A fantastic day out with the family on Saturday exploring Gasgale Gill and its many wonderful gems. It was a great opportunity for Emily to practice some scrambles, and also to take some photos for the Lakeland Way project; this section of the long-distance walk will be a ‘point of interest’ showing an alternative route at the beginning of Gasgale Gill, which includes short scrambles, waterfalls, deep pools and of course ‘Turtle Rock’. Can you spot it?
What I really love about days like this, is that we can mix family days out with recces and researching for the Lakeland Way. These will be great memories for us all, but especially for our daughter Emily.
www.lakelandway.uk
This trip was also an opportunity to do a final test pitch of our new X Mid 2 tent before taking it on any summit camps. The reason why we’ve not slept in this tent yet is because we wanted to wait for the Pro2+ groundsheet to arrive and then to see how everything connects together, and what order to best do so. We now realise it’s best to pitch like so:
Fly with four corner pegs
Two poles
Two door pegs
Two ridge-line pegs
Open vents
Layout the footprint
Roll out the inner on the footprint and connect to the fly
Connect the footprint to the inner
Two pole pegs
The four panel pegs will be staked before settling down for the night.
We have decided that we will always pitch and pack everything separate; it’s so easy to set up so this is where the X Mid excels. Saying that, however, like a lot of people have said previously, we are also finding the connection hooks a little tricky. I may look into changing these after we’ve camped out a few times.
Please note: Gasgale Gill is a SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) and is a protected area. By no means is it to be used as a wild camping area. We were extremely careful not to disturb the ground and only pitched for 30 minutes while we had our family picnic beside the cascades.
