Peaks and Perils | Mountain Rescue

And so we thought that that's what we'd do. Kinder was the place that I wanted to go to because my brother had told me a story about the climber had died on Kinder and I was fascinated by this. So from the very start, Kinder was a place of awe. So we set off from Sheffield from the Pond Street bus station and we didn't really know what we were doing or where we were going and we didn't have a map and we just started walking and then a thunderstorm arrived it rained heavily.

I didn't know it at the time, but it's a pretty standard dark peak storm. So very black sky. It went very, very dark. It got very cold. The wind became really ferocious And you literally couldn't see your hand in front of your face. It was very terrifying. We was two, 14 year old boys walking along the wooded road

with huge trucks thundering past them. We knocked on a house, a farmer's house to ask them if they'd take us in and they slammed the door on us because they didn't know what they were getting. So, so we were left to walk. So we hid in a telephone box outside the old youth hostel at Crowden until his- my friend's dad came and picked us up. And then like it often does in the dark peak, the storm finished and the sun came out and it was beautiful and there was steam rising from the pavement.

It was a- it was a kind of a- a light that just illuminated everything and it made everything very, very vivid. And in some ways, it started something off. It started the walking. And then life got involved in the walking, stopped for a while and I came away from the Peak district because I was busy and I had a career and I was abroad a lot. And then I started walking again. And actually, if you just do things in small steps you can actually have some really good adventures.

To learn to read a map and use a compass, took me about probably about a year and I took some lessons as well. And I, I walked with people that knew how to navigate and they asked me to navigate little legs for them. So I built up my skill level and I also started to understand exactly what the map was telling me. The contours are key. One of the things, why Kinder is so difficult and why it does require a great deal of respect is that it is subject to the weather.

So weather comes in from the west, it gets the weather first so the weather can change very quickly on Kinder and it can be covered in low cloud. So visibility can be extremely poor. In winter, if you end up with a white out- because Kinder is virtually flat. If you end up with heavy heavy snow you can actually be in a situation where you can't tell the ground from the sky and that's called a white out. And a white out is basically when everything looks just

white. So there is no difference between the ground and the sky. It's just like looking at a blank sheet of paper. So there are no reference points, there's no up or down or anything and negotiating across Kinder in them sort of conditions does require very, very good skills. And, nerve really to trust those skills and that's where people go wrong. They forget they stop trusting the map and the compass.

The best way to enjoy Kinder is to go on a guided walk and go with the rangers and the wardens and let them take you up there and show you what Kinder's like in full safety. And that's the best way to start enjoying Kinder. And then after that, get yourself a map and compass, make sure you can read it, make sure you know how to use the compass and make sure you know how to use both of them together. And then just have a walk up, Grindsbrook.

Go to the top of Grindsbrook and then come back down, come back down, Grindslow Knoll. Down to Edale, have a pint in the nags head next week, maybe have a walk over to Kinder downfall. Do the mass chess pass walk, anything like that, but just take it in little stages until you feel confident enough and you'll just have some fantastic days.