White Rake
Although not officially an EPC project, but since the beginning a number of Eldon members have been active members of the digging team. It is now >30m deep with numerous pushing fronts.
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- Written by: Rob Eavis
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Good trip yesterday, with Me, Simon, Jim and Dave (dig virgin). Carried more scaff down to the dig and plenty of clips and rebar pins. We forepoled into the face and dug out beneath. A few big rocks are supported by the scaf, but it’s mostly just there in case anything big falls from higher up.
All three poles unfortunately stopped ahead of target on a large rock which spans the rift and wouldn’t budge. This is probably big enough that we can leave I place, but it’s quite low down so if the rift below stays thin we’ll be crawling. The middle pole could probably be cut short now, as it’s kinda blocking the climb down into the dig.
Water all drains away ahead fine, and plenty of stuff to move now before any more shoring needed…
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Me n Simon had a good evening.
The water was quite deep in the dig, and we spent prob about 45 mins before we got it to drain. This finally worked by water flowing down one hole at foot of the climb, and bubbles coming up out of another in the small cross rift on the right! Felt a bit like those old condensed milk cans with two holes in the top. All the water in the dig flowed back to this hole and seemed to head back under the slope, making me think that we might not be best digging straight ahead but instead pushing on down. We also moved the pipe so it drained into the pool beyond the spoil heap. This gave around 10 minutes of no water at all heading into the dig, before it started to flow back along the rift and into the dig.
Once water was sorted we dug the floor out to try to improve the drainage, and it’s easy digging so far. Three people would be much quicker. The rift below is getting even thinner, but I think where the rift comes in from the right might be big enough to continue on down….?
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A pretty chilly trip with Simon and Dave. Trying for ages with the monster bar to get the water to disappear wasn’t working. It was ~2ft deep and nicely unpleasant. I then figures it was “only” that deep because it must have been overflowing somewhere. So a quick dabble with the bar horizontally back under the pile (heading away from the pitch) instantly dropped the water. On with digging!
What’s hard to be sure of is whether that’s the way on, or that simply it leads to open spaces between rocks that hasn’t yet been silted up by our activities. The water dropping away certainly sounds good. What is easy to see is that the rift there is getting narrow, so to progress on down it’ll probably only be possible to follow the widest bit. This is currently blocked with a big rock that’ll probably need capping.
At the end of the trip the blue water pipe was pushed far down into the draining hole so hopefully it shouldn’t block up with silt before the next trip…..
Rob