The drizzly dawn of North Wales confronted us as we shuffled out of the dorms to breakfast. Luckily it was potato waffle day which was scoffed quickly in the anticipation of today’s activity. We met up with our team to be informed of the daily activity. It turned out to be orienteering and gorge walking (the more exciting of the two). The day consisted of 2 orienteering courses, one around the centre and the other around the local area and town. Our equipment, in small quantity, only consisted of a map and answer sheet. Within a maximum of 20 minutes the first course was complete so we headed to the next location. The journey in the van was always made fun by the cool ones at the back of the bus (Sherlock and Watson). The thumping music made our enthusiasm reach the next level, the nicknames also helped.
After a short journey to the local town we hopped out and tried to locate ourselves. It took everyone about 5 minutes to complete this; however the group including Sherlock, Watson and Harry Ramsden took all of 20 minutes. We trekked down the nearby road to find points, that were labelled on our map. Our instructor, Jez, believed we had worked too much with the same people. So we were split into groups by Jez instead. Most of the groups completed this pretty speedily but two groups struggled to find last few, causing us to stay put underneath a fairly large tree.
The bus journey on the way back we were entertained with the ideas of Will, who wanted to pimp the van. He wanted a cargo net on the ceiling to hold our bags as well as a larish green exterior. Harry Ramsden gave an input by saying that we should have large speakers on every other seat. These ‘improvements’ were not likely to happen but a boy can dream.
When we returned the deliberation of the three options started to occur. They were:
- Go To The Gorge And Be Miserable
- Go To The Gorge And Be Happy
- Sleep (Sherlock’s Idea)
All the team members voted for option 3 but we were out ruled by Jez, Hodge and Long Legs (Karl).
So we boarded the bus again and set off to the gorge. We later arrived and started walking towards the bottom of the water avalanche (a.k.a the gorge). We trudged up the rocks and shortly came to our first pool. This just so happened to be a sliding pool in which you slid of the rocks into the freezing water below. This just fuelled our adrenaline as we began our ascent.
About half an hour later we came to a cave which looked extremely daunting in the eyes of everyone. From a viewing platform above we watched half the group stumble through a cave and waterfall. The two halves then swapped over so the now soaked ones could also have a laugh as they watched people step through the so called washing machine. Not long after we arrived at the summit of the gorge which commenced our day of map reading and climbing a flowing river.
By Alisha Holmes and Jack Whitehead