I've been packing for an upcoming cave camping trip today, and because I'm lazy tried searching the forum for a packing list in an attempt to avoid having to engage any brain cells. Alas I failed, so had to think about what I may need. To spare a future caver from having to undergo the same...

I've had exactly the same experience when I first started climbing and was using my dad's old harness! Although it didn't feel embarrassing as the staff were lovely about it, let me use a hire one for free, and offered me a discount on the ones they sell (in hindsight perhaps they considered me...

archive.org has crawled some of his site, but only one of the photos, and it's not a very cavey one...

There's enough room in the slot that the strap goes through to also pass a narrow bit of cord for securing the pantin to stuff. This also takes up less room on your krab, which is nice. I'll take a photo when I'm home :)

Nedward --> chaineddogned

I quite like that melting allows you to make a slot rather than a hole, which holds your zip tie nices and snug when you pass them through. I'd still tether the torch to your helmet with a bit of cord tbough, as those zip ties aren't infallible!

Personally I don't like using the straps to secure lights on helmets as the elasticity tends to go quite quickly with mud ingress, then they tend to wobble around. A couple of pairs of tiny holes melted into the helmet case to pass some zip-ties through would allow you to attach the plastic...

A couple from the University of Exeter coming your way!

I can't speak for them personally, but it looks like a good handled hand ascender. Personally I don't find the handle all that useful any more, but each to their own.

"Training it out" is really hard, because you almost never lose control of your speed on a descent, so you very rarely actually test what your reaction would be to finding yourself unexpectedly in freefall. The closest I've come is in a mine in Cornwall where the in-situ rope went from thick mud...

My system's a bit like yours I suppose, ZombieCake, but I don't actually sit at my desk much if I can help it (I work from home so don't want to sit there unless I'm paid to!), so being tethered to my drives is a shame. I guess I could set them up as NAS, that might be a sensible plan. I do use...

I'm interested to hear what everyone's process is for storing and backing up the photos they take. I take some cave photos on my phone, and some on a cave camera, and then I manually stick them all on an external drive from time to time, which I clone as a backup. This makes it quite hard to...

Why is that? Does that help remove stuff that would otherwise cause it to corrode?

I'm sure that's not representative of young people in general, but perhaps is a consequence of selection bias (the sample of young people is those invited to a destination wedding in a Mallorcan castle). I haven't flown since pre-covid, and that was to the Dachstein expedition, which just goes...

I feel the cold, so I always wear a wetsuit, and have rarely been too warm (there's very little totally dry cave where you couldn't dunk yourself if you needed to cool down!). I've never worn a hood or mask for it, but I imagine a hood would be quite nice. I personally wouldn't bother with a mask.

I want to be able to read about carbon offsetting for expeditions in a thread titled "carbon offsetting for expeditions" without having to trawl through posts discussing the re-engineering of the UK's energy infrastructure. I also made it very clear that I'm happy for those discussions to...

Can we try and keep this thread on the topic of offsetting expedition emissions, rather than global energy politics in general? Feel free to open another thread for more general discussions, but I'm interested in Badlad's initial question!

There's a little bit more nuance to it than that though, isn't there? All activities (leisure or not) are going to have a negative impact on something. That might be greenhouse gas emissions, or erosion, or the opportunity cost of not going litter picking instead. You have to decide what's an...

Sorry to hear it didn't go, it was sounding so promising! I'm loving the trip reports, well done, keep it up, and thanks for the vicarious excitement!

Awesome! Looks pretty dry, as well?