The plan was to do Fellbarrow & Low Fell today. There was no snow and only -1C when we set off until we headed North about six miles and headed inland . We were confronted with -7C and packed snow and ice on the minor roads leading into Loweswater Valley . the car’s a hatchback with front wheel drive and I was initially fairly confident and making progress, but reached a point where to continue would have crossed the line between confidence and foolishness .
Plan B was Binsey ( actually an on the spot decision) , but again we left the main road and the minor road with it’s hills were in the same state as the last one . We could have gone up from another route off the A591 but opted for Watch Hill instead .
As I’d not prepared the WOTA /SOTA references and had to look them up on the on the hoof with the phone and I wrote the SOTA ref down as LD-55 instead of 54 . Thanks to Derek 2E0MIX for ammending the alerts to Watch Hill and to Bill M0DXT who realised my error with the sota ref’ and put the correct one on the spot .
After all that it was a nice walk , I qualified the hill on 2m , 5W with a rubber duck , and had a few nice contacts ,about 8 including Reg and Derek again , on 40m but it wasn’t really happening on HF today but didn’t hang about too long as an icy breeze got up and the sun was obscuring .
Cheers .
Richard .
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That first photo is especially great 
Ashamed to admit I still have all these to do, as Derek pointed out I need to definitely spend some time in the North Lakes this year.
Mark.
It’s getting round to I would say Mark ,
Compared to most on here I’m relatively new to WOTA/SOTA , three years or so, and it makes you realise Cumbria covers a lot of area and how many fells there are to tackle , particularly if you live near the ends of it ! I found I’ve mostly been working within a particular radius from home on the coast here and there’s still ones I haven’t done there, also there can be quite a bit of driving time getting to the ones farther away if you did it every time . plus there’s weather and other commitments to consider .
Richard.