Giants Hole - 31st Oct 2009

Saturday October 31st 2009

Members present: Adam Wilkinson,  Chad B,  Chuck Holder,  Jacquie Martinez,  Lucy Gilchrist,  Marcus Roby,  Matt Hurley,  Matthijs Bouwman,  Steven Spall,  Yong Xi

Awesome trip! My first trip in the UK since Wales. After an efficient start in the morning, we sat off to the peaks. Chuck took the wrong exit in Sheffield, :) this resulted in an interesting route trough Sheffield, but we managed to find Hathersage quite quickly anyway. I had a a very nice breakfast in Hathersage, which required me to choose from 10 different ingredients! in my case lots of bacon and fried bread :)
We set of to Giant's hole. Other cavers apparently had the same idea, cos we found quite a few cars at the car park, and a minibus from glasgow arrived not long after we did. Fortunatley the waited till we were well inside the cave. Amazingly we only ran into one other team, which saved us a lot of waiting. The cave itself is amazing, lots of small streamway meandering into the cave. The ladder pitch wasn't very high, and I'm amazed all the freshers got down and up again so quickly! The giant's windpipe was fun to do, and the water wasnt very high apparently. You still got quite wet though :D The crabwalk was fun, and actually quite a bit easier then I expected. Climbing down the rift was good fun as well, even though it required me slipping between chuck's legs! Once down I had a bit of fun climbing up and down in the rift. All the freshers managed to get down as well without a problem! After this it was quite quick to get bavk to the ladder pitch. At this point another team caught up with us, and one of 'm had a bit of a problem getting up the ladder, which ended up with him flying in the air like superman. Adam and me derigged all the ropes from the pitch and ran out of the cave, which was an interesting experience. We ran into a group of women lookin at a glow in the dark skeleton and what not, and adam tried to scare them with his halloween mask, which he had put on the wrong way round :) After this short intermission, we ran to the car and had nice and quick change, and were of to the pub for a nice dinner and nice pint.
Drove back to to York without a problem.