OUTSLEETS BECKSaturday 26 July 2008We were up and breakfasted surprisingly early for a YSS School meet.This may have been due to a steady night in the pub (Keith was in the US of A!) and a sensible bedtime of about 1 a.m. after getting kicked out of the pub for not drinking fast enough.I thought 4 pints of cough medicine plenty (I seemed to have developed an annoying cough – it was annoying me I so I can only apologise to everyone else).The morning was glorious – quite a turn up for the books for a summer weekend in 08!We were in no rush as we packed some ropes for Magnetometer Pot which is what the calendar was urging us to do and is quite close to the YSS Hut anyway.Once we motivated ourselves into action, a convoy of 3 vehicles sped off to Neil’s Ing only to find no farmer in residence.Having waited a while and considered our options we decided it would be unfair to go without prior permission and just leave a note so another plan was quickly hatched.Damian’s suggestion of Outsleets Beck was quickly taken up – especially since none of the rest of us had done it before.We couldn’t have had better conditions either – a nice sunny dry stable day. Our convoy sped off again to park up with magnificent views of Pen-y-Ghent, “only ½ hour to the top” reckoned Richard (with the incredibly long legs), but failed to impress us by running up in his wellies.A fairly steady wander around the track south of Pen-y-Ghent Gill leads to the beck and a short 60 m amble downsteam finds the entrance and small dam beside a pool.Water levels were ok and we followed Damian into the narrow entrance, opening onto a short climb down which then becomes walking passage with climbs followed by crawls and a little pitch, down-climbable going in – but a rope is almost essential to get back up.There are couple of nice pitches with a low wet crawl between them.Two white cave fish, one about 6 inches long (150 mm for any youths reading this) were spotted in this shallow stream and they didn’t seem too bothered by a big ugly yellow creature with a red head and large bright central eye staring at them.At the bottom of Deluge Pot walking passage takes you to a canal, Damian’s lead at this point involved a dynamic leap, lunge and sploosh across the deepest bit, then he disappeared around the corner and was gone.Not being much of a water baby (just a baby) my less dramatic drift across technique got me to a narrowing rift in chest deep water (depending how tall you are of course).I have not until fairly recently ever experienced the feeling of being ‘the old fat one’, until I fell into the company of those mega fit human / dwarf troglodyte, hybrid super caver types (i.e. Lee, Lisa, Damian, Fiona W, Jason, Simon R etc etc).Well, the narrowing rift in chest deep water was narrowing too much at water level so I had to thrutch up above the water and along head first horizontally in a wider bit higher up in the rift then drop back into the water after the ‘nip’.By this time a backlog of people had emulated Damian’s dyno leap and were dancing around behind me in the water.Once the cork (me) had popped out of the bottle neck, the fizz of cavers behind shot through.The ‘duck’ beyond was easy after that.I’m not the only one who ain’t keen on deep water and with some encouragement everyone was soon through to follow an awkwardly angled rift that was a > or = size 8 wellie wedger.A bridging climb down lead to a low bedding plane crawl which Lisa didn’t like the smell of and that was good enough reason for the rest of us to head for the surface.The wet rift was not one a bit of a problem on the way out and a dynamic pool leap was easier the other way across.It must have been sunny on the surface because the flat out crawl in water between the pitches was almost tropical.Lee and Lisa derigged and the whole trip took little over 2 hours. It was a fun trip too, but would not be a good place to be when wet. T8 and I remembered it being on the calendar some years previously as a school meet but it was an incredibly sodden day and we cannot recall what we eventually did instead, just memories of looking out of the coach and seeing torrents gushing down hillsides followed by the sensible decision of “No way – not today”. We probably ended up in a pub - while the walkers got very wet…. .Those along:Damian & Fiona, Chris T8, Lee, Lisa, Mike (Skeggy), Richard Rae and me (Stu Weston).Back at the cars I hope we didn’t disturb the artist too much, who was sitting at his easel peacefully painting, when we all stripped off to get changed – well he had parked a bit close … So if you are ever in an art gallery and see a painting of a Dales landscape with Lee’s arse in the foreground, you have been warned.
