Yorkshire I
Ben Richards, James Wilson, Ellie Pizey, Chris Hayes, Wojtek Sowinski, Julien Jean, Laura Temple, Jergus Strucka, Ching Bon Tang, Thurston Blount, Jackie Li, Joshua Ho, Kinsy Li, Claryce Yap
Friday
Set off somewhat reaonsably Friday evening, with Chris passed out in the back from over-expsure to academic work leaving James, Jergus and I in the front and all the other freshers in the back. James was solo driving which meant non-stop bangers all the way to Yorkshire, and in Learnt about Jergus's wild trip to the US where he cost the US government a large amount of money, struggled to find micron wide holes and found his latest soul-mate in the land of the free-to-vote-for-a-convicted-felon. Navigation was highly entertaining, with wildly vague directions from Jergus leaving James rather confused. One highlight was "go straight ahead on the M56" just as James reached a turning for the M56 off to the left or the M6 onwards. He decided to take the M56, which was of course the wrong way, but miraculously this caused no change in ETA whatsoever. We also managed to overtake LauraCar, who had left multiple hours earlier than us and shopped along the way but lacked the chaotic random path algorithm provided by Jergus, which meant we luckily missed a closure on the M6 which they did not. Not bad. We finally made it to the NPC around midnight, meeting Ellie who had been cowering in the library doing some awful sounding job assessment thing. When LauraCar finally did arrive we of course made sure to remind them that arrived in second place to a speed limited vehicle.
Ben
Saturday
Notts 1: Ellie Pizey, Julien Jean, Ching Bon Tang, Thurston Blount, Jackie Li, Joshua Ho
A freshers trip to the freshest of caves, but sadly no one wrote anything about their adventures :(
Lost Johns: Ben Richards, Chris Hayes, Laura Temple, Kinsy Li, Claryce Yap
Woke up to Jergus caressing my face and staring into my eyes. Very bizarre. Wandered downstairs to breakfast and Chris started discussing trips and groups. We were two freshers trips and a rigging trip, and given we had one car there was a surpring amount of possible trips. We initially planned on doing a classic set of West Kingsdale caves, only to find that Jingling was going to be full of the other NPC members in the hut, so we changed plan to all on Leck Fell. Then Jingling turned out not to be happening so we could have done that after all, but it was too late, the decision had been made.
Leck fell trips then rapidly fluctuated between Lost Johns, Notts 1, Deaths Head, Back to Notts 1, back to Deaths Head, actually let's just go with Notts 1. The rigging trip for Wojtek ended up choosing Rumbling, and I joined the Lost Johns trip with Chris and Laura with the intention of playing around with some lights and cameras after doing some classic SRT routes. This is not exactly what happened.
Many people had shiny kit this weekend, given it was the first SRT trip of the year, and so Chris showed off his new home-made oversuit (which was actually shockingly impressive), I gave my new harness, SRT kit and PVC a spin, and Ellie had the latest in cave oversuit fashion - her own GeoTech suit in bright green. Laura thought it looked very 70s, but in a good way.
Heading in we were extra cautious to make sure we were going the right way. I had only been to Lost Johns once before, about this time last year with DW, under careful instructions not to miss the turning and having missed it on the way out anyway. We followed the written description on my phone and quickly came across the climbs I remembered, followed by a traverse over a large waterfall descending into the darkness. This was clearly the water going down Monastry, so we were on track and started the traverse over the top onto our destination, Centipede. It was a little confusing that we couldn't see any bolts above the pitch, but the roof was high so it was reasonable not to spot any given we weren't trying very hard, so on we went.
We carried on through the tube, following the water down to another pitch head with no obvious way on - meaning we must have reached the pitch head of Centipede, just as the description had said. Laura started rigging some tiny climb down to the pitch head, which was about the 10m expected on the rigging guide, and Claryce and Kinsy got their first taste of SRT not on a tree. So far so good. After this short pitch was a surpringly long walk over to the next pitch head, but after reaching it Laura had dutifully started rigging the long traverse and a large Y hang at the end of it just as the rigging guide had said, plus a few extra bolts for good measure that weren't on there. Another weird squeezy climb up the streamway to reach the traverse line was undertaken, but Claryce was quickly at the front and negotiating the swing out away from the pitch head.
This was acutally a very large swing, and so I helped lower her out over the pitch on my long cowstail as she made many noises of surpirse, fear, and presumably rapid fluctuations of excitement (or something like that). This was directly above a very large waterfall, which was plunging into the inky darkness below. This was a little odd, since I'd thought that Centipede was the easy dry route for novices, and it looked really quite wet, but it had rained a lot the night before and presumably the rigging kept us away from the water anyway.
Laura continued rigging down the main pitch, her headlight dramatically lighting up the enormous waterfall as she zoomed down into the darkness. Claryce and I then popped into a small oxbow in the wall, and then made our way to the main pitch head above the inky void below. This was another slightly tricky pitchhead, but nothing Claryce couldn't handle and soon she was at the top. After a quick smile for the camera she descended down into the abyss, and as I saw the beam of her headlight dipping in and out of the waterfall, my confidence that this was going to be an easy trip plummeted along with her.
I could see Laura's light at the bottom, and she seemed to be there with Claryce, so I zoomed down to join them both, managing to only dip into the waterfall once or twice. The noise at the bottom was ridiculous, with the spray shooting in every direction at the bottom of the almighty waterfall. The chamber wasn't particularly wide, and there wasn't really anywhere to hide from the horizontal storm-force rain and the endless booming of the ton after ton of water that was crashing into the floor only a few metres behind us. Laura was at the bottom, wide eyed and clearly not keen on continuing. She shouted so that I could hear over the endless roar that she had left a bothy bag and some other stuff further along the route, but that she didn't think we should carry on, which seemed abundatly sensible. She also said that she was initially glad to see Chris descending so that she could discuss what to do with him, only in horror to realise that it was Claryce descending into the waterfall on her first ever SRT trip. The exact quote was more along the lines of:
Claryce!?! Noooooooooo - Laura
It really did feel like being in that storm from The Martian, where you have to shout as loud as you can to people right next to you, your ears are filled with the storm around you and you can hardly see a thing in any direction, other than the beams of other people's headlights in the chaos. I personally thought this was epic in PVC, but for your first ever SRT trip while wearing a fabric "ventilated" club oversuit, this was not the easy intro trip I'd had in mind for Claryce and Kinsy.
Laura was clearly getting cold, so we agreed she should head up straight away and I would go retrieve the cache of goods stored somewhere downstream. Laura had tucked Claryce into a slot in the wall, and I told her I'd be back as soon as possible, before heading off down a tiny crack in the wall with the entire torrent of the waterfall following me below.
This turned out to be quite difficult, with bits only just wide enough for me to squeeze through. I also wsa traversing over all the water, which later turned out to be a good idea when I learnt it was chest deep from Laura, and eventually after squeezing and shimmying I saw the large orange bothy bag perched on a shelf on the right of the streamway. I looked around, for the other "stuff" but couldn't see anything at all. After looking through the loose bothy I also realised I couldn't find the bag it was in, but perhaps Laura had left that in a tackle sack or something. I poked further downstream but still nothing, and eventually decided to head back to Claryce in the waterfall chamber.
After traversing out of the sqeezy rift again, it was time to give Claryce a refresher on prussiking before her first ever up pitch in a cave, which happened to be through the middle of an enormous waterfall. She did brilliantly. I tried to pull the rope from the bottom so that she would stay out of the water, but this meant that her Croll kept slipping so after she had made it high enough I let her swing into the spray. I meanwhile was facing a nook in the wall right beside the bottom of the waterfall, holding the bottom of the rope gently enough so that I could feel it pulling through the jammers, and then retreated back to the cubby hole for about twenty minutes while she finished ascending the pitch. She managed to make it all the way without help, and popped up at the top to see that Chris had deployed his rapid response emergency christmas lights to boost festive morale.
I then headed up after her and we all had a bit of a sit down before heading back up via the annoying pich head to come next. It turned out this was because Laura had missed bolts on the other wall, which also weren't in the survey. Typical. So much for this being the easy cave. After some more plodding onwards we decided that today would not be the day for photographs, even with my entire Ged of equipment which had been shuttled to the bottom and back, and Chris's Lidl light in his bag as well.
Chris did however do a cheeky pop down to the bottom of the waterfall and back so that he could test his bungee jammers setup, which appreantly worked very well. As did the beading on his new shiny oversuit, conveniently. Chris also volunteered to de-rig, while I headed out with the others, and we all successfully spotted the turning off from the streamway out to the surface, making it out in seemingly no time at all. Claryce was wrapped in a bothy bag, and Kinsy took a final few videos on his GoPro, before we zoomed back to Laura's car and zoomed back home for a nice sit by the fire. We had made it out very early, about 5pm, but couldn't be bothered to do anything else, and the tea shop was closed anyway.
It was back at the hut, talking with Clive Westlake, that he enlightened us that we had not in fact gone down Centipede in wet conditions, which in retrospect made a lot of sense with the odd bolt placements and numbers, the large volume of water coming down the supposedly "dry" pitch, and the various really-not-that-fresher-friendly sections.
We had gone down Monastry.
"One of the most impressive waterfall pitches in Yorkshire", Clive noted.
Oops.
Ben
Rumbling Hole: James Wilson, Wojtek Sowinski, Jergus Strucka
It's always a joy to be in Yorkshire and wake up prior to my own alarm! 7:27am, crisp morning, empty kitchen -- The Dream. I was joined by Chris at 8am who made my cooking sesh much more efficient, parallelizing all tasks, and making sure that we have breakfast before noon. I was meant to wake people up, but it felt mean. I opted to wake Ben up gently, make some cat noises, and leave the room assuming that they would wake themselves up. Surprisingly, this worked.
Breakfast happened, Chris taught everyone SRT on the fresh and exciting NPC SRT rig, cave plans formed, and I decided to join James and Wojtek on their rigging trip down rumbling hole. I quite liked the idea of caving to a soothing deep hum, so the rumbling hole sounded like a nice choice. I was also keen to catch up with James after being away for a few weeks. James booked the cave, but on our approach we spotted a group of cavers that were clearly descending the hole. When we arrived, these cavers were gone and so was any proof of their existence. I thought that seeing a group of ghosts descend into a cave (without rope) was clearly a bad omen, but James did not seem particularly phased and came up with clearly irrational and significantly more boring explanations. Pre-order my upcoming book titled "Mysteries of Leck Fell and surrounding Dales".
Wojtek rigged the first pitch - it turns out that the Rumbling hole is not the perfect first rigging trip. We live, we learn. As James rigged with Wojtek, I wandered the fell. Many caves. At some point I fell asleep and woke up extra warm, this lasted a total of 2 minutes until I started moving and became cold again. We went down the cave, I ate some vegetarian sausage, and had a good time in the hole. Talking was possible, but hearing was not - the rumbling is more like the usual overwhelmingly loud waterfall noise. An OK cave.
In the evening, we all enjoyed a shockingly gelatinous eggy dal and I imbibed fine port while listening to people chat about the union. I also learnt how to plait and according to multiple independent spectators plaited Laura's hair better than Ellie.
Jergus
Sunday
Notts 2 > Voldemort Hole: James Wilson, Ellie Pizey, Laura Temple, Jergus Strucka
Saturday morning started successfully, with the Yorkists agreeing to leave Voldemort rigged for our extraordinarily well-planned trip from Notts 2 to Voldemort. The only problem with this plan was that it would effectively commit the entire trip to visit Leck Fell on both Saturday and Sunday, but because Leck Fell is the new Kingsdale, nobody minded.
On the day, I woke up to Chris making perfect porridge at a very early hour. This was followed by efficient breakfast as the caves have already been decided the previous night. Ellie, Laura, James and I would go up Voldemort while the rest of the group would film an exciting movie about Thurston sleeping. I thought the filming was a silly idea, but in hindsight I was clearly standing on the wrong side of history and everyone else was right.
Voldemort to Notts 2 or Notts 2 to Voldemort is a very nice Sunday trip. In the first variation, one enters Notts 2 via the Iron Kiln, walks upstream along the obvious passage past the connection to Lost Johns' Cave and until the streamway widens and gets intersected by a perfectly perpendicular side passage on the left. There are other side passages, but none of them as perfectly perpendicular as this one. Crawling along a muddy tunnel for approximately 5 minutes leads to a chamber with the last pitch of Voldemort hole. Navigation from here is relatively obvious - go up when possible, and turn right when possible.
Conveniently I took off the moment I saw the first pitch, leaving James, our only driver and true saviour, to derig the pitch and take a tackle sack across a long squeezy rifty crawl at the top. Due to the lack of any weight slowing me down, I made it across the crawl relatively quickly and had a long screaming session with Laura in a small chamber at the end. Our attempts to echo-locate Ellie and James were wildly unsuccesful with rumbling noise coming from the crawl being the only proof of their continued efforts. At last, Laura and I produced a hey-oh at precisely the perfect pitch to resonate with Ellie's ears - this was at a surprisingly high frequency and suggests the discovery of a long-lost link between humans and dolphins.
Continuation of the cave is up, when possible, and to the right, when viable. The cave is short, has lively amphibians in some crawls, and contains many very pretty formations. In the Haywagon, I recommend to not lose heart and push forward through the mud -- I am sure it must be thoroughly rewarding there.
Order of pretties on Leck Fell:
- F'ing Hopeless Pot
- Voldemort Hole
- Shuttleworth Pot
Jergus
Notts 2: Ben Richards, Chris Hayes, Wojtek Sowinski, Julien Jean, Ching Bon Tang, Thurston Blount, Jackie Li, Joshua Ho, Kinsy Li, Claryce Yap
Notts 2 is a absolutely stunning cave with its deep meandering streams and beautiful formations so it's hardly surprising that so many of us were keen to explore it. We all woke up extra early and were overflowing with energy. All except Thurston. Thurston must've really tired himself out on Saturday because on Sunday, he wouldn't even leave his sleeping bag. We figured the trip wouldn't be the same without him so we strapped his gear on for him and gently led him down the stairs. We even offered him a cushy seat with an amazing view on top of the minibus hoping that this would motivate him but, alas, it didn't work.
We lowered Thurston, with his trusty sleeping bag, down the scaffolding and into Notts 2 where we wandered upstream, as deep into the cave as time would allow us. For me, personally, it took a whole five minutes to realise that my attempts to climb above the stream or avoid its deeper parts were futile and that, sooner or later, I would inevatibly end up waist-deep in water which, for someone like me who hadn't packed a PVC, wasn't ideal but didn't feel nearly as cold as Rumbling Hole was the previous day. I like to think Thurston had it worse as, with every second, he sunk deeper while his sleeping bag absorbed more and more water, growing heavier than any of us had predicted. He did sleep through it though so it couldn't have been that bad.
Before turning back, we all took a quick break to share some chocolate, take photos and say hi to the folks from Durham who also happend to enter the cave on the same day and had just caught up to us. Letting Thurston slide back down the stream with us, we made our way out of Notts 2 just in time to cancel our callout and drove back to the NPC where we got ready to head back home.
This absolutely 100% real, definitely not made up, completely unscripted series of events was captured in its entirety thanks to Ben's amazing videography skills, resulting in the following documentary. Enjoy:
Wojtek
What a day. While of course the above report by Wojtek is what actually happened, I constructed a consiracy theory of my own as to how the video arrose, which I shall outline for you now.
The night before, as the port flowed freely and ideas were bouncing off of the walls at an alarmingl rapid pace, Chris discovered that there was an upcoming CHECC video competition. He found the entry from Cardiff, who had ironed a shirt in various places throughout OFD, and had made a very funny video of it for the competition. We weren't even going to CHECC, but oh how funny it would be to iron shirts in a cave. Minds started racing.
What if we took something else odd into the cave? Cooked a three course meal in one? Were all dressed in suits? What if we carried someone on a chair through an entire cave, SRT pitches and all? How about a bed?
These ideas seemed ill-suited to my planned trip of finally visiting Voldemort, given that Jergus had convinced the Yorkists to leave it rigged the day before so that we could derig it on our own trip. I'd been wanting to visit this cave for ages, but it isn't ideal for setting up complex film sets.
What if dragged someone throuhg on a sleeping bag? That could be perfect - it's one of the few club items we could bring in a cave and it would indeed look ridiculous. We could even have SRT on underneath, and drag someone through the water of Notts 2 just to see how quickly they could get hypotermia. Unfortunately surely no one would want to volunteer for this, but it would have been a funny video.
I'll do it - Thurston
And with that, we were off. Forget Voldemort, it was time to film Thurston's epic adventure.
The story was that Thurston would play a completely hypothetical snoring individual who doesn't want to wake up, and so is forced to go caving. Crazy, thank goodness we have none of those. We would then drag him out of the NPC, feed him breakfast and drag him behind the bus all the way to Leck Fell. It turned out that dragging behind the bus was actually quite tricky to pull off without either shredding a sleeping bag full of tackle sacks or constructing some weird roller rig thing that we wouldn't have time to perfect. Strapping to the roof it was.
We were to wake up early Sunday morning, and get to work. It all went shockingly well actually, with a speedy breakfast, and successful filming of Thurston being dragged out of the NPC. We did have to wait for 20 mins on the roof of the bus while James finished up whatever it was that he was doing in the hut, but eventually we convinced him to drive from the NPC down the driveway at max speed, which was a lot of fun. Well worth watching the behind the scenes video from the link above for all this.
We finally made it to Leck Fell, James tarted off with the Voldemorters, and we dragged Thruston over to, down, and through Notts 2. We bumped into Durham on the way, who were also doing a freshers trip, and only confused them a little with brief glimpses of Thruston in a sleeping bag for seemingly no apparent reason. We got all the shots we wanted, including a particulraly epic shot of Thurston being dragged down the main streamway, nearly wiping out Julien who was pulling him ahead as he zoomed down the slides, and we managed to not damage the bag too badly. It was shockingly heavy when wet though, with Thurston likening it to the weight of a large child (?).
On the way out I made the critical error of letting some Durham people go ahead on the climb while packing up my camera stuff, thinking that we could then film some SRT craziness after they'd left. This didn't happen as the Durham lot took so long we ended up pushing callout. And so we zoomed back to the hut, rapidly tidied up everything and shot off for the South.
We hadn't filmed any conclusion to our masterpiece, but luckily Chris had the genius idea of filming Thurston asleep in a service station while we ate fast food, and this turned out very well. I then got to work putting together the fruits of the day on my laptop as we sped overland, bound for London. By the final petrol station stop just outside Acton, it was complete. A premiere in stores went down very well, and I added the last few disclaimers after arriving home at 1am.
Probably the most fun I've ever had on a Sunday trip, or hypotheticallty it would have been had this not been a documentary, as Wojtek has already explained.