The
Intercounty Passage Saga
Ray’s Bit
A long, long time ago, I can still
remember.............. or so the song goes, well I can still remember, just! It
all started on a Wednesday evening the 14th November 2007, when Sam
Lieberman and I ventured into Red Wall Chamber to finish off the survey to
White Wall chamber and so complete one section of the Ease Gill re-survey
project. At the bottom of Red Wall is a small hole through into the low
streamway, Intercounty Passage. We’d already suffered the upstream misery of
this streamway and surveyed it the month before but Sam could remember having
been downstream and thought it quite reasonable, just goes to show what time
does to memories.
On
another trip into Ratbag to reach Surveyor’s Dog Inlet we noticed the high
passage as we returned toward Hall of the Ten end and decided to climb up to
investigate, lo and behold it was the other end of Intercounty Passage. Sam
found an easier way back down through a bedding plane which I was grateful for
with my knackered shoulder. So we determined to survey the whole thing from
that end to our Red Wall junction. That was May 2015, so fast forward to Sunday
20th August 2017 and me and Andy Hall ground our way to the start
where after a failure on the climb meant an alternative bedding entry to the
passage.
We crawled up until I found a point I
was sure I recognised from a previous survey, wrong, and started to survey back
thinking this would complete the loop. However, when I put the data into Survex
I realised I was wildly mistaken and we had in fact covered hardly a third of
the distance to where I thought we’d reached, hmmm. Not daunted by this
experience, well I am dumb, I set off again on another trip this time with Sam,
to try to complete the survey on Saturday 16th September. It had
been very wet and as
Sam wrote in the log book I got
soaked in the Mistral-Hobbit crawl and even wetter at the bottom of the Hall of
the Ten, doh! Anyway, we made our way to the last station and set off surveying
upstream as by now we’d left the nice dry crawl and were in the narrow wet
streamway. However, we were soon flummoxed as we reached a junction, how did
that happen? We split up and Sam went for the narrow right-hand passage while I
headed into the initially wider left. After some Wretched-Rabbit-like crabbing
I was forced into the top of the passage that finally lowered to a flat-out
bedding of cobbles and mud, time to turn around.
We re-grouped and were debating
whether to continue when Sam realised the battery on the Disto needed changing.
Now we’ve tried doing this underground before and spent an hour searching
through boulders for the battery compartment cap so we weren’t keen to do this.
I was by now also getting very cold having been soaked so commonsense prevailed
and we headed out. Obviously this was turning into a bit of an epic survey.
Sam & Phil’s Bit
I’d been mumbling for a while about
needing to practice my surveying. I
ended up mumbling too loudly near Sam, and he piped up and suggested that there
was a bit of surveying needing to be done in Mistral, and would I be
interested? Sure. My previous survey experience was in Austria, so getting some
practice in Yorkshire would be a good idea.
On the first trip, we headed down the
right-hand passage, and surveyed all of that in one long and fairly pleasant
evening. The passage continues much as Ray saw: as a narrow streamway, with one
minor junction leading off up an upwards-trending narrow rift, which ends in a bedding plane just above head height with digging possibilities. After drawing up the survey, Ray pointed out
that this bedding plane is at the same height as Nippikin Pot, and 14 metres
away from it, so may be the bottom of the pot. Worth a poke!
The main streamway continues and ends
in a reasonably sized aven accessed through a slot above head height, which
requires a bit of on-your-side letterbox manoeuvring, in order to be able to get
through. The aven’s a bit dribbly, but might be climbable. That wasn’t something
we were going to take on that evening, though. It was certainly a nice place to
finish off the night’s surveying.
Having
convinced me that this surveying lark was comfortable, Sam’s choice of the
crawl near Red Wall Chamber for our second surveying trip some days later was a
bit of a shock. A lot of time was spent trying to get the compass and clino
clean and non-condensated enough to read, and trying not to lose the Disto in
some fairly thick goop.
Ray Duffy,
Sam Lieberman and
Phil
Withnall
Ray drawing survey diagrams
Ray on one end of the tape, Andy on the other
Survey of Intercounty Passage etc...