With any luck, five UK cavers are on board a BA flight for Canada right now.  One Canadian team is enroute to the cave today.  The UK team skis in with more Canadians on April 10th and will put two divers in the Boon's Blunder sump on April 12; the intention is to start surveying the dry passage beyond the 845m sump.

Great stuff!
Would you be so kind as to post on hear with any updates? (or is there a twitter feed / blog somewhere?)

jarvist said:

Great stuff!
Would you be so kind as to post on hear with any updates? (or is there a twitter feed / blog somewhere?)

Click to expand...

I second that 

Well here's the update - Team One called in on the satellite phone to report that the Ice Crawls had grown to completely block the way on just 200m from the entrance, so the expedition was cancelled.  The UK cavers are taking it well, and are participating in another project as few hundred kilometres away.

To answer the inevitable question:  the Castleguard Cave gate key is tightly controlled by Parks Canada, and the entrance is a 20km ski from the nearest road, itself several hours from civilization, so could not be checked beforehand (ice blockage is a rare phenomenon, though it has been constricted in the past).

Terrible luck 8 (

Good effort none the less, respect to the UK team taking it so calmly, and I trust that this won't dampen spirits for a future return!

Does the ice essentially mean that this season is closed with respect to exploration? I seem to recall one time the crawls were a horrific ice/water slurry, so I guess there is a lot of variation...

I feel gutted for Martin who I know has been looking forward to the return trip along with everyone else who has put time and effort into the trip.

jarvist said:

Does the ice essentially mean that this season is closed with respect to exploration? I seem to recall one time the crawls were a horrific ice/water slurry, so I guess there is a lot of variation...

Click to expand...

On Martin's first trip out there is had been quite warm and everyone got a soaking going through the ice crawls and it was a bit misearable by all accounts.  On the 2nd trip in 2010 (when I was there) the crawls were very open and there was only one damp section.  The report from the Norwegians talks about having to enlarge the crawls with an ice axe and finding bits from their suits frozen under several inches of ice in the course of the week they spent underground.

There is a hatchet and an ice hammer permanently stored at the entrance in case the Ice Crawls need chipping, but this year it was beyond the efforts of the four Canadians comprising Team One who did give it a good effort over the course of two days.  The ice forms when the cold draught enters during winter, so there is a question as to whether the ice increases in mass during warm weather when surface percolation can reach the cold cave air, or whether the ponded water ice mass ablates and decreases over time, or both.  The cave floods during spring melt which puts access to an end until the following winter.

As far as I know, this is only the second prohibitive ice closure in the history of exploration.

845m sump, wow thats a big ask. Good luck to those brave souls.

As for prohibitive ice closure, Quaking lower entrance was once completely blocked by solid ice but that was not exploration.

Heh, our Mendips Cave was blocked by ice for eighteen years, reopened naturally in 1981.  Canyon Creek Ice Cave had its back series plugged by ice up to about 1950, then opened until the early 1980s and then closed off again and has been plugged ever since.  Ice Hall is almost always closed by ice.  But the Ice Crawls in Castleguard is seasonal ice; it appears and disappears every year.

As Ian says were all disappointed by the turn of events at castleguard. To make matters worse the unseasonal weather has screwed up plan B and C too.

Today was better and we spend a few hours digging a resurgence with promise. A return is expected tomorrow, and I hope we can pass the restriction.