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Only two were in attendance (Sharman and Alex).
We would have saved this trip for Don as we know he want’s to do it, but me and Chris could not think of anywhere else to go, especially with the rain forecast.
Off we popped straight to the cave, thanks goes to Don pointing it out to me last time. Once there we found a old and new very green rope going down the entrance pitch, which went all the way to the bottom. Safe to say we ignored this and rigged our own rope. We contemplated de-rigging the old rope, but it’s not our rope. The deviation on the “1st” short pitch can be ignored provided, on the return you climb back up and don’t prussic. The y-hang for the main drop is err interesting, the left-anchor is rigged off a very large boulder in the shakehole, a large boulder that is held up by a large stone and that is about it!
Once at the bottom, the precarious boulder theme continues as the way on is to follow the well travelled route down and through the boulders, reminding me a little of Nemesis boulder choke in Langcliffe, but this was much shorter. At the end, a flat out crawl leads to a scramble down several slopes and an awkward drop into more chambers. A flat out crawl from here leads to a muddy slope where a small stream is joined. It’s important here to remember the route you came in as it took us about 30 minutes to find the scramble back up to the crawl on the way out.
More bouldery passage with easy squeezes followed until we reached a rather awkward section. Like an easy version of Langcliffe Boireau Falls choke.
Here is where one needs to squeeze through the first one and then manoeuvre yourself for the next squeeze which was the tightest bit of the cave, where Chris thought he would have to turn around after reading the description. He did not, after that things got really loose and mobile until a scramble up out of the boulders brought some relief in another chamber.
A quick crawl and nicer passage brought us to another squeeze in the stream. Now there are no flood warnings on this cave but a few inches rise in the water would make this impassible. Chris almost did turn around at this point as this was rather tight too, but I convinced him he would fit, which he did but paid for it by ripping a big hole in his over-suit.
Very nice, big passage followed until the final chamber 66 was reached and more photos taken.
There was a continuation as a flat out crawl but it closed down after about 10 feet and would need digging. We finished up by retracing our steps and finding an alternative but no easier way back through part of the cave before we then got lost for a bit as mentioned above.
Once out of the cave we tried to find the buried entrance to Bucket on the head to try and dig it out but there was no sign of it, unless we were somehow looking in the wrong place that entrance is truly lost.
It was only 3 hours but it was a worthwhile trip for its length plenty of variety.
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