andrewmcleod
Well-known member
This is my first trip report, so I will start at the beginning ? about 6 months ago, when Exeter University Speleological Society (EUSS) posted on the Exeter Uni Climbing Club Facebook page in search of climbers who would like a free trip caving in the Mendips in exchange for driving as they were short of cars. I had been climbing with the Uni club for about 3 years, and had developed a reputation for seeking out the more 'interior' routes available, but had always avoided caving out of a fear that I might get a bit overly keen. Taking EUSS up on their offer, my first weekend involved a brief trip to Cuckoo Cleeves before a rapid retreat due to bad air, and a 3 hour Swildon's Short Round trip ? an interesting and very mixed introduction to caving! Suffice to say, fast forward 6 months and 18 more caves, and I find myself, two other EUSS members (Ari and Ed), and all the gear I have spent far too much money on, heading up the M5 towards the Dales.
At this point I should emphasise that the Dales are a Really Long Way from Exeter; on our last trip to Yorkshire we got back at 5am in the morning (due to a somewhat lengthy trip down the Small Mammal Pot/Bar Pot Alternative route), something we were hoping not to repeat this time! This time Ari had managed to get our Gaping Gill permit for the Saturday instead of the Sunday, leaving open the possibility of a long trip, and I had my sights set on Disappointment Pot and an anticlockwise round trip of the GG system. Eventually we arrived at the YSS just in time for a drink at the Helwith Bridge before packing the ropes for the morning and retiring to bed.
An unusually early start for EUSS saw us out of the hut before 10am (previously unheard of!) and the long, long, long trudge up the hill began with each of us carrying a tackle bag. Glorious sunshine lit up the hillsides, mocking us as we headed for our dark and damp destination deep below the fell. The entrance was located, then wetsuits, Neofleeces and SRT gear donned, and we began the descent. Incidentally the entrance is quite loose, so best to stay out of fall zone once at the bottom of the handline.
Rope lengths for the pitches are (according to the CNCC guide) a 15m handline and 30m, 20m, 10m and 25m for which we brought my 60m, 45m, 30m (EUSS), 15m and 30m ropes, respectively, fortunately with my ropes in 9/9.5mm rope (otherwise we might never have made it up the hill). Some might question the wisdom of rigging a 15m hand line with a 60m rope, but we wanted flexibility in case the duck was sumped, and we would have needed it for Marilyn or Flood (which I think we also had a permit for).
Looking at the survey shows the Disappointment entrance, an active streamway, is massively longer than any of the other entrances, at least in horizontal extent, and I was surprised by how worthwhile it was as a cave in its own right. But before we could 'appreciate' the Disappointment streamway proper, the duck beckoned. This comes in two parts ? one low enough to get you wet but think 'that wasn't so bad' followed by the sneaky lower duck at the end. But it was quickly dispatched, and we set off.
We had left one bag outside the cave and so had only one bag of ropes and my bag containing my survival Daren drum and self-rescue gear. The streamway is quite tight and sinuous; there are plenty of places where I could barely squeeze through sideways and I am not particularly wide. Dragging the bags through this was rather tricky and reminded me of the crabwalk in Giants. I say tricky; it was actually just a massive pain in the backside. Eventually we made it to the top of the first pitch, having struggled to drag rope and carabiners down the streamway, only to find the first pitch already rigged.
A brief discussion ensued as to whether to leave our ropes here and just use the pre-rigged pitches, but being a stubborn character I insisted on rigging this pitch with my own ropes just in case the mystery rope-rigger returned and removed their ropes, and in any event it was good practice. And so we continued down the cave with a steadily decreasing amount of rope and gear as I rigged underneath the pre-rigged pitches, until eventually we found ourselves in the chamber at the bottom of Disappointment Pot where we left our SRT gear and had a quick snack. A short scramble down and right turn led into Hensler's Master Cave. This walking passage of sizeable proportions reminded me of similar passages in OFD, another cave I must get back to.
We headed down into the Master Cave in search of the iron ladder at the end of the right-hand fork. We never found the ladder, but we did climb up a short fixed handline (dubiously tied around a stal or two) into a very nice grotto full of relatively clean white formations. Another even more excitingly rigged traverse handline seemed to lead around the hole we had climbed up and onwards, but we decided it was time to head back out, take the right turn and head toward Mud Hensler's Crawl. Crawling ensued. Lots of crawling.
Or at least that was the plan. Due to my excellent laminating but poor navigational skills we realised we were probably crawling towards Bar Pot. Fortunately it was simple enough to just change our plans and go for a clockwise round trip instead, although we somehow managed to repeatedly lose our way in New Hensler's Passage (with Ari at one point free-climbing a sketchy chimney at the end of a short extremely muddy tube). Eventually we emerged in South East Aven, which we had descended down just a few weeks before on our Small Mammal Pot/Bar Pot Alternative route. Back on the beaten track, we quickly headed past the Big Pitch and past the deep pot into South East Passage. As usual, the draught leads the way here, together with the general destruction wreaked by the passage of thousands of cavers.
Originally the Sand Caverns were on the plan, but with time passing we continued onwards to the mighty Main Chamber, where we could see the sun outside was still shining brightly down the ever-impressive shaft. After a quick snack break, our route took us to the east end of the chamber, scrambling up the boulders, and up the extremely rusty looking ladder, which looked like the only thing stopping it collapsing into a rusty pile was force of habit. Fortunately it did not, and we made our way into East Passage.
Most of GG seems fairly devoid of significant formations but here they were in good quantity (with accompanying conservation tape); some crawling/stooping later we emerged into the substantial Mud Hall, and the beginning of the high traverse line from one end of the chamber to the other. The floor drops quickly away beneath you for tens of metres, and attempting to descend and reascend the chamber at the other end would no doubt be quite an ordeal. The guide states that this traverse line was placed in 1981; the hope and assumption was that the ropes had been replaced since then but given how amazingly muddy they were, we did wonder?
An exciting array of hand-made pegs, stakes driven into mud and other dubious paraphernalia was used to 'secure' the traverse line. Fortunately a good path has been cut into the mud slopes by the passage of feet so the traverse line is barely necessary although the drop is substantial at times. The traverse is livened up by descending a substantial chain which provides a connection between two levels of the traverse.
Reaching the end of the line we climbed out of Mud Hall, and somehow managed to find the entrance to the aptly named Mud Hensler's crawl without any real difficulty - a substantial change from our performance in New Hensler's earlier! I cannot bring myself to call the entrance to the partly flooded tube a duck, as I was able to do the whole thing on my front without getting my face wet. Nonetheless it is still quite wet and the water is wonderfully accompanied by inches and inches of deep ooze covering the phreatic floor.
As we crawled through the canal, and I dragged my water-filled tackle bag behind me, we acquired a somewhat philosophical bent. We all agreed it was a truly wet, muddy, miserable and unpleasant experience, and therefore that as we found ourselves enjoying the experience there must be something quite wrong with us. Somehow I have gone from not being a massive fan of wet caves to putting the Chamber of Horrors in Giants on my caving wishlist. Clearly we are all twisted deviants who should be avoided at all costs!
Lengthy crawling started to take its toll at this point. Due to wearing an undersuit with foam knee pads in pockets, a Neofleece with its built in knee pads, and Warmtex knee pads over my oversuit, you would think my knees would be quite protected. However, somehow the outrageous and poorly-considered quantity of knee protection meant that something, somewhere was rubbing the hair and/or skin on my knee. Ari, meanwhile, was reminding everybody that he hated crawling (unless through a damp canal, apparently), and while we had enjoyed the cave we were all looking forward to escaping to the surface. Little did we know the worst was yet to come...
After passing Hensler's High Aven and returning to the bottom of Disappointment Pot, we put our SRT kit back on and headed up the pitch. Ed and Ari started up the fixed lines while I climbed my ropes and derigged. Eventually we were back in the tight streamway with the two bags. Thus began possibly the most arduous caving I have done so far.
The bags were a real pain to get down the streamway, but getting them back uphill was far, far worse. It was a continuous struggle, fighting for every metre of progress at probably a tenth of the speed we would have managed without the bags. Get the bag stuck. Climb over the bag so you are behind it. Lift it over your head and pass it a couple of feet forwards. Climb back over or underneath the bag. Drag it behind you by the side handle. Repeat, seemingly endlessly. I can only imagine how genuinely horrendous it must have been for cavers of years past bringing ladders or even rope ladders down the streamway...
Never did I suspect I would be so glad to see a duck, but it meant our troubles were nearly over. It's an interesting duck on the return: after passing through the very low arch into the low partly flooded tube you have to effectively change lanes, sliding sideways into fairly wide but initially low airspace that smoothly increases in height as you head towards the exit.
In typical Yorkshire style, the weather had turned slightly as we exited the cave: cloudy and damp, although fortunately it only rained very lightly and held back the downpours for another day. We had been underground for more than eight hours at this point, and after cancelling our callout we began the long slog back down to the car and the YSS.
Suffice to say the trip left us broken, exhausted and more than satisfied ? an excellent trip worthy of the long drive. Nonetheless, none of us was really keen for a 'proper' cave on the Sunday, and so plans of a Swinsto pull-through trip were rapidly scaled back to a simple Jingling Pot trip. I'm not sure it even really counts as a cave if you can see the sky for the whole time, but it was a fun little excursion despite me managing to put my Pantin on the outside of my foot instead of the inside. For some reason the pot was also full of frogs, but they seemed happy enough so we left them alone in the depths as we headed out, back to the hut and then on the road back to the deep, deep South.
Details of the GG round trip (and our Small Mammal Pot/Bar Pot Alternative trip) were acquired from the Braemoor website ? thank you mystery cave route describer! Thanks also to all the people who organize the access agreements, bolt the pitches, survey the caves, repair the huts and write and edit the CNCC rigging guides. And thanks to Ed and possibly Ari for the photos (I might have taken some but can't remember!).
At this point I should emphasise that the Dales are a Really Long Way from Exeter; on our last trip to Yorkshire we got back at 5am in the morning (due to a somewhat lengthy trip down the Small Mammal Pot/Bar Pot Alternative route), something we were hoping not to repeat this time! This time Ari had managed to get our Gaping Gill permit for the Saturday instead of the Sunday, leaving open the possibility of a long trip, and I had my sights set on Disappointment Pot and an anticlockwise round trip of the GG system. Eventually we arrived at the YSS just in time for a drink at the Helwith Bridge before packing the ropes for the morning and retiring to bed.
An unusually early start for EUSS saw us out of the hut before 10am (previously unheard of!) and the long, long, long trudge up the hill began with each of us carrying a tackle bag. Glorious sunshine lit up the hillsides, mocking us as we headed for our dark and damp destination deep below the fell. The entrance was located, then wetsuits, Neofleeces and SRT gear donned, and we began the descent. Incidentally the entrance is quite loose, so best to stay out of fall zone once at the bottom of the handline.
Rope lengths for the pitches are (according to the CNCC guide) a 15m handline and 30m, 20m, 10m and 25m for which we brought my 60m, 45m, 30m (EUSS), 15m and 30m ropes, respectively, fortunately with my ropes in 9/9.5mm rope (otherwise we might never have made it up the hill). Some might question the wisdom of rigging a 15m hand line with a 60m rope, but we wanted flexibility in case the duck was sumped, and we would have needed it for Marilyn or Flood (which I think we also had a permit for).
Looking at the survey shows the Disappointment entrance, an active streamway, is massively longer than any of the other entrances, at least in horizontal extent, and I was surprised by how worthwhile it was as a cave in its own right. But before we could 'appreciate' the Disappointment streamway proper, the duck beckoned. This comes in two parts ? one low enough to get you wet but think 'that wasn't so bad' followed by the sneaky lower duck at the end. But it was quickly dispatched, and we set off.
We had left one bag outside the cave and so had only one bag of ropes and my bag containing my survival Daren drum and self-rescue gear. The streamway is quite tight and sinuous; there are plenty of places where I could barely squeeze through sideways and I am not particularly wide. Dragging the bags through this was rather tricky and reminded me of the crabwalk in Giants. I say tricky; it was actually just a massive pain in the backside. Eventually we made it to the top of the first pitch, having struggled to drag rope and carabiners down the streamway, only to find the first pitch already rigged.
A brief discussion ensued as to whether to leave our ropes here and just use the pre-rigged pitches, but being a stubborn character I insisted on rigging this pitch with my own ropes just in case the mystery rope-rigger returned and removed their ropes, and in any event it was good practice. And so we continued down the cave with a steadily decreasing amount of rope and gear as I rigged underneath the pre-rigged pitches, until eventually we found ourselves in the chamber at the bottom of Disappointment Pot where we left our SRT gear and had a quick snack. A short scramble down and right turn led into Hensler's Master Cave. This walking passage of sizeable proportions reminded me of similar passages in OFD, another cave I must get back to.
We headed down into the Master Cave in search of the iron ladder at the end of the right-hand fork. We never found the ladder, but we did climb up a short fixed handline (dubiously tied around a stal or two) into a very nice grotto full of relatively clean white formations. Another even more excitingly rigged traverse handline seemed to lead around the hole we had climbed up and onwards, but we decided it was time to head back out, take the right turn and head toward Mud Hensler's Crawl. Crawling ensued. Lots of crawling.
Or at least that was the plan. Due to my excellent laminating but poor navigational skills we realised we were probably crawling towards Bar Pot. Fortunately it was simple enough to just change our plans and go for a clockwise round trip instead, although we somehow managed to repeatedly lose our way in New Hensler's Passage (with Ari at one point free-climbing a sketchy chimney at the end of a short extremely muddy tube). Eventually we emerged in South East Aven, which we had descended down just a few weeks before on our Small Mammal Pot/Bar Pot Alternative route. Back on the beaten track, we quickly headed past the Big Pitch and past the deep pot into South East Passage. As usual, the draught leads the way here, together with the general destruction wreaked by the passage of thousands of cavers.
Originally the Sand Caverns were on the plan, but with time passing we continued onwards to the mighty Main Chamber, where we could see the sun outside was still shining brightly down the ever-impressive shaft. After a quick snack break, our route took us to the east end of the chamber, scrambling up the boulders, and up the extremely rusty looking ladder, which looked like the only thing stopping it collapsing into a rusty pile was force of habit. Fortunately it did not, and we made our way into East Passage.
Most of GG seems fairly devoid of significant formations but here they were in good quantity (with accompanying conservation tape); some crawling/stooping later we emerged into the substantial Mud Hall, and the beginning of the high traverse line from one end of the chamber to the other. The floor drops quickly away beneath you for tens of metres, and attempting to descend and reascend the chamber at the other end would no doubt be quite an ordeal. The guide states that this traverse line was placed in 1981; the hope and assumption was that the ropes had been replaced since then but given how amazingly muddy they were, we did wonder?
An exciting array of hand-made pegs, stakes driven into mud and other dubious paraphernalia was used to 'secure' the traverse line. Fortunately a good path has been cut into the mud slopes by the passage of feet so the traverse line is barely necessary although the drop is substantial at times. The traverse is livened up by descending a substantial chain which provides a connection between two levels of the traverse.
Reaching the end of the line we climbed out of Mud Hall, and somehow managed to find the entrance to the aptly named Mud Hensler's crawl without any real difficulty - a substantial change from our performance in New Hensler's earlier! I cannot bring myself to call the entrance to the partly flooded tube a duck, as I was able to do the whole thing on my front without getting my face wet. Nonetheless it is still quite wet and the water is wonderfully accompanied by inches and inches of deep ooze covering the phreatic floor.
As we crawled through the canal, and I dragged my water-filled tackle bag behind me, we acquired a somewhat philosophical bent. We all agreed it was a truly wet, muddy, miserable and unpleasant experience, and therefore that as we found ourselves enjoying the experience there must be something quite wrong with us. Somehow I have gone from not being a massive fan of wet caves to putting the Chamber of Horrors in Giants on my caving wishlist. Clearly we are all twisted deviants who should be avoided at all costs!
Lengthy crawling started to take its toll at this point. Due to wearing an undersuit with foam knee pads in pockets, a Neofleece with its built in knee pads, and Warmtex knee pads over my oversuit, you would think my knees would be quite protected. However, somehow the outrageous and poorly-considered quantity of knee protection meant that something, somewhere was rubbing the hair and/or skin on my knee. Ari, meanwhile, was reminding everybody that he hated crawling (unless through a damp canal, apparently), and while we had enjoyed the cave we were all looking forward to escaping to the surface. Little did we know the worst was yet to come...
After passing Hensler's High Aven and returning to the bottom of Disappointment Pot, we put our SRT kit back on and headed up the pitch. Ed and Ari started up the fixed lines while I climbed my ropes and derigged. Eventually we were back in the tight streamway with the two bags. Thus began possibly the most arduous caving I have done so far.
The bags were a real pain to get down the streamway, but getting them back uphill was far, far worse. It was a continuous struggle, fighting for every metre of progress at probably a tenth of the speed we would have managed without the bags. Get the bag stuck. Climb over the bag so you are behind it. Lift it over your head and pass it a couple of feet forwards. Climb back over or underneath the bag. Drag it behind you by the side handle. Repeat, seemingly endlessly. I can only imagine how genuinely horrendous it must have been for cavers of years past bringing ladders or even rope ladders down the streamway...
Never did I suspect I would be so glad to see a duck, but it meant our troubles were nearly over. It's an interesting duck on the return: after passing through the very low arch into the low partly flooded tube you have to effectively change lanes, sliding sideways into fairly wide but initially low airspace that smoothly increases in height as you head towards the exit.
In typical Yorkshire style, the weather had turned slightly as we exited the cave: cloudy and damp, although fortunately it only rained very lightly and held back the downpours for another day. We had been underground for more than eight hours at this point, and after cancelling our callout we began the long slog back down to the car and the YSS.
Suffice to say the trip left us broken, exhausted and more than satisfied ? an excellent trip worthy of the long drive. Nonetheless, none of us was really keen for a 'proper' cave on the Sunday, and so plans of a Swinsto pull-through trip were rapidly scaled back to a simple Jingling Pot trip. I'm not sure it even really counts as a cave if you can see the sky for the whole time, but it was a fun little excursion despite me managing to put my Pantin on the outside of my foot instead of the inside. For some reason the pot was also full of frogs, but they seemed happy enough so we left them alone in the depths as we headed out, back to the hut and then on the road back to the deep, deep South.
Details of the GG round trip (and our Small Mammal Pot/Bar Pot Alternative trip) were acquired from the Braemoor website ? thank you mystery cave route describer! Thanks also to all the people who organize the access agreements, bolt the pitches, survey the caves, repair the huts and write and edit the CNCC rigging guides. And thanks to Ed and possibly Ari for the photos (I might have taken some but can't remember!).
