Lancaster Hole - 1st Feb 2009

Sunday February 1st 2009

Members present: Catherine Moody,  Chuck Holder,  Thomas Blakey

Chuck had been told he had to back to Lancaster after failing to find the colonnades the day before, so off he trotted with Tom and I in tow. We didn’t have a description so Chuck and I were navigating just with the aid of the survey.

After successfully finding the colonnades, the route took us down Kaths Way and Bill Taylors passage, then left up some steps to the comically short ladder (but much needed – the passageway it leads up to is very small and a bugger to get through!) which took us into Montague West. A lot of crawling through some pretty bits then took us round to Wilf Taylors – a very nice phreatic passage with some fun cascadey bits.

After a while we reached a short climb down to Double Decker Pot. Chuck thought about rigging a pull through but I reckoned it was easily free climbable so went first to check it out. The first half was no problem, but at the bottom was an overhanging ledge. I opted for clipping into the loops in the in-situ rope and lowering myself the couple of feet over the edge. Not being particularly strong this resulting in me swinging on my cowtails a few inches above the pool below. No bother, I could stand up so unclipped and moved out the way for Chuck. He decided to do it the “proper way” using his handjammer. I was highly amused when he got strung up about an inch above the floor tehehe. Tom expertly lowered himself over the edge and we then contemplated the next move.

Double Decker Pot has two routes down, a rift traverse with an in-situ rope of unknown age and origin, or a pitch a little further along. We didn’t trust the rope so we went down the pitch, with Chuck rigging his first pull through. At the bottom were two routes so while I waited for the others I went for a bit of an explore and discovered they both joined up again. With the rope re-packed I led the way down the left hand (and slightly wider of the two) passage to the main streamway. Here it was a left turn and some nice stomping until we reached the climb up to Fall Pot that Gover had told us about. Problem being… we had no idea where the climb up was! With no description and only a very small copy of the survey, we found it very difficult to gauge at which point the passages joined up. Eventually though after wandering backwards and forward and exploring up a few muddy slopes, we found the slightly hidden (though obvious if you know youre sposed to be looking for water trickling from the ceiling!) climb through some boulders up to Fall Pot.

We remembered that the last time we were here, Andy had gone down a bit of a dodgy climb rather than down the main pitch – we decided to use the same route. It proved to be a bit of a pain to get up as there were few footholds but persistence prevailed and we were soon making a speedy retreat back to Lancaster Hole, where I de-rigged.

On the surface it was snowing and the rope was frozen! Outside the farm, the tactic was to undress as quickly as possible then run inside into the warm to find some clothes!

A relatively short, but very interesting and fun trip.