The Scrambling of a Gorge

I have grown to really love Thursday’s over here, because Thursday means I have Outdoor Pursuits, which means that I get to do things I would have never imagined I would so. So far in O.P. I’ve gotten to go surfing, low/high ropes courses, kayaking, sea level traversing and now gorge scrambling. Now some of you might wonder what exactly is gorge scrambling. I thought the same thing. Turns out its one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done. How gorge scrambling works is you a) find a gorge or a part of a mountain that has been cut away by a river that runs from the top of the mountain down the side of the mountain. Since these rivers have been flowing for hundreds if not thousands of years so there is quite a deep gorge cut into the mountain. The gorge we went to is in Conway Valley and is called the Afon Ddu (Black River) gorge. As for the part b) once you find a gorge and have all of the appropriate gear you “scramble” or essentially climb up the gorge. Doesn’t sound to terribly difficult right? Wrong. Since it is a river that is flowing from the top of the mountain there are waterfalls and pools and rapid like places throughout the gorge and the rocks are extremely slippy and there is lots of moss that you want to try and leave undisturbed. Needless to say we knew we were going to be getting wet so we wore full wetsuits to keep warm and protect us from the rather chilly water we could potentially fall into. We started by doing some rock hopping which is similar to walking on the big rocks down by Lake Michigan in Kenosha or on Rib Mountain in Wausau so that wasn’t too bad. After a bit of rock hopping, and trying to stay dry, we got our first feel of the Afon Ddu water when we crawled through the Elephant’s Ass. Yes, the Elephants Ass. It is two very large boulders with a small space at the bottom that you can squeeze through and pop up on the other side. It looks as though you are climbing into a large stone elephants buttock. Oh and since you are climbing up there is rushing water underneath you. It was awesome!! We continued up the gorge squeezing ourselves through rock formations and tight squeezed and in and out of the water. We got to this one part and there was a small pool which a nice rock that you could slide on so we slide head first on the little rock into the pool, just like a slide! We then got to do a bigger slide up a little farther where we took off our life jackets and stepped into them, so it looked like we had weird bulking diapers on, and slide down a longer “slide” into another pool. We did trust falls off the edge of rocks into pools and climbed up some waterfalls and even got to stand underneath one of them for a while. Words don’t describe how amazing it was. The gorge itself is so incredibly beautiful I didn’t take my camera with me since we were going to be getting wet but one of the guys in my group took his so I’m going to try and get some pictures from him a little later. But it was easily the best day of O.P. we’ve had so far, at least in my eyes. Oh and once we got to the top of the gorge we got to jump off a small cliff into a real deep pool below us. So much fun!!!