For two days we hiked along the bottoms of immense canyons, in the shadows, jumping boulders, fording side streams, imagining Marco Polo doing the same thing.
Eventually you will come up against a small weir with a fast flowing side stream flowing in on your left hand side.
We pushed on and were just thinking that it wasn't going to be easy to get much further when we were rewarded by a waterfall on a side stream, a thin ribbon dropping perhaps forty feet to a platform and then further into a pool.
Police say 60-year-old Kenneth Jagger had been walking on tree trunks across the River Roch when he slipped, falling 10 feet into a side stream.
A side stream of the Quoile was visibly contaminated with human sewage and other wastes.
The Nidd was clear, probably would have been for another hour or so, but coloured water was already gushing in from side streams.
After a couple of side streams, a finger of forest, the most organic black tin sheet creations and an old gateway or two we found ourselves returned to our outward territory of Hamer Moor.
The mouths of side streams also attract fish - more so if there is some overhead cover from willows, alders or some other trees.