Ah, twas all in jest!

Cabeza Muxa : A second frontline report So, once the big 250m shaft was rigged, the next stage of rigging Muxa was to drop the next 107m shaft and establish camp at the foot of this, and continue rigging from there. Due to being vaguely ill (combination of a mild cold and heat exhaustion...

Cabeza Muxa: A frontline report. One of the two main objectives of this years Ario expedition is to re-bolt and re-explore the cave of Cabeza Muxa, a ~930m deep cave first explored in the late 70s and early 80s by a group of Catalonian cavers from the SIE club. Unlike many alpine cave...

Sadly Brendan never did make that Part II (I asked him the same question back when I was trying to figure out the same issue myself). However I did eventually manage to work out how to do it by reverse engineering the Survex sample data of the Loser Plateau that you can download from the Survex...

Don't like screwgates as I often find the gate doing itself up when you don't want it and generally being a nuisance. I did a long trip out of a deep alpine cave once and they were very vexatious the whole way up, partly due to the mud and grit fouling the screw. A fairly unwelcome distraction...

Thank Christ. I inched down that rope two years ago. Had to push the rope into the descender to make it go through.

Yeah, it's hard to believe how AKAKOR expected to pull this off long-term, or quite what motivated them. They had 9 cavers on the 2006 trip, and they staged a return trip in 2007 with a team of 4, which makes about 12 people who have to be in on it (the exped leader was the only person who was...

This is a really bizare story, which I've been fascinated by since hearing about it in the summer. In 2006, a small group of Italian cave explorers claimed to have explored a quartzite cave in the province of Amazonas to a depth of 670m. This made it not only the deepest cave in Brazil, but in...

I also associate Gary Moore with Northern Spain, as I once spent a week canyoning in the Pyrenees and the only CD in the car was a Gary Moore blues compilation. After the 7th or 8th listen I'd heard enough Gary Moore to last me a lifetime.

Not being nosy, but why do you want a titanium crowbar? Is it for caving?

I'd wait a bit in case there's any issues that might take a generation or two to resolve. I'd be interested in one myself but for the fact that my eight-year old MacBook Pro is still going strong, and I'd expect it to do so for at least another two to four years. There's some serious longevity...

I've used concrete screws quite a lot, especially since they're very suited to the terrible cherty friable rock we have in much of Ireland as they don't stress the rock all that much. I just use a small scrap of of inner tube with a hole in the middle on the screw like a washer so it holds the...

;D amazing. I've seen them before in Ireland (there's some in Noons) and wondered what the little lip of fabric was for. Was the idea that by making them more visible that people would be less inclined to miss them and place their own bolts, or was there some some additional factors behind...

Interesting photo of the Parba bolts here - click through for a close-up. https://verticalarchaeology.com/2015/06/18/ellis-brigham-catalog-1972-selected-pages/#jp-carousel-2887 Look a bit longer than the spit we know today. Also some of the older L-style hanger plates. There's still one of...

The trusty old Spit - when exactly did this come into use in the UK? I ask because we've come across a few of these recently in Ireland in caves where we don't think anyone's been to since the early 70s and are wondering if these would have been placed during the original early 70's exploration...

OI File Manager is needed because it has root access, and it gives access to additional folders and directories that are normally hidden from the phone users. I'm not sure of the exact reason it keeps getting removed from the Play store it but it's probably because it's open source and may not...

Such a pity. From reading the two-part account of the exploration of Verjovkina published in Descent last year I got the picture of a man totally dedicated to exploration. A sad way to go, but a fitting monument to him lies in the form of Verjovkina. Ar dheis D? go raibh a anam.

That would be class as I've got an X3 I don't really use much. They're lovely units though...

For size comparison, my original nalgene bottle, the larger current bottle, and a can of beer.

Just opened up my mini-first aid kit for a look. I keep everything in a small nalgene bottle. I used to have an even smaller nalgene bottle but it was a bit too minimal (no room for duct tape) and the opening was so small I had to include a tweezers to pull the bits out of it. - Tweezers not...