To this day Carm still says she couldn’t believe it, despite seeing it with her own eyes! (fnaar). It’s an awkward little number with an unprotectable rub-point in the narrow section to add to the fun, opening marginally to a free-hanging narrow rebelay and more front-and-back rubbing to another rebelay which is mercifully larger and a final drop down to a trickling stream pot Good traverses follow to a rather majestic cleanwashed fluted inlet aven and a glorious bold step over an impressive black hole, made reassuringly not-black by my Prototype Viper headlight which scorches rock into softly rounded magma. Another meandering traversy tightmare leads quickly to Pitch 4 and similarly to Pitch 5, with the added excitement of the traverse being bottomless[tm] and with an aweinspiring 13 second echo. Hmm. It’s rather vertical, this, methinks. I didn’t sleep well that night!
View up Pitch 1: an awesome introduction
Pitch 5 was the event horizon in more than one way – firstly it starts as a very narrow pitch in a high traverse leading to a sodding awkward pinch with black space below – hardly the most reassuring bit of SRT, best tackled with your Stop on cowstails for anorexic advantage – this instantly bells out into a frickin-heeyou-juh shaft (pronounced “huge”) comprising a series of pitches and associated rigging malarkeydom – P5 30m, P6 & P7 71m, P8 & P9 78m ending in “Touch Down! – yeehah!.... new ground beckons!”.
This is not the sort of place where the panicked distant echoes of “Below!” would like to be heard ever again. I don’t think I’ve run for cover that fast before, or since. Anyhoo, we soon had a party of four (myself, Carm, Joe and Chris Backhouse) and we tag-teamed turns descending the next parts of the cave,…. Moonmilk Pitch 13m, Mud Slide Pitch 20m, Mud Traverse Pitch 16m… all rigged off naturals and leading to a…. streamway! Cool! – we now had a significan t v er t i cal system alter character and become a horizontal system; the excitement wasn’t containable and a lot of exclamations occurred with each twist and turn - a couple of
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Andy Clark gets to grips with the confined third pitch