Joe B, Rob E (Dream Team)
Back in November myself and Joe had an amble down the master cave an realised than an aven seemed to be taking a draught. Joe stood on my head and could just about get in but it wasn’t ideal so we set to return. Many months on, today was the day.
First we ran around the place changing all the dye detectors. The Boil-Up Sump 2 was longer than we had hoped, but nothing like our last time (!) so perfectly doable for us, even with us armed with drill and bolting gear this time.
The aven is a narrow rift, but it’s located in the roof of a roughly 3m diameter passage. I put in a quick bolt as high as I could (see next trip report!!) and attached an etrier which then allowed me relatively easy access into the rift above. Once in it was a pretty easy freeclimb, although quite slippery in places. I attached an electron ladder to my belt which allowed me to climb without the weight of a drill. Plan being once at the top Joe would clip the drill on to the bottom of the ladder and I pull it up. Nice plan, but…
I normally do this sort of freeclimbing with a rope, but getting SRT kits to/from this place is a ball ache and we were keen to keep gear light. Turns out ladders don’t trail behind a freeclimber well at all. It managed to get stuck below me in exactly the slippery manoeuvres, very not ideal. Secondly, ladders are quite short, maybe 30ft. turns out this aven was nearly double that, so Joe clipped on the bolting gear and drill way before I reached the top, therefore making the ladder get stuck even more. Bad plan Rob.
Thankfully I got to the top OK and managed to put in a good bolt and hang the way too short ladder to assist with my route down. At the top the rift is simply blocked with boulders in the roof, some which as bigger than the rift (hence being there) which suggests above that the cave only gets bigger. Good news I reckon, although it’s still a boulder choke, directly above you head, at the top of a 20m pitch, beyond a sump, beyond Cussey, so not ideal really. There is also a small horizontal opening which is too small to fit into but you can see up and may avoid some of the hanging death if it could be made passable. So a few different options to think about.
Also, madly, there was an absolutely huge echo coming from above. Like, Titan sized echo! I holler and hoot in all directions and convince myself that this is indeed coming from above, beyond the choke. Joe below could also hear the echo, which at first was very confirming, but then made me question how. As I climbed down the ladder the echo got louder, and I realised that in fact there’s a weird acoustics phenomenon occurring (big words for a Friday night!) and the echo was in fact just from the passage below where Joe was. Sad, cos I nearly got reyt excited.
Unfortunately the hardest bit to downclimb was the bottom part of the aven, especially getting onto the etrier, but thankfully Joe (an actual climber) was very polite about my pathetic squirming about only 3-4m up. Once down, easy (stoopidly fast) trip out, made memorable by Joe politely asking if he could carry the bag, probably to speed me up a bit.
Joined up with Chris and Jim (who had been buggerin about somewhere above Bradwell) in the Anchor for a debrief and too many snacks.
