Hurnell Moss - 28 Jan 2007

Sunday January 28th 2007

Members present: Debbie Flowers,  James Gregory,  Jessica Walkup,  Kevin Francis,  Mary Finnegan,  Peter Scowcroft,  Simon Herrod

The plan was that team 1 would go first and rig, followed an hour later by team 2, who would no doubt catch us up soon enough, but at least they would have an hour more waiting in Bernies and an hour less waiting around getting cold in the cave.

We (team 1) set off, walked up Ingleborough, and after a relatively short amount of time wandering about in light fog, wind and drizzle stumbled across the entrance. However, we knew that noone on the second team had seen the cave entrance before, and that furthermore just like us they lacked a compass. As such the chances of them actually finding the cave, in the fog, in the middle of open moorland covered in shake holes, was pretty non existent. It was decided that Peter and Debbie would go back to the path and lead the others to the cave whilst Mary and I started on rigging the cave.

Whilst who knows what events took place on the surface above, Mary and I descended the cave largely without issue. After perhaps 2 hours we reached the bottom of the final pitch, and decided to wait here for the others to catch up - and if they didn't do so within the next hour, to give up and go back. After we had been waiting for half an hour Debbie came flying down the rope and gleefully announced that Kevin and Simon were waiting around in the cold at the cave entrance without SRT kits whilst Peter and Jess had gone back to Clapham and were going to call out mountain rescue if we were not also back at Clapham within 2 and a half hours. The 3 of us therefore departed the cave post-haste, to find Kevin and Simon waiting at the entrance, suitably cold. Unfortunately not only was it now pitch black, but the fog had thickened, such that visibility was now down to about 10 metres. Without a compass we set off as best we could in a straight line in the direction we had come from, a task further complicated by the numerous shake holes that we had to walk around, ever further eroding the straightness of our not very straight line. Not surprisingly, we were soon rather lost. After a great deal of fairly randomly wandering about in the fog we eventually came across the wall that runs alongside the path back to Clapham and climbed over it, at which point Kevin and Simon ran off down the path as quickly as possible to try to prevent anyone from coming to rescue us, which they sort of succeeded in doing. A true cacophony of errors.