We had been up to Scafell Pike before (in 2006): it is the highest mountain in England at 978m, and there is a relatively easy way up to the top. On the last occasion, it was in December, and there was a bit of snow at the top. I had felt a bit nervous about stepping into the snow, but had not had any mishaps, and had been rewarded with my first Brocken spectre.
This time, we decided to try and get up to Sca Fell, which is just on the other side of the col of Mickeldore, but not as frequented as its neighbour due to the relative difficulty of accessing its summit. When we started walking into snow on Brown Tongue up Lingmell Gill, we decided that it was time to put on our crampons and get our ice axes out. We kept to the right as we went up Hollow Stones in order to have a look for the Lord’s Rake, which we were interested in trying as a scrambling route up to Sca Fell. On the way up, we saw several iced-over waterfalls looking like sculptures. There was a fair amount of snow in the Rake. I wanted to go up further to have a closer look, but did not trust the lying snow on the slopes going up to the bottom of the rake, so we ended up turning away more towards the centre of the way up to Mickledore. The snow was already disturbed where people had gone up and down, and with ice axe and crampons it felt quite easy to get up to the col.
Not being rock climbers, we were not going to go up directly to Sca Fell via the Broad Stand route, so we decided to have a look at the way down the other side of the col for the gully up to Foxes Tarn. This felt fine, so we continued up from Foxes Tarn, going up quite steeply, but with care, until we reached the shoulder of Sca Fell. It was a short walk from there up to the summit.
We walked over to Symonds Knott, which is on the edge of the crags over Mickledore, and followed the Scafell Crag edge closely downwards from there. We were trying to find the top of the Lord’s Rake, and came across more than one gully. (I later looked into this further, and found that the lower gully we had stood by was the top of the Lord’s Rake, which is climbed in three sections, with two ‘cols’.) We would our way down gradually over Green How, then turned more sharply downhill to the side of a stream. B persuaded me to try sliding down the snow covering the stream bed as a quicker way down. The snow quite soft, which meant it was quite hard to brake using my ice axe, and as the layer was not that thick, the axe bumped over rocks in some places. I have to admit that it took a lot less time to get down to the valley floor than picking my way carefully down the steep slope. From there it was just a short walk back to the campsite. Very convenient.
Map of walk route
View Sca Fell via Mickledore and Foxes Tarn – Apr 2013 in a larger map