Country diary: fell climbers leave their mark on an English Alp

A bleary-eyed start in the early-morning winter dark; a couple of coffee-fuelled hours in the car; a stiff and impatient pull up the path to Birkhouse Moor. Finally, the Helvellyn massif comes into view; a huge throne of snow and rock shining pristinely in the sun like an English Alp.

After a few days of ferocious storms, the skies have cleared in time for the weekend and the fells have re-emerged with a snowy facelift. The fleeting window of opportunity during an unpredictable winter pulls people from far and wide; we hear Brummie, scouse and geordie on the way up.

Related: Helvellyn forecast: cloudy, with wet rock and retreating walkers

We make a beeline for the famous glacial handiwork that is Striding Edge. In “full” winter conditions, safely negotiating this narrow, stegosaurus-back ridge – a metre across at its tightest – requires a few mountaineering tools. We pull out ice axes, attach crampons, and start out across the arête. It is fun, exhilarating work; a combination of careful teetering and hands-on scrambling, with snow-plastered slopes falling away either side.

But as it turns out, snow coverage on the ridge itself is patchy. Clambering over a slab, I am struck by the volume of crampon scratches scarring the rock. Many climbs are marked by this involuntary graffiti, so to see them here is unsurprising, but the cumulative impact seems particularly striking.

Conditions like these, where snow and ice mingle with bare rock, make such scratches and defacements more likely. I wonder how many of the ones I see today are new. Later that weekend, one of the felltop assessors (mountaineers who assess conditions on Helvellyn daily) tweets concern at the number of fresh scrape marks. It’s the sort of ethical question that can cause Tolstoy-sized threads on climbing forums. In marginal conditions, can activities requiring sharp bits of metal be justified? Where to draw the line between safety and conservation?

As temperatures warm and prime winter weather gets rarer, this may become more of a sticking point. But beyond that, in some winterless future, I wonder if these marks will be seen like ice age rock art or cave paintings: a physical insight into an older, colder age.