The
A couple of months ago
Emma Wilson and Tom Clayton, plumbing new depths of squalour,
found over 100m of new cave in a slightly obscure part of Link Pot known as
'The Grind'. Their discovery, named 'Pickle Passage', connected with Easy
Street, below the Serendipity pitches. Thus a new round trip was born: down
Serendipity and back out through the Grind. Kathryn Hopkins and I joined them
to help with the surveying and to complete the first ever '
The first part of the
trip was familiar ground, as we made our way down Link Pot, through various
crawls and down the Serendipity pitches to the start of Easy Street. A few
bends down the streamway, Emma and Tom located the point where their new
passage connected, several metres up the wall, completely out of view from the
stream. It was easy to see how nobody had ever seen this passage. It wasn't until
Tom's head and torso started magically disappearing into the wall a few metres
above me that I believed they'd found the right spot! It makes you wonder how
many other open passages exist so close to the beaten track...
The obscure climb led
into a crawling sized passage. We followed this past a couple of short side
passages until it degenerated into unremitting awkwardness. We were supposed to
be helping Emma and Tom survey this section, but it was at this point that Tom
noticed the glass in his clinometer had cracked and
the fluid had leaked out. As the clinometer seemed to
be constantly oscillating between plus and minus 90 degrees, surveying was
abandoned. The passage was now a narrow sinuous rift, a bit
over a metre high but narrow enough to necessitate facing sideways, with
a little bedding plane section on top that was sometimes big enough to fit
through. To get round the tight corners, various back-breaking and
femur-snapping contortions were needed and careful thought was required as to
how high in the rift your body should be, because it wouldn't fit through at
all levels. My lamp cable kept trying to escape by snagging on the cave,
plunging me into darkness at the most inopportune moments.
Towards the end of this
section was a particularly snug double bend that made me feel very fat indeed.
This was the crux which Emma and Tom had originally struggled through to make
their discovery (very gutsy!). I couldn't quite make out what was happening
from the back, but after some rearranging of limbs they both seemed to have
managed to squeeze through feet first. Kathryn then waltzed through with
infuriating ease, not even touching the sides. For me, the limiting factor was
my height, rather than my (not particularly notable) girth. Somewhat flustered,
I took my helmet off and pressed my scalp into the ceiling with my feet
scraping along the floor in front. At which point my lamp decided to make a
final bid for freedom and fell off my helmet completely. This didn't help my
state of mind. Eventually, by scraping my head along the roof (which probably
wouldn't have been necessary if I was a bit calmer), I seemed to pop through
the worst of it and could put my helmet back on.
The strap on my helmet was now too muddy to shut properly. Realising this, my
helmet decided that it wanted to join my lamp and began to jump off my head
every time I tilted it to one side. Luckily there were plenty of puddles to
crawl through so I could clean the strap. Eventually we joined the Grind, which
was initially a flat out crawl through muddy gravel, and therefore very
pleasant in comparison with what we'd just done. Slowly the passage increased
in size until, for the first time in an hour or two, we could stand up briefly.
Pickle Passage probably isn't as bad as I've made out, but having not done much
caving in the past few months, I'd tackled it with all the grace of a
hippopotamus. I was totally knackered and my arms were cramping from all the
crawling. So I was quite relieved when we finally arrived at the Wormway, and soon after at Echo Aven.
We prussiked up the pitch and were soon within tantalising sight of daylight.
After popping back to Serendipity to de-rig, we emerged from Link Pot after
seven hours underground.
The
Edvin Deadman