Ireby Fell Cavern - 22 Feb 2009

Sunday February 22nd 2009

Members present: Chad B,  Chuck Holder,  George Bunyan,  Imogen Shepherd,  Mark Sims,  Matt Gosling,  Max Spicer

This was a really beautiful cave, nice pitches and crawls. We did an Ireby Fell exchange lol! Team 1 went down the traditional route and team 2 down Shadow route. Although, as we were spending time checking out the was level situation Mark ended up going down and up Ding – Dong and Bell and Chuck and I went down and up Ding – Dong before deciding that we would rig the shadow route. The good thing about this excursion was that it kept me warm as I was getting a little cold while waiting for a decision on the water level. Mark rigged the shadow route – it sounded like he had good fun trying to find the p-hangers. There was some really challenging stuff, the traversing was probably the most exposed I’ve done to date – think I’ll be up for doing the High traverse in the Sports Hall soon. Interesting rebelays and quite a tight deviation. The main shaft was great fun to abseil down with the water falling past you.

From here we followed team 1 down 'Well pitch', which had a nice drop on the traverse – I’m glad I have one foot heading towards the ledge while the other went towards a drop. Went through some nice passages – some really nice formations were seen, some less nice crawls though the water but hey. Got to the 'rope pitch' were team 1 were rigging and we decided to go back at that point

We went back the Ding-Dong Bell route, Mark and Chuck asked if I wanted to de-rig; after my efforts the previous day at Jingling I was well up for it. The top of Bell was a great part to de-rig, I had to shuffle up against the rock to reach up to a sling which seemed to be miles up, and my fall factor was getting well high. The sling was self threaded through the p-hanger which made it even more difficult to de-rig, Chuck said I did a really good job on that one, so I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Two caves in one weekend and I got to de-rig both – quality!

I think the change on this trip was a grade ‘Maillon’ took me 20 minutes to get it off. Then an interesting experiment was proposed of what effect on the body does ‘pissing and stopping mid-stream’ has! Result – body says ‘why are you doing this? There is no need to do this? Please don’t do this again!’

Quality trip – will definitely be up for going further to Ireby 2 next time. :)