About Me

Alvina Labsvirs – That’s me, the person behind Reasons to go North!

I am a UK Mountain Leader, teacher, educator, blogger, photographer.

I take small groups of people around the Lake District to places I know and love.  No matter how inexperienced, how old or young, it is never to late to start to enjoy the hills.

Despite my name, I was born and brought up in Cumbria, in a small South Lakes village when it was still Westmorland.  Like many of us born into rural villages I couldn’t wait to escape.  At 18 I left to begin a haphazard journey through education and life.  Various cities, various jobs, this country and occasionally, outside of it.

I love mountains and have hiked them all over the world but Cumbria has always been ‘home’.

And eventually I made plans to get back.

At times I wondered why.  After a soggy weekend in the Lakes, drained from M6 Madness, the warm Warwickshire air hit me as I stepped out of an air-conditioned cocoon.  Could this really be the same country?

Not sure who I was trying to convince a tightly closed, never public, Facebook album, Reasonstomovenorth started to grow.

Pictures of quiet tarns.  Deep green hills. Dramatic sky and jagged horizons.  Splendid isolation with colour splashed rocks.  Places where the detirius of an industrial past lingers around corners.

With houses drawn by Beatrix Potter, where the Brothers Grim gave a hand in the design of bridges.  Whoever filled in the details and joined the dots, they knew exactly the colour mix and light.  Just enuough to make you linger a little too long and may be come back to live.

As I did