Present: Al, Gwyn, Martin, Jenny
The day started by being warm and sunny and we expected to suddenly find ourselves in the alternative reality of Leck Fell it the dark and snow. We tried hard to faff a lot and have an epic, but this never really happened. Despite Derbyshire being further than Yorkshire we got underground before midday (albeit by 5 minutes), I can’t even remember the last time that happened.
We wandered along to the top of the first pitch and waited for another group to go down, there were already 2 ladders and 3 ropes on the pitch, and more two tackle sacs at the top so we left our tacklesac in their company. We walked along the crabwalk which was wider and drier than we had expected and passed The Vice, the climb and the ladder, all of which were pretty dry. The joys of caving on DUSA vision meant I found it easier to go by the light of Gwyns carbide than to turn my FX2 on…
Just before the second stream sump we turned right to follow the round trip out. After some walking, crawling and a couple of climbs we got to the Giants Windpipe and the encouraging notice reminding you not to attempt to freedive it if it sumps. We sent Al through first to see how wet it was. The sound of crying suggested that he had been temporarily transported to the alternative reality of the Daren entrance crawl in winter, luckily the realities had switched back for the rest of us and we only got one ear wet each and the water was surprisingly warm.
Despite cheating and having copied out the description from the guide book we went straight on not right after the wet bit and did a bit of extra crawling to a vaguely pretty bit. We retraced our steps and got back on route to reach the crabwalk (somewhat higher up than before). We carefully traversed on fairly sizable ledges for a while ’till Al decided climbing down to be a good idea, I looked around for the ‘obvious polished thread’ mentioned by in guide book and couldn’t see it anywhere. Al got up and started down climbing thus uncovering the thread that he had been sitting on…
We got back to the bottom of the pitch to find we were the last in the cave, and the last people out had kindly rigged our ladder for us. Sadly we had the wrong length ladder and it hang 1.5 Al heights above the ground and we couldn’t reach it … luckily the rope was plenty long enough and we had two slings. I put some knots in the rope as footholds and Gwyn made a pseudo-ettrie from a sling attached to the bottom of the ladder and Al was very brave and heroic. With a further sling attached to the top of the ladder the bottom rung was at about chest height for the rest of us. I think using a 25ft ladder in future is probably a good idea…
Despite all this we only spent 4.5 hours underground and were blinded by bright sunlight at the surface – I thought is was supposed to be dark and snowing when you exited caves? Caving in summer is really quite pleasant. Anyway, to finish this day of strangeness we got back to Durham a long time before midnight, before 9pm in fact. Something was definitely wrong!
Jenny