By: Blonde Two
There’s a new team in town… Princetown on Dartmoor to be exact. With pubs, our favourite Foxtor Cafe and reliable mobile phone signal, Princetown is the Two Blondes’ favourite base camp location so it made perfect sense to us when we discovered that polar exploration specialists Ice Warrior have set up shop (some good kit, worth a visit) and installed their own base camp there.
We did, however, first meet Ice Warrior Jim and Ice Warrior Pete on the hottest day Princetown has seen for along time. Usually shrouded in mist long after everyone else on Dartmoor has found a bit of spring (definitely its own microclimate), Princetown looks uncannily different in the sunshine and is, unsurprisingly, a difficult place in which to find factor 50 suncream (we were gently laughed at in the Post Office for asking). Our Gold DofE team had enough factor 30 suncream for an army but were a fair skinned bunch and running out of factor 50, so we were asking around.
This seemed the perfect excuse to drop in and introduce ourselves to team Ice Warrior. We received a warm welcome and had a good chat about #LastPole, their latest, forthcoming polar expedition (check out the #LastPole website if you want to find out more, these guys are out to encourage ordinary people to do some extraordinary things).
If chatting to a polar explorer in possibly the dampest place on earth on the hottest day of 2018 sounds a bit incongruous, you will love (as we did) the fact that Ice Warrior Jim very kindly then offered to buy some factor 50 for us when he went into Yelverton later in the day. We bumped into Jim again that evening as he was running an, ‘Is polar exploration for you?’ weekend at Bellever Youth Hostel. The potential explorers all seemed to be having a great time and were very enthusiastic but we would like to gently suggest that the young lady who was overheard saying, ‘I’m not walking to Princetown!’ (11 km) might have underestimated the distances required to reach the ‘Northern Pole of Inaccessibility‘.
Thanks Jim… and good luck!
If you haven’t looked at the Visit Dartmoor website yet, you really should. As well as places to stay on Dartmoor (including Dartmoor campsites), things to do on Dartmoor and top pubs on Dartmoor, the Visit Dartmoor website gives loads of useful information about Dartmoor activities, Dartmoor places and more Dartmoor walks than you could possibly complete in even 10 visits.
https://www.twoblondeswalking.com/workshops/
