Noon's Hole / Arch Cave - 20 Oct 2007

Saturday October 20th 2007

Members present: Gary Douthwaite,  Kevin Francis,  Matt Ewles,  Natasha Durham,  Nicola Gover,  Richard Gover

An exceptional trip with a spectacular entrance pitch, reminicent of Deaths head, in the Dales, but with more added interest of ledges and several rebelays all the way to the bottom. From the bottom, a slope leads down an you need to cross the canal. This was no deeper than waist height, however I suspect that if it were not for the exceptionally dry weather we'd had, this would be more like what the guidebooks say (swimmy!). From there, a series of very narrow rift-like wet passages meander for a couple of hundred metres, starting with a wet wiggle on belly through a muddy pool. Routefinding is easy, although this section of the cave is quite arduous. The tight squeezy passage then leads off from the top of a small boulder slope, and this is quite easy providing you take your time. At the end by the rescue dump, we went right and on through the crawling section down to the canal and streamway past the big chamber. We spent quite a while making progress however, we were unable to locate the way on towards the arch cave section, where we were supposed to climb up through boulders. Still a long trip (around six hours if I remember rightly) and an excellent cave.