason why I hate the prospect of cutting ourselves off, psychologically, from mainland Europe. I especially admire Terray who called his much later autobiography Conquistadors of the Useless, a wry comment on the nature of his chosen sport. Yes, I know, it’s climbing and you’re not into that but there’s a commonality about getting out into the weather.
OK, no more long ones like this from me. You don’t have to read it all even if I, in senescence, feel I have to write it.
Keep the long ones coming! I’m off to the library to see if I can borrow that one. My first frosty camp, which awakened to a gloriously sunny, glistening, thickly white world, was the only time when in the middle of the night the dog climbed on top of me and slept under my waterproof jacket, as well as wearing her own quilt and raincoat – and wasn’t I glad she did! So, all you frosty campers, a nice warm dog comes hugely recommended.