Nearing the 2,126ft summit of Fleetwith Pike, a hiker with windswept grey hair and a crook-handled walking stick strides out of the mist towards us. Given the remoteness of the encounter, I’m expecting at least a short exchange. And so it proves.

The weather (rapidly brightening), the going (good to firm) and the aesthetics of the spot (undeniably majestic) are all duly covered. But the man seems distracted; his eyes keep darting to our buoyancy aids.

My wife and daughter have theirs in the outer webbing of their packs. I’m still wearing mine. This corner of the Lakes is officially the wettest in England (‘in loving memory of a sunny day’, reads the plaque outside a nearby pub). Yet surely, I can imagine him reasoning, this is a precaution too far.

“We’re packrafting,” I volunteer. “Hiking and rafting.”

“I see,” he says, his manner suggesting otherwise. “So where are your… boats?”

The answer is that they’re in our packs: rolled up, neatly and unobtrusively, each consuming barely the space of a two-person tent. I’ve got a tandem. My wife, a single. Three twin-blade paddles, broken down into quarters, are shared between us, along with kayaking shoes, towels, some changes of clothes and, in my daughter’s pack, a Russian dolls arrangement of empty drybags.

We’re a happily self-contained amphibious unit and, truth be told, feeling rather smug about it.

In a few hundred yards, I know from previous sorties to these parts, the path will round the western flank of the pyramidal fell and one of the Lake District’s most compelling vistas will emerge: the mountain-crowded glacial valley of Buttermere, with its eponymous mere and neighbouring Crummock Water stretching half a dozen miles away towards the distant Solway Firth.

And while our fellow hikers will be constrained by the valley’s busy perimeter paths when they reach water level, we’ll be inflating (a touch performatively, now we’ve got the knack) our shiny-hulled craft and striking out through the glassily serene centre of this extraordinary valley.

Packrafting is nothing new. Variations of portable inflatable craft have been around for a hundred years or more. But it took until the turn of this century for them to become truly portable, durable and thus viable. Today’s models are sleek SUVs to the horse-drawn carts of the early days. They’re made from high-strength, lightweight fabrics such as TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane). They’re stable enough to carry large loads. Bikes even. Some can tackle white-water rapids.

Fuelled by the post-pandemic pivot to the great outdoors and glamorised by social media, demand is booming. “Packrafting had been growing and growing and then after Covid it just blew up,” says Emily Doig, marketing director of Alpacka Raft, with unfortunate phrasing. “It’s turned into such a cool thing.”