Knacker Trapper Hole - 25th Apr 2010

Sunday April 25th 2010

Members present: Chad B,  Marcus Roby,  Toby Buxton

Described in NFTFH as an ‘evening trip’!!! This lead me to completely underestimate this cave in thinking that it would be similar to Jean pot, not so, turned out to be an epic in terms of strength and determination. This turned out to be horrendously difficult and extremely tight throughout. Carrying a tacklsack just made it even worse, right from the entrance, I think on the way out without Toby that tacklsack was not going to get through Bosch Rift. There were so many things that even I did not fancy, all of the right hand bends were quite difficult to negotiate, I spend most of the trip without my SRT kit on, and I even for the first time ever had to take my helmet off. In the end though I don’t think I was destroyed as much as my oversuit was in shreds, the cave rock is really sharp.

A nice thing about the cave is the complete lack of p-hanger and spits spoiling the walls (not that you would want to take any drill etc down here anyway) so it was all of natural using slings etc, which is always good fun trying to back up off whatever you can find. The second pitch is extremely tight at top, I had to attach my rack to my cows tails to get through, coming back out wasn’t much better.

University challenge at the bottom is a series of multilevel rifts that eventually gets you in the streamway, and I have to say that they are more sketchy and scary that those in Wales, due to some of the extremely exposed free climbs involved in addition to the roped. It was also very unnerving the amount of loose rocks that were easily dislodged.

It was a fine trip non-the-less though, the most difficult I’ve ever done so far and will probably seem better in a few days but I have to say that I never want to go back there ever again!!!