Washfold Pot
Saturday May 17th 2014
Members present: John Holloway, Luke Brownbridge, Marion Holloway, Vicky Bailey
Report by Vicky Bailey
We set off to Washfold on the sort of day it’s a crime to go underground for, cooking in our oversuits as we walked up from the Long Churn track. The route to Washfold passes Alum and Diccan and crosses a stile near the lower Long Churn entrance, crossing two more fields to where a fenced-off enclosure of trees surrounds the three entrances. Green ferns overhung our chosen entrance, which, with the sound of water trickling below and the ripple of cool air, was as inviting in the heat as a shady pool in a tropical forest. John led the way through a sun-streaked stretch of passage which quickly veered into darkness, following the streamway.
Finding myself encumbered with a tacklesack, but in a mellow, meditative mood, I decided it was time to rethink my relationship with those much-maligned beasts. What a falling off there had been from my innocent early caving days when I flinched to see Toby pummelling the anthropomorphic flanks of a tacklesack outside Sell Gill. My compassion had been violently extinguished come February, prussiking out of Maskill mine with a tacklesack the size of small pig, and from thence on followed a career of customary cursings and beatings which culminated in my – accidentally – throwing a tacklesack at Will down Bitch Pitch in JH.
It occurred to me, thinking of Mark – who, at that very moment, elsewhere in the Dales, was taking his three year old nephew for his first caving trip – that we seldom bear this level of malice to the other dependent creatures which fall within our care. Were our burden a beloved child, or pet, we would not begrudge them the patient attentions required to carry them carefully through the cave.
With this in mind I found myself imagining the sack as an overgrown Yorkshire terrier, fat and rather cowardly, buttoned into a red PVC coat, more at home in the basket of a mobility scooter than in a cave. Before – embittered, resentful and determined not to gratify the tacklesack by paying it any attention, my technique had been to ignore it, kicking and cursing it when it became stuck and taking the occasional fall when I forgot to account for its weight. In the grip of this sudden tenderness, however, I experimented with an assortment of new techniques; from careful crabwise crawling with the tacklesack balanced on my lap, to the careful stowing of the tacklesack on a safe ridge, awaiting its gentle tug on the lead before moving it onwards – which, though slow and laborious, were more suitable to the convoluted course of the cave and offered calm and frustration-free progress. This make-believe absorbed me for much of the day, so that I felt quite a pang to see it unceremoniously divested of its intestines when we reached the first section of rigging.
Before that point, however, there were a number of obstacles to overcome. At a 2.5m climb up to a bedding plane there was much deliberation about the best approach. Whilst Maz made considerate use of my knee and shoulder to scale the climb, attentive at all times that her weight was distributed in the manner most agreeable to my limbs, Luke got bored and climbed up behind us – kicking my head and dropping a tacklesack on it for good measure. (Which did at least seem fair after my tacklesackattack on Will in JH). Climbing down from the bedding plain proved even more awkward than climbing up, so this was the first of a number of possible free climbs that John decided to rig. Waiting in the bedding plane, lying still on my stomach face to face with the aforementioned calcite sheep, I was reminded of long-ago games of hide and seek that always seemed to end up under a bed, the custardy eruptions of calcite taking the place of shoe boxes and tattered suitcases elevated to an unusual significance by virtue of being wedged between them.
My thoughts were on similarly mundane matters as I made my way down the climb, realising, as I played an uncomfortable game of crotch versus croll attempting to force myself through the narrowest section, that in our everyday life the application of force in concurrent situations, such as the plunging of a foot into a sock, or legs into trousers, is met, almost always, with eventual success, the tangles of material inevitably giving way to a persistent limb. Likewise the brushing of one’s hair, the navigation of a plug into its socket, the thrusting of a tent peg into compacted earth; they all conspire to give one a false sense of confidence when easing down into unyielding rock.
The horrible idea of falling and becoming wedged in between walls of rock – somehow so much more unnerving than the idea of a straightforward tumble into oblivion – was evoked all the more vividly when we reached the rift leading to the first pitch, a round tunnel with smooth edges curving down into a deep, narrowing divide that might swallow you at least a body’s length before wedging you tight, if you were to slip. I was amazed when Maz confessed this had happened to her on her last visit to the cave – I found myself wondering whether I would have dared return after a similar experience. The rift is unrigged for several metres before a traverse line begins the approach to the 50m pitch, so Maz fed the rope into the passage while John rigged. I don’t imagine the wait looking down into the rift did much to steady her nerves, but we all made it through the rift without incident – my latest tacklesack testing my new-found indulgence with several kamikaze leaps into the void – and soon I was watching Maz descend the pitch, the white spot of her light casting ragged shadows up the wide shaft, like a white bud in a black rose.
The passage on was varied and interesting, with stretches of crawl over wider rifts and many more climbs – some with in situ ropes, some we decided to rig ourselves. At the last climb, Maz decided, as half past four approached, that she wanted to turn back to ensure she was out before callout. John accompanied Maz back through the passage while Luke and I explored further.
The navigation became a little difficult at this point. We continued along the most obvious route through the passage, over more rifts, past the boulder choke, until we reached a long thin slice of rock dividing the passage, with an open drop beyond it and a narrower but equally intimidating drop to its right. Dismissing the possibility of free climbing these damp, vertical shafts we spent a long time searching for a way on which better suited the route description – until finally we backtracked to the boulder choke and found a narrow way peeling off parallel to the main passage, performing an about turn to the left of the main passage. A small, sideways-person sized gap looked down on a 2m climb. Not at all sure this was the right route, or whether it would be possible to climb out, we found a useful boulder from which we could rig an escape line if we found ourselves stuck. Nose-diving into the unknown was exhilarating, and luckily it seemed that there were plenty of handholds for the climb out, so Luke followed with the gear and we explored on, rejoining the stream way, to the last pitches of the cave.
Unfortunately we didn’t reach the bottom – dangling over a very wet pitch, with our turn-back time ticking past, neither of us could find the bolts for the subsequent pitches and so reluctantly decided to begin the return trip. The pitch below, sparkling with the spray of the waterfall lit up by our headlight beams, was a tantalising prospect, but one to be saved for another day.
De-rigging and heading out of the cave we hit a spot of bother at the 2m climb. The sideways wriggling required to climb up through the narrow gap favoured scrawn over brawn and was a more serious proposition for Luke with his broader shoulders than it had been for me; it was lucky that we had identified the handy boulder before descending, making it a simple matter for me to clamber up and rig a rope down the climb.
From then on we made it swiftly to the first pitch where the not entirely wise decision was made to haul the tacklesack up from the end of the rope rather than prussik up with it in the wet. As the appointed de-rigger I ascended last and was surprised to find no sign of Luke at the top of the pitch. Giving up hauling the tacklesack on my own I went to find Luke, and to my surprise heard voices ahead. Immediately I feared the worst – had we caught up with the others? Why? Perhaps Maz, or John, or both had taken a tumble into the rift, and Luke was there trying to rescue them, or taking a few last words!
Before I reached the ended of the rift, however, Luke appeared with the news that Maz had been stuck at the climb directly after the rift but had freed herself and she and John were on their way to the surface once more. That only left us with the task of hauling the tacklesack, and what Luke described as ‘ten minutes to the entrance’. With Luke gathering the rope behind me, hauling the tacklesack was possible but still exhausting, and it was with jelly arms that I fought to shunt the rope and sack back along the rift. Both Luke and I struggled on the next climb, Luke throwing off his SRT kit in a fit frustration, my tacklesack acting as an inconveniently situated third limb, jamming me in such a position that made it very difficult to move up or down.
With Luke carrying both his SRT kit and a tacklesack, and my arms weak and resentful after the hauling, progress out of the cave was torturously slow, wriggling and heaving our way inch by inch, passing sacks on to each other, Luke occasionally scouting ahead with just his kit while I pushed his tacklesack onwards, dragging mine, until he reached back. Remembering my earlier meditations on tacklesack appreciation, I felt peculiarly maternal as I clutched the tacklesack to my chest.
At last the sweet smell of fresh air and the last pale-blue streaks of daylight were upon us. The last wobbly-armed climb required the removal of every piece of extraneous kit, including a fateful first aid kit, before we at last rejoined the outdoor world and set off on a jubilant tramp down the hillside, savouring our triumphant return, admiring the watercolour skies and daydreaming about pizza.
The sense of triumph was somewhat deflated when we realised that we’d left the first aid kit at the cave entrance. While the others drove off to cancel call-out I headed back up the hillside for an unsuccessful search in the gathering dark. By the time we reached Bodrums, I for one felt as affectionate towards my pizza as a vulture feels towards a particularly fleshy carcass and devoured it in record time, while representatives from the Skipton intelligentsia impressed us with their caving knowledge:
“Stalactites go up, you see, because you pull tights up.”
Not envying Luke the drive back, I determined to stay awake for moral support and was asleep in five minutes.
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One of the most arduous, but also one of the most fun trips I’ve been on. I’m already looking forward to returning and reaching the bottom!
