David Rose
Well-known member
Since 1987, teams from Oxford University Cave Club and its successor body, the Ario Caves Project, have been trying to realise “the Ario dream”, a navigable link between the mountain pothole known as Pozu Jultayu or 2/7 to Cueva Culiembro, a big resurgence cave located far below at the bottom of the Rio Cares gorge. Together, the resultant system would be close to 1,500m deep, with further potential for “uphill” extension.
OUCC’s first big find in the area, Pozu del Xitu, was connected to Culiembro via six sumps by Chris Jewell and CDG colleagues in 2010. This now has a surveyed length of some 15km, and a depth of 1,264m. A second branch of Cueva Culiembro, whose total catchment area is enormous, heads towards the 1,100m-deep Asopladeru la Texa/Pozu Tormenta complex. Also first bottomed by the Oxford club, this has not yet been linked, although a dive by Tony Seddon in La Texa’s terminal sump made significant progress in 2009.
However, the big one, the joining of Pozu Jultayu and Culiembro, has for many years proven elusive. Now a very deep shaft (see photo below) may prove to be the key to achieving it.
The end of the 2/7 streamway was reached half a lifetime ago in 1989, and in the following decade, numerous expeditions tried and failed to find a way through its terminus, the intimidating blockage known as Choke Egbert. Enticing as its potential is, no one has been there since an intrepid pair paid a brief visit in August 2000, and the last more systematic efforts were in 1998. In 2018, Tony established an important upstream link in the 2/7 system with a successful dive at the bottom of C4/Torca la Regallon that connected the two caves, increasing the overall depth to more than 900m. Egbert, however, has remained neglected.
There are good reasons for this. On the one hand, the distance between Choke Egbert and the current upstream limit of the 2/7 branch of Culiembro is relatively small: around 450m vertically and 500m horizontally, so the gradient must be steep. But the original 2/7 entrance lies almost at the top of the Jultayu mountain peak, a solid two-hour uphill slog through the summer heat from our base at the Ario mountain refuge. Its entrance series contains several strenuous, narrow rifts, as well as numerous pitches, followed by a lot of horizontal caving, some of it far from straightforward. Approached by this mean, Choke Egbert is truly remote, and a dig there would be a daunting proposition.
Hence, when Ario expeditions resumed after the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a powerful incentive to try to find an easier entrance, ideally close to the 2/7 streamway’s end. In 2023, years of efforts made to widen the rifts in Bill’s Cave, also known as 27/9, paid off when this was linked to the 2/7 streamway. However, although much closer to the refuge than the original Pozu Jultayu shafts, it came in close to the upstream sump, a very long way from Egbert, and even after widening operations, its rifts are tight, long and exhausting. The big push this year will be via yet another ingress to the system that was connected in 2025.
The late Keith Potter had a look at the gigantic open shaft known as Jou Tras la Jayada (or TLJ, as Ario project members usually call it) in 1980. He found himself dangling far above the floor at a depth of 200m: fortunately, he’d remembered to tie a knot in the end of his rope. Five years later, I was part of a small group that got to the bottom, some 315m below the surface. A Spanish team had reached the base of the main shaft some years earlier, finding no way on, but we were excited when we found a parallel pitch through a window some 20m up. Alas: it led only to an impenetrable rift choked with sand, and like the Spanish, we found nothing in the vast, echoing cathedral where the main TLJ shaft lands.
It was, then, sheer luck that led to members of the 2024 expedition deciding to look at TLJ again in order to survey it. To their amazement, they could see that just a few metres from the end of their rope, a flake of rock jutted out from the wall, barely concealing a passage we had missed almost four decades earlier. A short climb down, a bit of crawling and stooping, another climb up and they were in a short, straight rift that opened out into TLJ’s second pitch, an airy drop of 100m. For reasons best known to themselves, but which may have something to do with our dismal inability to find the way on in 1985, they called their find Try a Little Harder.
Descending and climbing a 315m drop with some 23 re-belays may not be the easiest way to get to work, but we hope it will create a more practical way to push Choke Egbert for the first time in 28 years. To begin with, the TLJ entrance is even closer to the Ario refuge than 27/9, and requires only minimal uphill walking. Last June, a group that included my son Dan, the 2025 – 6 UBSS President who at 21 was then six months older than I was when I went to Ario for the first time in 1980, swiftly connected the base of TLJ’s second pitch to Holier than Thou, a short inlet off the main 2/7 streamway. This will be our route of choice.
And what a streamway it is: a blue and turquoise torrent that runs through vast, boulder strewn chambers, down powerful, challenging cascades, across wide, marbled corridors and at the bottom of high rifts. To reach Primula Point, the campsite close to Choke Egbert used by our OUCC predecessors in the 1990s, will, we hope, be doable in a longish day from the surface, once the lower cave is rigged. And then we will see whether any of the leads described by the last expedition that spent much time there back in 1998 are as promising as they sound.
Getting through or round Choke Egbert is not the expedition’s only objective. In recent years, we have found and investigated other entrances lower down the mountain that may yet offer a more convenient backdoor, and we will pay them further attention. One, 53/5, carries a powerful draught and sits tantalisingly close to the deeper reaches of both Xitu and 2/7. We will also hunt for holes in the precipitous Valle Extremeru in the side of the Cares gorge, that might – might – drop into the streamway on the downstream side of Egbert, or close to its upstream end.
And as ever, there will be the sublime tranquility of the Picos, and the guaranteed warmest of welcomes from our friends who run the Ario refuge, Carlota and Ignacio – and serve the finest breakfasts in Spain.
I won’t be quite the longest-serving Ario veteran this year: that accolade belongs to my friend Graham Naylor, a fellow Xitu pioneer who first probed the mountains’ secrets the year before me, in 1979. But we have young blood too, from Bristol, Sheffield and other thriving university clubs.
“This will be my first expedition, so naturally I'm very excited for it,” Oxford engineer Viktor Verebelyi told me. “Being based in Oxford, it feels like a rite of passage to be part of the Ario Dream. I'm looking forward to experiencing the amazing views above and below ground, and I'd really like to learn bolting and bolt climbing. If the opportunity arises during the expedition, I will certainly not shy away from digging at the choke.”
Like my son Dan, Sheffield’s Violet Hill has been a caver since she was 5. Now 19, she said she is “especially looking forward to the sheer size of the European caves, and the challenge of that depth of SRT. It will be a new and exciting experience to survey that sort of cave, and to be a part of the history of the project.”
In 2026, the prospects for a new chapter of that history look good.
Photos by Bartek Biela
Above: Schematic map of the Ario area, showing the 2/7 system, its entrances, Xitu, Cueva Culiembro and Sil de Oliseda, another cave thought likely to connect that would add a further c.200m of depth.
OUCC’s first big find in the area, Pozu del Xitu, was connected to Culiembro via six sumps by Chris Jewell and CDG colleagues in 2010. This now has a surveyed length of some 15km, and a depth of 1,264m. A second branch of Cueva Culiembro, whose total catchment area is enormous, heads towards the 1,100m-deep Asopladeru la Texa/Pozu Tormenta complex. Also first bottomed by the Oxford club, this has not yet been linked, although a dive by Tony Seddon in La Texa’s terminal sump made significant progress in 2009.
However, the big one, the joining of Pozu Jultayu and Culiembro, has for many years proven elusive. Now a very deep shaft (see photo below) may prove to be the key to achieving it.
The end of the 2/7 streamway was reached half a lifetime ago in 1989, and in the following decade, numerous expeditions tried and failed to find a way through its terminus, the intimidating blockage known as Choke Egbert. Enticing as its potential is, no one has been there since an intrepid pair paid a brief visit in August 2000, and the last more systematic efforts were in 1998. In 2018, Tony established an important upstream link in the 2/7 system with a successful dive at the bottom of C4/Torca la Regallon that connected the two caves, increasing the overall depth to more than 900m. Egbert, however, has remained neglected.
There are good reasons for this. On the one hand, the distance between Choke Egbert and the current upstream limit of the 2/7 branch of Culiembro is relatively small: around 450m vertically and 500m horizontally, so the gradient must be steep. But the original 2/7 entrance lies almost at the top of the Jultayu mountain peak, a solid two-hour uphill slog through the summer heat from our base at the Ario mountain refuge. Its entrance series contains several strenuous, narrow rifts, as well as numerous pitches, followed by a lot of horizontal caving, some of it far from straightforward. Approached by this mean, Choke Egbert is truly remote, and a dig there would be a daunting proposition.
Hence, when Ario expeditions resumed after the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a powerful incentive to try to find an easier entrance, ideally close to the 2/7 streamway’s end. In 2023, years of efforts made to widen the rifts in Bill’s Cave, also known as 27/9, paid off when this was linked to the 2/7 streamway. However, although much closer to the refuge than the original Pozu Jultayu shafts, it came in close to the upstream sump, a very long way from Egbert, and even after widening operations, its rifts are tight, long and exhausting. The big push this year will be via yet another ingress to the system that was connected in 2025.
The late Keith Potter had a look at the gigantic open shaft known as Jou Tras la Jayada (or TLJ, as Ario project members usually call it) in 1980. He found himself dangling far above the floor at a depth of 200m: fortunately, he’d remembered to tie a knot in the end of his rope. Five years later, I was part of a small group that got to the bottom, some 315m below the surface. A Spanish team had reached the base of the main shaft some years earlier, finding no way on, but we were excited when we found a parallel pitch through a window some 20m up. Alas: it led only to an impenetrable rift choked with sand, and like the Spanish, we found nothing in the vast, echoing cathedral where the main TLJ shaft lands.
It was, then, sheer luck that led to members of the 2024 expedition deciding to look at TLJ again in order to survey it. To their amazement, they could see that just a few metres from the end of their rope, a flake of rock jutted out from the wall, barely concealing a passage we had missed almost four decades earlier. A short climb down, a bit of crawling and stooping, another climb up and they were in a short, straight rift that opened out into TLJ’s second pitch, an airy drop of 100m. For reasons best known to themselves, but which may have something to do with our dismal inability to find the way on in 1985, they called their find Try a Little Harder.
Descending and climbing a 315m drop with some 23 re-belays may not be the easiest way to get to work, but we hope it will create a more practical way to push Choke Egbert for the first time in 28 years. To begin with, the TLJ entrance is even closer to the Ario refuge than 27/9, and requires only minimal uphill walking. Last June, a group that included my son Dan, the 2025 – 6 UBSS President who at 21 was then six months older than I was when I went to Ario for the first time in 1980, swiftly connected the base of TLJ’s second pitch to Holier than Thou, a short inlet off the main 2/7 streamway. This will be our route of choice.
And what a streamway it is: a blue and turquoise torrent that runs through vast, boulder strewn chambers, down powerful, challenging cascades, across wide, marbled corridors and at the bottom of high rifts. To reach Primula Point, the campsite close to Choke Egbert used by our OUCC predecessors in the 1990s, will, we hope, be doable in a longish day from the surface, once the lower cave is rigged. And then we will see whether any of the leads described by the last expedition that spent much time there back in 1998 are as promising as they sound.
Getting through or round Choke Egbert is not the expedition’s only objective. In recent years, we have found and investigated other entrances lower down the mountain that may yet offer a more convenient backdoor, and we will pay them further attention. One, 53/5, carries a powerful draught and sits tantalisingly close to the deeper reaches of both Xitu and 2/7. We will also hunt for holes in the precipitous Valle Extremeru in the side of the Cares gorge, that might – might – drop into the streamway on the downstream side of Egbert, or close to its upstream end.
And as ever, there will be the sublime tranquility of the Picos, and the guaranteed warmest of welcomes from our friends who run the Ario refuge, Carlota and Ignacio – and serve the finest breakfasts in Spain.
I won’t be quite the longest-serving Ario veteran this year: that accolade belongs to my friend Graham Naylor, a fellow Xitu pioneer who first probed the mountains’ secrets the year before me, in 1979. But we have young blood too, from Bristol, Sheffield and other thriving university clubs.
“This will be my first expedition, so naturally I'm very excited for it,” Oxford engineer Viktor Verebelyi told me. “Being based in Oxford, it feels like a rite of passage to be part of the Ario Dream. I'm looking forward to experiencing the amazing views above and below ground, and I'd really like to learn bolting and bolt climbing. If the opportunity arises during the expedition, I will certainly not shy away from digging at the choke.”
Like my son Dan, Sheffield’s Violet Hill has been a caver since she was 5. Now 19, she said she is “especially looking forward to the sheer size of the European caves, and the challenge of that depth of SRT. It will be a new and exciting experience to survey that sort of cave, and to be a part of the history of the project.”
In 2026, the prospects for a new chapter of that history look good.
Photos by Bartek Biela
Above: Schematic map of the Ario area, showing the 2/7 system, its entrances, Xitu, Cueva Culiembro and Sil de Oliseda, another cave thought likely to connect that would add a further c.200m of depth.
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