Nick Pot and not quite Juniper Gulf

Wednesday July 30th 2025

Members present: Erika Lang,  Jean-luc Heath,  Sophie Brazil,  Will Barlow

Being a fan of efficient starts, we packed the rope the day before, and I ended the day before with a plan to pick Erika and Sophie up at 7am the next morning and to meet Jean-Luc either in the Dales or Skipton Morrisons. That all went fine, we met at Morrisons, ate, dealt with callout, and departed towards our parking spot on Crummack Lane. On the way we realised we didn’t actually have confirmation on our callout, so had to pull over to deal with that before losing signal.

The walk to Nick Pot was mostly fairly gentle uphill, not too bad of a walk despite it being a bit warm. The approach from Crummack is fairly difficult to navigate, but that was made not an issue by having Jean-Luc, who is quite familiar with the area. What was more difficult was locating the entrance, after walking right past it, and spending a fair bit of time considering where it might be, we went back and found it. It was just a small hole in some rock, just a bit west of a slightly larger hole, with a small tree in it, in some other rock (what we think is what the CNCC description calls the “main depression”). In the small hole is a short but fairly tight hands and knees crawl, at the end of it the anchors are found. The first pitch is quite small, with a couple of fun deviations on the way down (which were in-situ). Though this pitch is quite insignificant compared to what is to come.

Through a short crawl you’ll arrive at the beginning of the “Traverse in the Gods”, a quite awkward to rig, mostly flat-out crawling traverse, with a nice 80m drop right next to you. After a short amount of crawling, you arrive at the pitch head. Anchors located quite high (but not high enough to be awkward to rig) make getting on the rope very easy. A short distance down is the next rebelay. A nice and fun free-hanging y-hang which will take you down 40m to the next rebelay.

About 40m down is this massive flake spanning the width of the shaft, the Trouser Flake. I initially thought that it was because it slightly resembled an upside down pair of trousers, only to be corrected later that the shaft itself is the trousers and the flake is the space between the trouser legs. A perspective which makes much more sense. Anyway, once I arrived at the flake I began to search for the anchors for a rebelay, which is supposed to be located “in the corner of the shaft just by the Trouser Flake” according to the CNCC description and take you down the final 30m. However, despite spending what felt like a really long time trying to locate these anchors I could not find them. I looked on both sides of the flake, both sides of the shaft, considered where I’d put them if I was anchoring, even swung slightly into the waterfall, but still could not find them. So instead I rigged a deviation from the opposite wall to prevent rub on the flake, which actually worked fairly well, then descended to the bottom.

At this point I was really worried that 1) I had spent a really long time trying to find this rebelay, 2) it was actually in a really obvious place that I’d somehow missed. Well no one else found them either on the way down. Jean-Luc had a good look for them on the way down and also could not find them. But not to be defeated he went straight back up for another search. After spending a fair amount of time searching, he did locate them. They ended up being quite high near the very top of the flake, on the opposite side of the shaft to the waterfall. One anchor on each wall of the shaft formed a big y-hang. Jean-Luc admitted they were not in an obvious position and very easily missed, so I’m not too worried about missing them. It’s the kind of thing that once you do the trip once, you’ll know exactly where they are, and none of us had ever done it before.

The way back up was fun, Sophie derigged but we decided to haul the rope up from the top, which went without issue. We made it back to the surface at around 5pm, later than I had been hoping for as I had also planned to try Juniper Gulf. We decided that a full Juniper Gulf trip wasn’t too sensible so opted to instead go and look at it and pop down the entrance pitch instead. We did, and walked to the anchors for the next pitch, and turned around there. Whilst in theory we could have gone further, it would have meant a really late exit and even later arrival at York, so we opted not to. Though I would love to return and do it fully.

Overall awesome trip, Nick Pot is a must do for all big pitch enthusiasts.