Wretched Rabbit - County Pot via Easter Grotto - 9th May 2009

Saturday May 9th 2009

Members present: Anna Barnard,  Catherine Moody,  Chad B,  Mark Sims

After several emails to & fro between Cat & I we decided that a round trip including Easter Grotto, which we were both keen to visit, would be a great start to a Bull Pot Farm weekend. On the Friday night we recruited another couple of Chemists in Anna & Chad and after a very small amount of sleep we were ready to go, complete with reams of descriptions/surveys, cereal bars and the obligatory scones.

The weather was better than expected with only a small amount of drizzle on the way to the cave. We had to head to County first to pre-rig the pitch for our planned exit route which Cat & I did in a very respectable 7 minutes, especially bearing in mind the fact that I realised at the pitch head that I had never rigged a ladder before…luckily there’s not really anything to be done wrong!

This done & the tackle sack left in County, we set off upstream towards Wretched Rabbit. Unfortunately none of us had ever been in this way before, and when had exited here it had only been in the dark. We were pretty sure that it was the next entrance along…it turned out to be the 3rd, but there you go – we live and learn! This slight faff behind us and we knew we were in the right entrance. The climbs down the entrance rifts were much easier going down than on the way up, and we were soon down into Spiral Staircase Passage admiring the straws, before reaching the 6m climb.

This sounded quite intimidating in the description, and looked it at first glance, but the rift was narrow so it was virtually possible without the rope in the end! We met another group at the junction with Green & Smelly who were just on their way out before descending to the streamway. The passage that followed caused a few puzzles as it didn’t match brilliantly with the description, so a small amount of exploration was required. Cat and I set off in different directions which involved (in my case) flat out crawling into what turned out to be a sump, before getting my first oversuit rip on the return…no wonder Cat suggested I went that way!

Meanwhile, she had found the right way so we carried on towards the “obvious traverse line”. Sadly the usually fantastic description let us down once again as it transpired that the traverse line was no longer in existence. After some re-enactment of where the traverse line had probably been, Holbeck Junction was properly identified and after meeting another group we had soon climbed up into Easter Grotto.

I think this far exceeded all our expectations and photos really fail to do it justice. What surprised me most was the length for which the formations went on, but it was difficult to ignore the quantity of broken straws on the floor. To appreciate the place fully, we decided some scones were in order, so these were distributed around. Hooray for Morrisons value scones – 37p for 10!

From here we planned to return to Holbeck Junction via Gypsum Cavern which involved a very smooth flat-out crawl over calcite to start off with. Ordinarily this wouldn’t have been a problem, but the squeeze machine antics the night before meant that my chest was sadly not bruise free, so for me this was a fairly painful section of the trip! At the end of the crawl I was elected to descend the 2m drop first which was slightly awkward, but on guiding Cat’s feet to the footholds as she followed me, she ended up standing in my hands and sitting on the back of my neck! This wouldn't have been quite so bad, had her oversuit not been coated in liquid mud, which then proceeded to run down my back!

We were soon back in Holbeck junction and it was no time before we reached Stop Pot. Flushed with the success of negotiating a fairly significant amount of entirely unknown Easegill with no real navigational issues, I then went to the back of the group leaving the others to lead on to the Upper Trident streamway as I was happy with the navigation to this point. We had a brief visit to White Line Chamber and visited the oxbow just downstream of here before climbing out of the streamway to encounter my most feared section of the trip...

The link from Splash Chamber to Battle of Britain Hall had eluded me more than once previously and threatened to do so again, but thankfully after looking down another couple of crawls I popped out above the Manchester Bypass with significant relief! I backtracked to Splash Chamber to make sure I could repeat this next time and from there we were quickly back out of County.

The sunshine greeted us as we surfaced and it was fantastic to have achieved exactly what we set out to do without any real route finding issues. A great day’s caving, largely due to the enthusiasm of the whole team. I love Easegill! :)