Bye George Pot to the Grand Cascade - 04/06/2011

Saturday June 4th 2011

Members present: Adam Walmsley,  Caitlin Brumby,  Mark Sims,  Toby Buxton

Bye George is cool! To find it, go see if you can park at Leck Fell House (we got to change in the barn!), then walk down the hill through two gates. The first fairly flat field is the right one, and the shakehole is a fairly obvious double one on a direct diagonal out from the far left corner of the field, if you see what I mean.

Negotiating the entrance pipe involves battling spiders. At the bottom some crawling downstream brings you to the 5m pitch, where you can find some fairly ok tatt (bit mouldy though!). We rigged our own rope anyway, and since we weren't planning on passing the grand cascade, we dumped our srt kits at the bottom. About ten minutes downstream the first wet bit is reached - a sideways crawl in about 6 inches of water. Caitlin declared I was 'not a pansy' after I'd wriggled through, which gave me a warm fuzzy feeling :) All the more welcome since my left side was now cold and wet.

Another 10/20 minutes of streamway fun leads to the second, slightly more pleasant squeeze, which is very short but quite low and goes round a tight left hand bend. I dug the stones out of the bottom of this one as my shoulders barely fitted, and with the likes of Walmslers hanging around more space was definitely required. Unsurprisingly, this one is best negotiated on your right hand side, making you now wet on both sides. Hooray.

The backbreaker is next, and is rather annoying. Definitely requires the helmet to be removed, which then gets in your way and doesn't float. Caitlin tackled it first, which was nice of her since she pushed out all the stones at the other end making it much drier for everyone else! The backbreaker goes round another tight left hand bend, after which you have to pass a stal sticking out of the ceiling right in your way. There is space on the other side, but it's not over yet. A very low crawl follows, which may involve getting your face wet. Caitlin kindly gave me back my position at the head of our band of cavers. I got my face wet.

After a lot more crawling, you get to a slightly annoying sideways thrutchy bit, though you don't get too wet here. Right after this, an awesome route between long straws drops you into a section of the cave with lots of friendly boulder piles hanging above your head. Pass with care lest they become too friendly. After this the passage gets nice and big. A shower enters from the left, but this isn't cigalere inlet, the roaring you can here is. Not far on, you'll find it and have to dodge through it. Lovely. A duck follows, not nearly as constricted as everything else so far, but deeper. By this point the character of the cave has changed significantly as you're now in Cigalere rather than Bye George. A little climb down and some more streamway leads to the top of the Grand Cascade. The in-situ stuff here looks pretty good, but nobody felt like descending it with just our battery belts, so we turned around and headed back out!

It's worth mentioning that all the nasty wet bits in Bye George can be made significantly more pleasant by digging out the down stream end, but this only becomes apparent or useful once at least one person has gone through. Going out was much quicker than going in as no time for manning up was required. Apparently the backbreaker is worse on the way out, but seemed ok to me. The spiders were waiting for me at the entrance.