Saddleworth is one of the furthest commutes for us to get to, we are trying to get these difficult locations completed sooner rather than later as we are constantly racing against the time of the sunset. The sun sets earlier and earlier every night and by the time we hit September we will find it almost impossible to capture the scene in the right light. Tonights mission was The Trinnacle. I knew it would be the most difficult location we had attempted so far, little did I know how difficult it would turn out to be...
We left straight after work with a quick stop off at the chip shop on the way, we then had to endure some awful traffic on the way to Saddleworth, it took forever. We arrived at the car park at about 6:30pm and started our walk. The walk soon turned into a hike, a hike up a very very steep hill (mountain if I am honest). It was a brutal ascent and took a lot longer than anticipated. We aren't the fittest people in the world and we did struggle getting to the top. We took a couple of quick snaps at the summit but knew that the precise location was still quite a walk away:
A fairly mediocre image at best but we were quite far behind schedule at this point. You can see from the image how high up we are, it really took it out of us! We carried on across the top, we were rushing, all of a sudden Tracy cried out in pain. She had misplaced her foot and twisted her ankle. We had to stop for a short while and assess whether we could continue. Tracy was adamant that we carry on so we did. We ran into a group of lovely student doctors that helped with her ankle, it was a bit of good luck actually, they had painkillers with them which were gratefully received. We got to the Trinnacle with only a short amount of time to spare and just about managed to capture this image:
I think the rock formation looks great in this even though the sky is a bit blown out. At this point we had to make a decision though, do we go back the way we came which took over 2 hours? Or do we go the short way down to the path that you can see at the bottom right of the image? We decided to go the short way, at least most of the walk back to the car would be on a path. In hindsight it was the wrong choice, we had to climb down a huge number of small waterfalls and cascades whilst it was getting very dark. I probably can't describe to you how scary some of it was, at one point we weren't sure whether or not we could actually climb down, especially with Tracy's ankle hurting so much. We had torches but with the bags we were carrying it really wasn't easy at all.
After what felt like forever we got to the bottom with a huge sigh of relief. We walked back to the car which took another hour or so, it wasn't until about 12:30am that we got back home. We have both been feeling the effects of this one today, so tonight we will make it an easy one. Tracy said "if I never see the Trinnacle again it'll be too soon". I think that sums it up nicely.