On Saturday 20th October, Derek and I did the Greenburn Round from Grasmere. We met up at the Traveller’s Rest on the A591 at 1015 and drove down to Ghyll Foot where we parked by the roadside leading on to Town Head. We were booted up and away for around 1030. From Ghyll Foot we took the track up over the cattle grid and out onto the fellside. Steel Fell is one of those deceptive fells that has a couple of rocky outcrops on the south-east ridge and is a concave slope which means you think the protuberance ahead of you is the summit when it is not! However, after approximately 75 minutes we reached the summit, exactly on the schedule I had on the route card I had prepared using Peter Linney’s Gazetteer. The views were outstanding as it was such a clear morning. Thirlmere and Blencathra to the North and across the Greenburn Valley to the West, Great Gable was clearly visible. 
After the customary photos on the summit, including Derek trying to get his dog to keep still and pose whilst sitting below the cairn, we then set off in the direction of Calf Crag, our next objective. The views as we passed the two tarns were brilliant and the bogs were not as bad as I have encountered over here in the past. My boots got slightly wet but not my socks thanks to a good coating of Nikwax spray on Friday night on the boots. Lunch was taken on the summit of Calf Crag at around 1 pm and we then set off along the ridge to Gibson Knott. Wainwright lists this ridge walk as 1¼ miles in length and 100 feet of ascent. Both Derek and I felt that he underestimated both the distance and amount of climbing as there certainly seemed to be much more ascent than this, and it took us nearly an hour compared with the 35 minutes I had calculated on the route card. 
We dropped from Gibson Knott to the depression and then had the final 300 feet of climbing up to Helm Crag. The path here has been much improved recently as good steps have been put in place, which made both our ascent and those who were descending in the opposite direction much easier. Again, photos were taken on the top and we then headed South in the direction of Grasmere. As I told Derek, it had been 32 years since I was last on Helm Crag (shame, I hear some of you say) but I remembered that after the descent to White Crag there was an old track eastwards you could take down through the bracken, which we had 
used to get to the Traveller’s Rest for a pint in 1975.We managed to find this track, which takes you down to the main intake wall that is then followed in a northerly direction. After about a mile, we cut through a gate on the right, which took us down through a field, and out by some farm buildings to exactly where we had parked the cars at Ghyll Foot. This had saved us the best part of a further mile of walking had we used the new Helm Crag track back via Grasmere itself.A great 4½ hours on the fells, with roughly 8 miles of walking and 2,500 feet of ascent, some superb views and good company. Thanks Derek! As AW said about a number of walks – ‘Heaven must be something like this!’
