Saturday Morning Run - Winter Special - Cowpe and Top of Leach

Ever warming British winters are making snow a bit of a rarity in Lancashire. This morning however, we were shocked to see around 10cm of snow in the valleys and up to 50cm on the hills. The hills were calling, but so was the Lancashire Schools XC at Witton Park. After much deliberation, we eventually decided to try the roads only to reach the car park after the race had started. So we got our snowy hill run in the end...







Taking on some sugar in a ruined quarry building, excellent shelter from the freezing winds:



Running over Cowpe Moss was tough going as underneath the snow and the tussocks were frozen bogs, incredibly energy sapping; not nice at all!

Frozen Waterfalls en route, we were considering starting the Lancashire Ice Climbing Club:






All in all, a very good 7.8 miles (12.55km) which took slightly longer than expected due to repeated immature endeavours mainly involving snow balls and yellow snow. Snow makes children out of us all you know.

The Pennine Bridleway above Cowpe Reservoir:



Ironically, by the amount of car tracks seen today, people with gas guzzling Chelsea tractors seem to enjoy driving on the gravel tracks in the snow, but it's mainly them who are making snowy winters a thing of the past in Britain.