Out of the Dark Season... and Onwards?

Snowy January in Leeds.

With the passing of every festive season, I normally crack wise about hiding away for the remainder of January, and essentially going into hibernation for five weeks that lead us out of the Dark Season and on towards our renewed walking career, but 2021 has already given us enough reason to literally do that, as a renewed National Lockdown, our third since the start of the Covid Pandemic, which means my inclination for keeping out of circulation for the month has no been imposed on everyone else too, and as we look forwards to my Tenth year of walking, I'm feeling deeply uncertain about what's going to come next. Not with regards the pandemic situation, as I can honestly say I've finally gotten a proper handle on that, but with how I'm going to conduct myself as we look to get walking again, as restrictions look like they're going to be in place for a while, and although it seems like severe time limits for exercise are not going to be in place this time around, there seems every indication that local exercise is going to mean just that, and so all the plans that I'd been hatching for 2021 during the late passage of last year are effectively junked to comply with the instructions passed out. So for once, I find myself on the waning edge of the rotten three months of the year, looking forward without a great deal of certainty about where my walking year is going to go, as I'm not immediately feeling a lot of enthusiasm for making more trails around Morley, having exhausted the vast majority of the plausible paths during that long Spring of 2020, with my desire to engage with the walking year feeling like it's at its lowest ebb in along while. I don't think I'd really expected to be in such a place when my last walking year ended, with the country going back into lockdown in the teeth of a second Covid wave that my optimistic brain would have hoped would have never come to pass, indeed my thinking back in March would have had us on the tail end of this pandemic, as it retreated into the background after the effective and well considered actions of governments and health care systems worldwide would have taken a firm grip on it. 

The Conclusions of 2020

Wrapping the 2020 Walking
Season at Morley Hole.

In retrospect, it seems entirely plausible that I cursed this past twelve months before they even got started, as the previous year's summation boldly declared both '2019 has been a rough year that I do not care to see a repeat of', and 'I'm going to need my good mental health as much as ever in 2020' almost as if I had accidentally wished upon us all a year of pain, frustration and intemperance with my hopeful words for the future, a reality that gave the world a stiff old kicking and left us all in a much less certain situation than we started out in. But if we ignore the Covid-19 pandemic and all that came with it, which we really ought to in the context of this walking blog, 2020's active season turned out to be far from ruined, as in spite of all the obstacles thrown in its path, like losing two months of Spring to absolute lockdown and being unable to travel beyond Morley, we managed to make the best of the Summer and Autumn while keeping ourselves mostly removed from the risks of the disease which has blanketed all our experiences. I'm really happy that my resolve to keep walking managed to hold so firm after losing so much of the first half of the year when compelled to keep my exercising local, and despite all the stresses and strains through the back half of the year, I managed to get all the way through all of the trips that I had originally planned for the four lost months, keeping going until the last available day of the year and reaching a final mileage which made it not even close to my least impressive year, surpassing both 2012 and 2013's totals. Indeed, only one walking weekend between July and November was actively under-utilised, as I gratefully absorbed the hospitality of My Good Friends in Calderdale, and while I might have not managed all the route across the Pennines to the fringes of Greater manchester, I managed to keep a tight focus to gain the landscape knowledge of another part of the county that had been absent from my walking field for too many years, giving all the lands between the Colne and calder as much exposure as they could have ever wanted. So while we may have seen more of my home town that I'd ever have anticipated, and only done half of the long trails I may have wished to have paced, I don't feel like I've missed out on the expansion of my walking experiences at all, as all you really need are a high viewpoint or two to look beyond what you know, such as ascending the Pennine ridge and looking west across the Cheshire plain to the Clwydian Hills, or east to the North York Moors and the Wolds, giving you a new visual horizon in excess of 100 miles wide.