It was mid-May 1998. I was nineteen and still getting used to the idea that, having left school, I could travel independently. There was still a lingering feeling that I ought to ask permission before heading to the railway station with a bag and disappearing for the weekend.
A few weeks earlier, I had returned from Knoydart in the Scottish Highlands, where I had spent more than a week helping to run a school expedition with friends from the Stancliffe Hall outdoor circle. Ad, Charlotte, James and Tim had been there too. Along with Steve, they formed a group of friends who appeared in many of my early adventures. We had eaten together, climbed together and spent time in the mountains and pubs around Inverie.
The Welsh 3000s were coming up the following weekend, a much more demanding traverse that Martin and Tim had invited me to join. Before that next adventure began, I travelled back to Derbyshire to see Ad and Charlotte.
Derbyshire has always felt like my spiritual home, even though I did not move there until a month before my son was born.
On Saturday, I took the train and Charlotte gave me a lift to the pub. We sat outside in the sunshine with Ad and James, and for a few hours that was enough: friends, daylight and the easy conversation of people who had recently shared an expedition. It was the kind of weekend that did not need to be dramatic.
On Sunday afternoon, we drove to Harborough Rocks, a modest limestone outcrop near Brassington, to practise leading.
By the spring of 1998, I had led a few routes. Oberon at Tremadog had been my first lead and an important milestone, but I was still learning what it meant to move from being taught and taken climbing to placing my own protection, making my own decisions about a route and accepting responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.
I no longer remember which routes we climbed that afternoon or the precise conditions. I remember the feel of the rough, pocketed limestone beneath my hands, and the mixture of concentration, uncertainty and gradual satisfaction that came with taking the lead myself.
It was not a dramatic day, but it formed part of a quiet transition. I was becoming the kind of climber who arranged their own climbing rather than waiting for someone else to organise it.
We had decided to climb around the Trident area, but were briefly delayed when a helicopter passed directly overhead. It was low enough for us to stop and wait, and I remember a mountain rescue team practising nearby. It was one of those small interruptions that feels significant at the time and is soon forgotten as your attention returns to preparing to be at the sharp end of the rope.
When we moved on, we discovered that we were not alone. A group from WUMC, Warwick University Mountaineering Club, were also climbing at Harborough Rocks that day.
They were on what the club called a “girls’ meet”, a trip organised to give the women in the club a supportive environment in which to climb together and share skills. The destination had deliberately been kept secret. I remember thinking that, had I known they would be there, I might have suggested that we climb somewhere else.
I recognised some of the women and was conscious that they were trying to create their own space. At the same time, the chance encounter reminded me of how difficult it could be to disappear completely from university life. Here I was, attempting to spend a private weekend away from Warwick, climbing with friends from the Stancliffe world, and I had still managed to run into members of my university mountaineering club.
The encounter made visible what was happening in my life that spring. I was moving between two overlapping but quite different outdoor communities.
The Stancliffe expedition world, represented by Ad, Charlotte, Tim and Steve, was built around mentors, longer friendships, shared expeditions and a great deal of history. Warwick University Mountaineering Club represented my new student life: peers, club trips, elections and a much louder social culture.
The two worlds did not usually collide. When they did, it felt both inevitable and slightly surreal.
When the rain started, we abandoned the rocks and returned to the pub. I remember little more of that Sunday evening beyond the conversation, the transition from climbing back to ordinary life and the particular contentment that came from spending a weekend with friends in a place where I felt at home.
This was one of several apparently ordinary weekends during what became a very busy spring. The Knoydart expedition had given me time in the mountains, greater fitness and new confidence. The Welsh 3000s were waiting the following weekend. The mountaineering club was beginning to feel like a genuine community.
Yet it was the smaller, seemingly unremarkable weekends like this one, driving to a modest crag with friends, practising leading and sitting in Derbyshire pubs, that felt at the time like the real substance of my life.
Looking back, that is what I remember. Not a particular route or dramatic moment, but the growing realisation that I no longer needed to wait for someone else to organise my adventures.
I could travel independently, arrange my own climbing, decide which routes to lead and choose which friends to visit. The weekend at Harborough Rocks with Ad and Charlotte was a small part of that transition.
It did not feel particularly significant then.
Now it does.