Because It's There

When a mountain is as great as Gable, what more of an excuse do you need to climb it? Oh, yes: winter.

- Ben Weeks

I'm going to let you in on a bit of insider knowledge. When articles like this are written it’s preferable that they have some kind of ‘hook’. There’s a whole bunch of hills out there, and it’s helpful to justify why we’re telling you about mountain A rather than peak B. This is no great secret; in fact it’s a fairly typical element of magazine writing. I’ll tell you what is a secret, though: up until recently, I’d never been up Great Gable. Yeah, I know. It’s one of the elite Lakeland fells, which any hillwalker worth their salt absolutely positively HAS to have climbed. And I hadn’t. So, with a day of on-and-off weather free in the Lake District and with no other objective leaping out to sell itself, putting that embarrassing omission right became the ‘hook’.