Badgerbadger
New member
Watery trepidation at Croesor Rhosydd: My first ever leading of an underground adventure.
A friend and I had taken the high-level traverse route, and throughout the journey, my level of fear and apprehension had slowly ebbed away as each step of the route went under our belt and had fit my memory; the yellow smoke pipe, the explosives store, the difficult, sustained high-level traverse, the air shaft pit, zip-lines and tunnels, an electron ladder, slippery slopes, loose descents and giant slate blocks; all had fallen into place, we were not lost and not onto back-up lights, we had managed the pitches without issues, the ropes and fixtures had been in useable condition, the Bridge of Death had not failed under our feet, we had not slipped into the emerald cool drink like a weighted-stone, we were in good shape. But all that trepidation returned to me, as I saw the thin blue knotted line on the ground in front of my feet. We had reached The Chamber of Horrors.
My head torch dimly lit up the tunnel, the end terminated in a black hole, I turned the light to maximum, (a luxury that could not be used too often) and the hole was still deepest black but now a tangle of heavy rusted chains and a large rotten beam could be seen suspended from the sloping roof, held up by meter-long rusted metal pins, like a spooky giant trapeze. Behind it in the darkness, barely discernible, was a second one that had aged badly, a gnarled rotted wooden spike dangling from a single pin, pointing down like a giant finger to the blackness below.
I stepped to the edge and was stood atop a cliff, a single rope pitching down over the edge, my light bounced off the deep black water 10m below. Its surface reflecting eerily in the light as an occasional echoing drip from the ceiling created radiating circles, it felt foreboding.
It was my idea to come here, I had 2 back-up plans, it was my responsibility to get us both out:
Plan C was to reverse the entire route we’d come in by, to retrace all that way back would be strenuous, this was sub-optimal.
Plan B was to strip down to my smalls and harness, lose all non-essential metalwork, adorn a buoyancy aid, blow up an Amazon-special “flirty Fiesta” pool ring, attach it to myself with the emergency sling, descend to the dark pool, awkwardly gain the ring (possibly with some arse-skimming) and float, lazy river style, across to the other side of the cold deep water and retrieve or untangle what we needed to both cross safely… this all seemed great fun when visualised during the planning stage – it was all giggles and kicks then, but the reality of it now, stood at the top of the cliff, with the black silence yawning out in front of my eyes, felt quite different.
Paul made it across the wire bridge behind me, and I dimmed my light back down, not wanting to waste precious battery, I refocused attention to the blue line on the floor and picked it up, then pulled gently and felt… absolutely nothing. I pulled a little more, waiting to feel resistance, there was nothing, pulled more - a little faster and still nothing, I held back from saying it at first, but after a few more seconds; “It feels light” I whispered to Paul, “huh?” “light… like there’s nothing on the end” we both stared into the black and I was praying for salvation, I pulled more and more string, reaching a steady rhythm, I was expecting a loose end to rise up out of the water, frayed and terminal, I resigned myself to this outcome, it felt so weightless there could not possibly be anything tied to it.
We both strained our vision into the black chamber, and then fading into view, like a porcelain ghost, white and unfamiliar, a Canadian canoe loomed into the torch-light, she slowly drifted like a whale through the water, gracefully, completely silent, and completely sunken.
It was at this point, even with the trickiest route finding still to go, that I felt we had succeeded the through trip, I let the breath go that had been inadvertently held and whispered, “thank you”.
I could not have imagined how thankful I would be to see a completely sunken canoe, it was like an old friend, stoically arriving to lend a hand.
Side note!
(Big thank you to the Croesor Rhosydd guardians, it’s because of you and your ongoing maintenance of this amazing through-route that these two travellers had the most awesome adventure of all time!)
There are no photos of our adventure just a victory photo of us looking really cheesey and dishevelled at the exit!
A friend and I had taken the high-level traverse route, and throughout the journey, my level of fear and apprehension had slowly ebbed away as each step of the route went under our belt and had fit my memory; the yellow smoke pipe, the explosives store, the difficult, sustained high-level traverse, the air shaft pit, zip-lines and tunnels, an electron ladder, slippery slopes, loose descents and giant slate blocks; all had fallen into place, we were not lost and not onto back-up lights, we had managed the pitches without issues, the ropes and fixtures had been in useable condition, the Bridge of Death had not failed under our feet, we had not slipped into the emerald cool drink like a weighted-stone, we were in good shape. But all that trepidation returned to me, as I saw the thin blue knotted line on the ground in front of my feet. We had reached The Chamber of Horrors.
My head torch dimly lit up the tunnel, the end terminated in a black hole, I turned the light to maximum, (a luxury that could not be used too often) and the hole was still deepest black but now a tangle of heavy rusted chains and a large rotten beam could be seen suspended from the sloping roof, held up by meter-long rusted metal pins, like a spooky giant trapeze. Behind it in the darkness, barely discernible, was a second one that had aged badly, a gnarled rotted wooden spike dangling from a single pin, pointing down like a giant finger to the blackness below.
I stepped to the edge and was stood atop a cliff, a single rope pitching down over the edge, my light bounced off the deep black water 10m below. Its surface reflecting eerily in the light as an occasional echoing drip from the ceiling created radiating circles, it felt foreboding.
It was my idea to come here, I had 2 back-up plans, it was my responsibility to get us both out:
Plan C was to reverse the entire route we’d come in by, to retrace all that way back would be strenuous, this was sub-optimal.
Plan B was to strip down to my smalls and harness, lose all non-essential metalwork, adorn a buoyancy aid, blow up an Amazon-special “flirty Fiesta” pool ring, attach it to myself with the emergency sling, descend to the dark pool, awkwardly gain the ring (possibly with some arse-skimming) and float, lazy river style, across to the other side of the cold deep water and retrieve or untangle what we needed to both cross safely… this all seemed great fun when visualised during the planning stage – it was all giggles and kicks then, but the reality of it now, stood at the top of the cliff, with the black silence yawning out in front of my eyes, felt quite different.
Paul made it across the wire bridge behind me, and I dimmed my light back down, not wanting to waste precious battery, I refocused attention to the blue line on the floor and picked it up, then pulled gently and felt… absolutely nothing. I pulled a little more, waiting to feel resistance, there was nothing, pulled more - a little faster and still nothing, I held back from saying it at first, but after a few more seconds; “It feels light” I whispered to Paul, “huh?” “light… like there’s nothing on the end” we both stared into the black and I was praying for salvation, I pulled more and more string, reaching a steady rhythm, I was expecting a loose end to rise up out of the water, frayed and terminal, I resigned myself to this outcome, it felt so weightless there could not possibly be anything tied to it.
We both strained our vision into the black chamber, and then fading into view, like a porcelain ghost, white and unfamiliar, a Canadian canoe loomed into the torch-light, she slowly drifted like a whale through the water, gracefully, completely silent, and completely sunken.
It was at this point, even with the trickiest route finding still to go, that I felt we had succeeded the through trip, I let the breath go that had been inadvertently held and whispered, “thank you”.
I could not have imagined how thankful I would be to see a completely sunken canoe, it was like an old friend, stoically arriving to lend a hand.
Side note!
(Big thank you to the Croesor Rhosydd guardians, it’s because of you and your ongoing maintenance of this amazing through-route that these two travellers had the most awesome adventure of all time!)
There are no photos of our adventure just a victory photo of us looking really cheesey and dishevelled at the exit!
