Monday 17th December 2012 Reservoir Hole
Chris Castle, Nicky Dennis, Phil Hendy (WCC), Martin Grass (Leader)
Martin very kindly agreed to give us a tourist trip to the Frozen Deep as we are representatives of the landowners (well, that was my argument).
I do not intend to give a full description of the trip and what we saw as there are currently 20 pages of description and photographs on this forum.
We were in the cave by 6pm and made our way through the old part of the cave down the deep boulder climb to the Grand Gallery. At the end of this is the climb up to Topless Aven and Golgotha rift, but the dig is to the right. Initially easy crawling, it got a bit twiddlely at the bit called Hard Times, which I'd been concerned about as Ali Moody said it was a bit tight, and if
she said it was tight.... But it wasn't and we arrived in the big stuff, a high rift chamber called Resurrection and the ladder down into the Frozen Deep. Suffice to say it is even more awesome than we expected. The now-famous group of a column and stalactites was seen immediately, but there was a lot more. We made a careful traverse of the chamber, as the floor is of slippery boulders. One of the more spectacular sights is the huge wall, absolutely vertical, like a Mendip El Capitan, looking around 40 metres high. A look at the way down to the sump and we were back at the ladder and on our way out. Martin heroically brought out two air bottles with only minimal help from me.
A brief visit was made to the start of Potters Heaven for Martin to do something which will doubtless appear on this site soon.
It was a great privilege to visit this magnificent cave and the three of us are extremely grateful to Martin for the trip. If you haven't done so already look at the pictures on the Mendip forum.
Chris