A Lakes trip
Leafing through my logbook and piecing together a few memories I find a record of this May’s trip to the lakes. Add a few photos…
A light but persistant drizzle heralded the morning so Martin H, Steve C, John boy and I headed out along Mickleden in glorious cloud for a spot of ghyll scrambling up Troughton Beck. Some consistant scrambling with an interestingly green section near the end.
Now in cloud but with the drizzle still holding off we traversed along the side of Pike of Stickle. Some careful navigation later we were at the base of something resembling the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Some gardening later, we made it to some good (and wet) rock and then to the summit.
The path to the east lead to Dungeon Ghyll. By this time the drizzle had really set in as we scrambled down a path trod by Martin many moons ago. However, the promised abseil had multiplied in Martin’s absence to become three – for even better value! The middle abseil was the longest and wettest, and featured an adjacent cascade to test our abseiling skill.
Rejoining the path before any more slings needed to be sacrificed, we made our way to the ODG to finish off the day.
Sunday saw better weather so, with the addition of Martin S and Mervyn, we headed to White Ghyll for some climbing.
A promising start with Martin H leading most of Gordian knot. Martin then went on to an excellent lead of “Waste not want not”. On trying to follow, I was suddenly aware of the height part way along the traverse and took a swing. The day was finished off with a successful lead of the first pitch of Slip knot only slighly marred by another loss of confidence seconding the final pitch.
On the Monday morning, Martin and Steve headed off for some harder climbing while I headed off to Upper Scout Crag with the main crowd.
Jeremy lead the first pitch of Route 1 with confidence, followed by Stuart and then myself. My lead of the second pitch started off with a traverse to the right as suggested by the guide. The lack of polish, gear or holds should have suggested that this wasn’t the route that I was looking for (Jeremy: That’s definitely not HVDiff), but meeting Phil as he lead Zero Route finally confirmed that I’d wandered. A suprisingly social finish to the climb (Phil: Stop taking my gear placements!) made for an enjoyable climb to nicely wrap up the weekend.