New Goyden & Goyden.

Being a Sunday trip, I wanted something without the need for tackle to give me a break from carry lots of heavy tackle through very small passages, these caves fitted that bill. Chris met me at my house and I drove him up to the caves.

New Goyden first. I knew of a none SRT entrance but had no idea what it was like. It started off as an careful climb down scaffolding directly below the dry stream bed before it reaches a horizontal passage at about 8m depth. Beyond the passage opened out with many sizeable holes, where a climb meanders downwards between them. An old hand-line protects us from a potentially rather nasty fall. The final part of the climb is about 15 ft deep, with the last 5 feet being free-hanging. From here we followed the water down cascades into ‘South Avens’. and a short slope brought us down to the main stream, or should I say river!

The water was strong, not strong enough to push you off your feet but strong enough to make moving through it a challenge. Inspecting an inlet along the way, we slowly progressed to the Planeterium were we ascended a very slippery, high slope into a bit of walking passage known as Astronomers’ Passage. It soon closed down but was interesting non-the-less. We then returned to the planetarium and entered Hardy Pools Passage, turning left to explore more interesting passage with several high, muddy inlet passages whivh were full of worms, one of these passages led into another smaller version of the Planeterium which is strangely not described in Northern caves. Another inlet led through some static pools before terminating at a 5m deep climb/pitch, that Chris explored.

Reaching the stream we thought our way up river to Middle Sump before returning back through Jupiter cavern, going back up river again. Chris spotted a hand line climb which led to some crawl traversing along a passage known as Wath inlet. At the end of which was a sizeable waterfall and a pitch up through it, equipped with an SRT rope. As our SRT gear was in the car we left that for another time. This I believe led to the old original entrance, as my Northern caves is way out of date it may be an entrance again? We finished the trip by heading upstream where we were quickly stopped by a sump, which I read is normally a duck. It was not a duck today!

Back out we headed upstream to Goyden where the fun really began. It was the first time I had seen water flow into this entrance and there was quite a lot of it. Northern caves says that your not suppose to go in if water flowing into the entrance. Well I had not read that entry yet. We carefully followed the torrent into the cave. Part way along we looked up to see the ceiling plastered white with foam 20 feet about our heads eventually after slow water-filled progress we reached the downstream sump. From the sump we turned left (twice), crawled through some tubes and then followed a walking passage and reached what we thought was the main stream again, I had missed the turn off for the intended round trip. This torrent was not the water in the main passage to the left was the window pitch that had a large waterfall tumbling over the edge while ahead, lay a knotted rope climb up only it was mostly under a maelstrom of water. I managed to climb up fine, keeping out of the main flow but as the hand-line was anchored on the other side of the passage I almost got washed off at the top, it was certainly a struggle! Following the pounding water and finding a way around the sump it made at one point we reached larger passage which we left to collect some firewood!

Literally tons and tons of wood, so much, we had to dig through it to get into the passage beyond. Quite easy going passage led upstream to a small hole full of clear water (Pillar pot). Not a round trip that way, but just back from the hole was a low passage. A short ways in progress was stopped by a large tree stump that had somehow got washed in there, scary place! I managed to move it to enter passage which got lower and lower, with tight bends. This passage {Pillar Crawl or Pillar pot passage?} was going downhill in both senses of the word but by now neither of us wanted to reverse it, so our only hope was to keep going towards the rumbling of water we could hear in the distance. Each corner we came to we wondered if the passage would end here, but somehow, as if by design the passage was just big enough to let us both progress. After a final squeeze around a corner we entered into deeper water where a 20 foot long canal/duck (probably normally dry) brought us through falling water into bigger passage. (bigger as it was hands and knees). A short way on there was an easy climb down and we were back in the main stream surrounded by waterfalls. With that bit of excitement we headed out and called it a day, it was certainly good fun with high water levels but its not for the faint-hearted, and you really do have to trust the forecast when its this wet (both wind and rain), any more water in there and we could have been in trouble.