Trips & Reports 2010

Managed (just!) to get through three days of caving on a dodgy knee :S Hence the hard rating, did not want to do a Brown Hill :P Rigging the last two pitches in Gavel was awesome stuff!

An awesome trip -Gavel SRT is a really fun route. The original, well planned routes for everyone worked almost to plan - just with a little deviation from Toby, Marcus and Sam - involving less time overground for those three. Me and Chad headed down into the Gavel shake hole to find our SRT route P hangers, we did, as wel as finding Mike and Jennie\'s for the other Gavel route so shouted at them for a while until we saw Mike\'s... read more

What an awesome traverse!!

Yordas is amazing!!!

3 for fun, because I didn\'t actually get to go down the ropes... but I did get to watch some hippy musicians!

I walked into Bernies and was greeted by Chad saying that Boggarts was off that day due to his knee and Gingling the previous day, and I wasn\'t desperately pleased to hear Bull Pot being suggested as the alternative. Since no other suggestions appeared, off to Kingsdale it was. Perhaps it was retribution for mentioning on the way that it\'d been too long since I visited Kingsdale! I wasn\'t too annoyed at doing Bull Pot - although it\'s short, it was... read more

5 for hard becuase I was in pain for most of the trip :S Although one foot prussiking with a foot jammer was ok.

After making excellent time to the Dales, and having a nice efficient breakfast – with purchases, we got lost! We were looking for a place called new houses to park (making the walk to the cave half as long), but according to the map it didn’t exist and according to the Sat Nav it was actually Helwith Bridge pub – unlikely we though. After a call to Ade gave in and parked up in Horton for more of a trek.... read more

\'Fools paradise\' is one of the most beautiful I have seen in the Dales. We attempted both the big pitch and big rift routes, on the the big rift route we stopped at the thrutch (a 4 m tight slot with not footholds) knowing that I was in a fit state to get back up and by that point it was only me and Marcus needing to carry three tacklsacks. On the big pitch route (a 65 m shaft) we... read more

I only go to show caves don\'t I? Much longer than I remember it being, the streamway was pretty impressive when lit up to the ceiling! We had a look at Battlefield, then went off to the sumps, and to our surprise we got through 3 of them. Not bad! Ben and his neoprene hood led the way directly through them whilst Mike and I picked the drier routes, preventing soggy ears. We thought we looked everywhere following that, but apparently we... read more

An awesome day down GG, adding to amount of times that I have had to do the long walk up, probably representing 10% of my trips. Seeing all the GG permits on the YUCPC diary makes me happy. After the extremely disappointing failure of a trip a few months ago, I was rather happy to have got to Farrar Hall. The best section of the Whitsun series is beyond the natural barrier of the Font, with a vast array of really... read more

Faff: Due to taking Peak cavern key to Titan entrance :P Hardcore: Derigging Titan, together with carrying a full tacklsack up the top section of Titan and the entrance shaft was a right good laugh. Scummyness: As well at a useless oversuit, a massive hole in the undesuit lead to leakage :S

Additional faff provided by my undersuit problems.

we had a person not going into the cave due to over currying the night before.

4 for sum because it was really muddy but not in a bad way.

http://www.peakdistrictcaving.info/caveguides/peak_cavern_pt5.pdf Sam and George went to Mark & Angela’s Wedding Present Passage. Ann waited at the bottom and I went up a shaft which turned out to be pretty pointless. There is still one up rope and several down ropes that I\'d like to look at in the NCC Shafts at some point. One day it would be good to see a survey that shows quite how close the Avens are to the surface, the bat skeleton indicates that there must be... read more

In and out in 70mins. The windpipe was suprisingly high and this should have raised the hardcore level but this was canceled out by the shortness of the nasty bit and the overall shortness of the trip.

Great trip. Entrance series is a bit grotty and drags on a bit, especially on the way out with a gigantic tackle sack! West chamber is absolutely stunning though and well worth the effort & the pitch with the in-situ guideline is excellent fun too. Shame we couldn\'t do the exchange and avoid the long exit, ultra faff cuz of a stupidly late start, got back home at 3:30am, quite ambitious for a post-titan Sunday trip :-S Hardcore 3 due to... read more

Maskhill is a fantastic trip, requiring a hell of a lot of rope and some pretty challenging rigging for those of us with less reach. Much of it was clearly bolted by an 8-foot giant who believed short people should not be rigging. Enormous Y-hangs are all over the place - the biggest being at the top of the last pitch into Oxlow West Chamber - both arms about two metres long! A lot of banter was had with me... read more

Three ropes down JH meant that trip was off so we did Giants round trip. Hard 3 due to uber hangover - ouch what a headache. Formations at the top more than made up for it though and Toby cheered me up with good banter!

Titan is one I have been looking forward to since I started caving. You can read the numbers and look at the pictures but it really doesn\'t show the scale anything like being there. First impressions was Mike beckoning me to the edge as I was second in then shouting \"HELLO!\" and hearing it echo around the whole chamber for 10 seconds. Incredible! Then the abseil.....it just goes on and on and on. Then you hit the all familiar event horizon that... read more

We bottomed it! Hardcore 3 due to forgetting wellies and wearing normal shoes, and some hard derigging. More to follow when Ive had some sleep.

Really enjoyable cave. Sidewinder was an excellent route. Best part? Being the second down the 90. I was figuring the easiest way onto the pitch head for myself.....turned out to be one of my favourite techniques - clip as much shit in as possible and then slide through the squeezy bit onto the pitch and hope everything holds

MArble steps is a great SRT cave. We ariived at the shakehole with the plan of doing a sidewinder-gully exchange but there was a team on gully so we just did sidewindrer. Rigging it was an excellent experience and so far is the best rig Iv\\\'e done. The traverse around gully route to the old fossil passage is non-trivial to rig in shoes as the sloping footholds had a generous covering of soil and leaves but it wasnt too gripping... read more

Thread a rope through metal set into rock and glide into a hidden world, stained by twinkling summer light, and the wind in the trees, for what are these? Days of mine to shoot the breeze!

Great trip! Probably the most scared I\'ve been in a cave so far. I see this as a good thing :D have a videons http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=776788727615&ref=mf

After an immense night with MUSC at the TSG. Me, George Bunyan, Christina Guam, Kevin Francis and Mandy Fu (of MUSC). Made our way into peak cavern alongside one Jim Lister of TSG and ink sump fame. After making a fool of myself in front of the tour by slipping over on some slippy rock! we made our way down to buxton water sump where Jim quickly dissapeared into the darkness and his long standing project of which we would be... read more

After a very delayed start to the rescue (during which time I'm sure "Mr Portly" would have died from suspension trauma), Toby, Maz, Marcus, Jennie, Ade and myself headed down to the bottom of the cave, where we found Andy and Laura who explained the problem. I was volunteered to do do the rescue and opted for a cut-rope. After putting my handjammer on in case my lock fell off while reaching upside down for Mr Portly's cowstails, I clipped... read more

Definitely a 3 for hardcore due to the difficulties of amputing Mr Portly\'s legs (one very heavy tacklesack) while hanging in ridiculously uncomfortable position! Overall though a definite success due to the incredible rigging and teamwork on the second pitch. Hopefully the problems we had with the casualty disintegrating wouldn\'t happen with a real person in the stretcher.....unless we were doing something very wrong. Either way, I can see why putting a human in there for hauling practice is a... read more

Haul Haul Haul it was a lot of fun setting up the hauling rig and then seeing it in work, with remote deviations and a back up rig, it was an immense sight that had quite a bit of kit holding it together must have had nearly £500 worth of metal and rope about.

Faff level of 3 was all deliberate faff. Still left before the rescue people despite trying our hardest :-p Really nice trip. All pretty easy, and mostly walking passages (nice ones). Need to go back and do the pitches when not tired/hungover. We started off by popping over to Echo Aven to rig for the top sink-pippikin team, only to find the fixed rope had been replaced and is probably fine to use for a good while now (also better placed now... read more

The classic trip in Easegill that everyone who loves Easegill should aspire to. Don\'t take my word for it, it says something similar in NFTFH. Generally the caving is relatively easy. Link Crawl was the only wet bit, and Pipikin was tiring but not horrendous. The challenge is the sheer amount and complexity of cave to navigate. I strongly recommend doing it in sections first to build up experience of the route (Top to Lancaster,... read more

It only took us over a decade to get this one done! NFTFH reckons 8-10 hours, 12-14 if you don\'t know the route. I\'ll echo what Richard said in that if you don\'t know where you\'re going then this would be quite a serious undertaking, and as such quite a lot of homework is required. It initially seemed like the amount of food we were taking was more than a little over-the-top but with hindsight it was most definitely a... read more

I thought Rescue training, whilst an exciting challenge, was quite sobering. It was reassuring that if anything did happen in Montenegro people would have an idea about what to do - but I don't think I quite appreciated quite how much effort goes into moving an injured person a very short distance in a relatively easy cave. To me, it seemed that everyone worked well together, and focused on the task at hand, which give me more confidence that we... read more

NOTE TO SELF-- DON\'T GET INJURED it will be hard work especially in wretched rabbit to get an injured person out, we only managed a distance that you could walk to in way less than 5 minutes in a couple of hours. very hard work.