Home  Log Book Aug Bank Hol : Langcliffe, Heron, Alum
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Aug Bank Hol : Langcliffe, Heron, Alum |
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Saturday 26th Langcliffe Pot caving trip (Rich Bayfield, Charlotte Harris and myself) :
I'd had Langcliffe Pot in mind for some time after reading about the cave in Adventures of another Pooh and the bank holiday weekend presented the perfect opportunity. Unfortunately we didn't have a copy of Northern caves 1 so we had to borrow one from Andy Rumming who was also staying at the YSS.
Andy's copy was the old one so it had no mention of the oddmire entrance (we didn't know about it till Monday night) or access arrangements. However the description seemed ok so we copied this down and headed off to Ingleston to pick up a few bits where we asked about access in Bernies and was told that it was no problem (since read this may not be the case). We headed up the hill and soon reached the cave, the decription had been for ladders but we were going to do it with SRT as we didn't have enough ladders. The top of the entrance pitch wasn't a problem but lower down you reach a large ledge and the ptich really isn't rigged for SRT. Rich Bayfield came down after me and managed to get a deviation in which fixed it enough for us three.
At the bottom of the pitch we stripped off our SRT kits ...
....and headed off down the craven crawl. This wasn't too bad and soon we were able to stoop along stagger passage. There is 600m of this and it did seem to take even longer than it ought to. At the end it enters the main drain, a large walking passage with a large quantity of still water in it.
Part way along you are forced to leave the water and make your way along a dry passage for about 150m before rejoining the water and the beginning of Langstroth dale chase, over 1200m of "uninterrupted stream way". This isn’t exactly true as there are several oxbows – but they are short and the water does continue the whole way.
At the end of this the passage becomes a small crawl over boulders before a flat out bedding plane drops you into boriau falls chamber. The way on from here is in the floor of the chamber by squeezing between boulders. This is a complex boulder choke which took us quite a while to negotiate and included some pretty tight squeezes.
On the other side we reached the Nemesis pitch which again really wasn’t rigged for SRT but never the less we found a way down. From there we had to squeeze into a crawl over water (which must be one of the places which becomes impassable) before climbing up over a boulder and down again to enter a chamber where Pooh and the others had waited. From here we pushed through the Nemesis boulder choke, around bars and car jacks and through squeezes in water until we popped out the other side in a large passage. 60m on from here the water turns right into a duck. To explain the next bit of our trip it is best to quote the guide book
"only 60m forward the water turns right into a pool, creating a short duck. The stream then quickly descends through chaos to Poisedon sump. Ahead the deserted continuation is floored by sand.."
We mis-read this and thought that the deserted continutation was near the sump - after the duck. In fact it is where the stream turns right. It didn't help that this wasn't a deserted continuation - instead there was water coming in so it looked like an inlet.
So we of course went through the duck and climbed a large mud bank above the sump - which fitted the description, except the only way on was through more water. This made us think the water levels were just high or the description bad and so we turned around here and headed out. We had a relatively uneventful trip out and emerged after about an 11hr trip. Sunday 27th Heron Pot (Charlotte and Myself):
We were pretty tired form the day before and so when Rich dropped out of caving to go walking with his girlfriend we looked for something easy to do. Neither of us had done Heron and it sounded like a laugh so it was decided.
We did the pull through trip in about 45mins which was actually disappointingly quick but at least we ticked off another cave and it may prove a useful place for taking novices for a short trip. Monday 28th Alum Pot (Charlotte, Rich, Lou and myself):
A quick trip down Alum before the drive home. Lou unfortunately aborted the trip early - but at least we didn't leave the Dales too late! |
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