Trips & Reports

Having been a Main Chamber whore for some time now and watching Sid Peruo’s film The Lost River of Gaping Gill I was intend on heading into the Far Country. I set about recruiting some reprobates; Alistair ‘Lumens’ Rollinson, Ban Doothby and our resident Scots member Rachel Findlay. It was decided that we would meet up at the container at 0700 on Tuesday morning in order to try and miss the worst of the Harrogate traffic. The morning started amusingly,... read more

Faff-tastic was one way to describe this trip, addmitedly not all of our doing. We all fancied a relatively short trip, and so Walmslers recomended this. We met at the much more civilised time of 10, left by 10.30 but hit traffic (faff no.1). After stopping for copius amounts of cream cakes for second breakfast (an essesntial not a faff!) we eventually reached Kingsdale, where we had to arrange a callout in an area of weak signal (faff no.2). We... read more

Twas reet early one morning in May When Walmslers did rise from the hay He thought as he ate his breakfast pie: “Let’s go down Otter Hole in the Vale of Wye”. So he hopped in his black chav-mobile And stopping for coffee at Keele, By 7 reached the campsite at Chepstowe Finding the others all ready to go. Andy H, Vicky B, German Sophie, And to get them all psyched, Andy G From there, they all did a-hasten To meet their great leader, Pete Mason. Now the walk through the woodland... read more

The indisputable caving gem of Fountains Fell according to the Black Book. A cracking trip with loads of variation and just the right amount of challenge. Mark was keen to return to bottom Gingling after his first trip here last year (see Vicky's trip report). The faff began when we arrived at the Dale Head car park and in completely un-forecast rain. Not wanting to get changed in the cold and wind and rain was thinly disguised as concern about... read more

After connecting Jenga and Excalibur about four weeks prior to this trip, the stage was set for someone to do the full grand tour and through trip. Unfortunately, our digging group, after many months of wallowing in the mud and water around the connection point were quite fed up of it and so the task fell to a club outside of our digging circles to take the glory. I was honoured to be taking a team of fine underground explorers... read more

Now that Jenga and Excalibur pots have been connected by the efforts of the digging team it was decided that YUCPC should pop over the Yorkshire Moors and give it a go, and a great sporting trip it was with brilliant trip down Bogg Hall to finish of the day (and wash ourselves off ;-) ). The 45min journey from York to the moors was a nice change to the usual 2.5hour journeys to the dales even if I was a... read more

After our excursion into the Excalibur system, I was quite keen to have a go at Bogg Hall, if partly to wash off some of the mud! The entrance is doable with a handline, and we were very quickly at the bottom, sitting in an inlet amongst the bird remains and otter poop. A short distance to the main streamway and we were splashing upstream. Low air space is the theme of the middle third of the cave, starting off... read more

A great Sunday trip, taking us a very leisurely 3 three hours to see all the sights, including the fantastic Lu Blue sump. The trip contained almost every type of crawling – on sand, in water, on cobbles, on flat limestone, on soil, on small prickly stones – and we did seem to spend a lot of our trip on our knees, good practice for the more gruelling northern stuff. Also there was climbing, meandering through boulder chokes and slithering... read more