Weather Wet on the surface, dryish underground
People present Me & Rob
We had been trying to arrange an evening trip for a while and in the end we managed it. We wanted something challenging but can be done on the evening and although both of us had at least part done the cave before Yokenthwaite was chosen as a good evening venue.
We met at burger king after I had sufficiently fuelled up on a bacon double cheese and we drove up in Rob’s van to the entrance, when thankfully the rain stopped. We quickly got changed and did the hardest bit of any caving trip, the bloody steep walk up hill.
Rob rigged the first, though he was not happy with the rock belay. However, our only other option was a rotten tree above, it really is ready to break that so don’t use it! After sorting that and passing the Yokenthwaite owls who left us behind for their nightly hunt, we got to the bottom of the pitch and Rob set about rigging the easy second pitch. We had brought one rope to rig all 4 pitches, (80m long) which even that turned out to be a bit of an overkill.
At the bottom of the second we swapped over and I rigged. I had a little bit of trouble descending the 3rd until I turned to face the other wall so I could get at my stop’s handle. 4th was not too bad, in-fact I would say it was slightly easier than the 3rd provided you give yourself about 3 to 4 ft of slack, before going down.
From the ledge we abseiled the last part rather than using the free climb and all that was left to do was to sample the wonderful fossil passage. After a climb up we entered a tight passage with Hammeresk style rift passage in places, some of it was quite awkward. We passed some nice, though damaged formations and entered yet more rift passage with an interesting skydive over a boulder on route. But in the end after a wrong turn by me up a squalid grovel we got to the end of the passage (the double bends) before quickly turning around to make the return.
I de-rigged the bottom pitch and passed him the bag through the constriction at the top of the 4th and Rob did the other 3. It had become quite stormy outside but again thankfully the rain stopped when we got to the river to wash gear. Despite the rain river levels were still low.
Trip time: Around 2 hours 30.
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