My trip to St Bees
In the summer holidays me, my mum and Rob all had a week’s trip to the Lake District. We wanted to go there to climb at St. Bees. It was a long 3 hours drive in our big van up north. Surprisingly, it wasn’t raining when we arrived at our caravan, so we set out to Ambleside for some lunch and most importantly to buy a jet-boil and rehydrated meals. Rob was very excited about buying the jet boil and couldn’t wait to try it out. The next day soon came around, and we set off in the morning to St Bees. Along the way we stopped off at the service station and had some breakfast. It was a 2 hour drive to our destination.
I was really excited to climb as I’ve only climbed outdoors in Font and a bit on Stanage and I heard it was a great place to climb from Tom Newman, at the Depot (Nottingham). When we arrived at St Bees, the sun was out and we had our climbing gear ready. There was a nice 3 minute walk along the coast to get the cliff face. Finding the rocks was quite difficult, as we missed the path to go down to the rock, and took another one which was a long way away from the rocks. Eventually we found the rocks and had a look at all the climbs. We were right at the sea front so it was really windy. The rock was sandstone and felt really nice to hold on to. My main achievements were that I did 1 7A and 2 6Cs. I was quite happy with that as I find climbing on rock really different to climbing indoors.
After a nice day climbing on the rocks, we headed back to the van, as we just got to the van, it started
raining. Thankfully we didn’t get wet. We decided to go to the nearest campsite and sleep in our van. We ate our hydrated meals for tea with boiling water from Rob’s Jet-boil and surprisingly they were very nice. I had pasta with tomato and garlic sauce. We were right at the sea front and it was really, really windy and it was raining loads. It rained constantly hard all throughout the night, apparently, but that didn’t disturb my twelve hours sleep! It was actually comfy in the back of the van and I slept really well despite the rain and the wind.
The next morning we got up and set off back to the caravan. Along the way we decided to go check out the Bowder Stone. The Bowder Stone is really crimpy with sharp rock. I only tried a few easy climbs as my fingers tips hurt from the day before. I flashed 2 6B’s and did a few other climbs. then we headed into Keswick for a snack.
