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 deciding that I wanted an epic Easegill trip on Saturday and really wanted to see Easter Grotto, Mark and I came up with a plan, and I spent half of Thursday and Friday printing off descriptions and surveys to make sure we didn’t get lost…

Saturday morning came, and after a severe lack of sleep we kitted up and headed across the moor. Mark and I went into County to rig the ladder then we set off further up the river to find the entrance to Wretched Rabbit. Anna and Chad had never been, and Mark and I had only ever exited it in the dark… this led to quite a bit of faff while we went in the first couple of entrances only to decide they didn’t look right at all. This wasn’t helped by the group we’d followed across the moor who, whilst I was looking at the 2nd entrance, came back the other way insisting that Wretched Rabbit wasn’t upstream but was back the way we’d just come… Turns out it actually was further upstream (3rd entrance after county, for future reference) and about half an hour after leaving county we were relieved to finally find the first rope-climb.

The climbs are so much easier on the way down and I was able to just slide down half of them which was rather fun! Navigation through Spiral Staircase was no problem however after reaching the junction with T-piece passage we got a little confused. Thinking we’d got to the big boulder mentioned in the description before we actually had, when we got to what looked like a sump instead of a traverse line we assumed we’d somehow gone wrong. No worries, we backtracked and tried again and with a different mindset (ignoring the first boulder) – found we had in fact gone the right way. However we still couldn’t find the traverse line (it eventually turned out later that it no longer existed!)

This caused a little more confusion as we ended up along Thakray’s passage (where we eventually wanted to be) and passed Holbeck junction without even realising it. Some backtracking and discovering where the traverse line should have been soon sorted us out. We also met another group who assured us we were going the right way, reinstalling confidence. The way on to Easter Grotto was pretty straightforward from here.

I was half way up the rope climb when the other group re-emerged at the top, wanting to come back down. They let me up then went down while the others waited at the bottom.

I’d seen pictures of Easter Grotto previously but they don’t do it justice, and don’t give you the scale… I was amazed at how long the formations went on for. At the end I turned my light off and sat waiting for the others. Watching the torches slowly emerge round the corner and light up the formations was pretty awesome. We spent a good while trying to get some decent photos, before returning to Holbeck junction via Gypsum cavern, which was also quite impressive. The crawl to get there was rather fun as you could pretty much pull yourself along, sliding on the calcite floor (though Mark kept whinging that his chest hurt). The climb down at the end, although short, was straight out of the crawl and looked a bit precarious so I kindly let Mark go first.

I was expecting him to guide my feet into the holds but instead somehow ended up just lowering me down, and I ended up covering him in mud. He couldn’t moan at me too much though as he’d made a promise to be nice to me all day (which surprisingly he managed reasonably well… it even extended into Sunday!)

From Holbeck Junction we followed the stream past Stop Pot (we detoured up to find the ladder just to double check we were in the right pace) to Eureka Junction and then to the Trident Series. Mark pointed out some of the inlets on the way for future reference. We made a short detour to the impressive White Line Chamber and the oxbow, before climbing up to Splash Chamber. Once confident of the way to Battle of Britain, it was a short trip back to Broadway and County Pot.

Chad was last and so with some assistance from Mark, he derigged the ladder. We had a bit of a quiz at the top, spotting all the horrendous mistakes that another group had made in rigging their rope.

Overall a little faffy but a very fun trip and really great to have planned something and seen it to completion, and in the complexities of that end of Easegill, managed to find our way without too many major difficulties.