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...

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...

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...

I've been reading a lot of old caving literature during the lockdown and I've come across a lot of obscure terms that I find quite intriguing. A lot of these are the result of words being translated from French and not really sticking. Boulder Ruckle - Older term for a boulder choke. Seems...

You can read more on the Caveatron here - http://caveatron.com/index.html It's quite a sophisticated device, it does the usual compass, inclination, and length measurements, but it's primarily a handheld 3D scanning tool. I'm not sure how well it would replace or succeed the DistoX -  it...

Does anyone have the solution to the following Survex problem I have. When I'm linking survey files together in survex I use a command like           *equate  sectionone.1 sectiontwo.2 where 'sectionone' is the name of the file and '1' is the exported station. However, when I have stations...

Chanced across this (don't ask how*) whilst trawling the internet. ! No longer available Oddly reminiscent of my last trip to the Dales. *alright I'll admit it, I was searching for 'Vera Lynn in Blackface' videos and this came up somehow. I have eclectic taste in music okay?

Anyone got an idea of how much dynamic rope I'd need for a set of cows tails? I want to just go into the local outdoor shop and order a length and then not have to trim off the extra length with a knife heated on the hob. Cos I don't have a gas hob - but that's a different problem. Or is this...

I?m in the hunt for a mysterious newsletter that may have been produced by the Cave Projects Group some time in the mid-1970s, that might contain information on some caves in Ireland. The back-story is that the Shannon Group have been exploring a remote karst area in county Leitrim that hasn't...

I've got a few .3d files on my laptop from an old project. I can't find the .svx files and I think they went missing after a hard drive failure a few years back. I still have the survey notes and can re-type the data but is there any way I can open the .3d file as a .svx file? It would save an...

Does the Chelsea College Caving Club still exist? They did some work in Ireland c.1970 and published in the London Universities Caving Clubs Journal. From what I can glean from the internet the college itself was subsumed into the wider University of London during the 70s so I'm guessing that...

Would anyone with a stock of CPC Journals close at hand be able to tell me what the volume number and issue number was of the journal's 1961 issue? I need to reference it for an article and don't have the whole journal. It has the article CPC Irish Meet, 1961 in it...

Does anyone know what this stuff is? I see it all over the place. It also comes in a silvery-white colour but the golden-yellow colour stuff is more common. And what exactly is it living on? The only observation that I've made is that it usually occurs in moist places, near pitches and the like...