h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Very little has happened recently on the mineshaft front, due to a combination of Christmas and some nasty doses of 'flu.
We went down another cave on Wednesday to continue bolting up a muddy rifty aven with the intention of killing the lead (declared dead by someone who rememberedd going up decades ago) and surveying out.

We'd only left a climbing rope rigged from the week before, up a ~12m climb held by a pair of on good 8mm bolts, and hadn't brought much rope gear (a total of one pair of cowstails and a handled jammer lacking either safety cord or footloops), so simply climbing up the rope wasn't an option.
'Not a problem', D had said 'it's not a bad free-climb, apart from being slippy'.

D went up first, carrying the drill and battery, and belayed by me from the bottom. About half-way up the swearing started in earnest, and I couldn't provide a huge amount of pull from the bottom, and was a little distracted by the possibility of falling rocks. The problem was soon evident - the previous week, D had bolted up using an etrier to climb well above the current-last bolt. Since the rift was fairly narrow, it was easy to stand on the etrier top rung and lean against tha back wall while placing the next bolt.
Not having the etrier put paid to that possibility, so direct climbing with nothing more than medium tension from me was the only way. He ditched the bag with the drill, clipping it to a bolt near the top, since he simply couldn't finish the climb carrying that weight.

He got safely to the ledge and clipped into the final bolt, and gave the message I could cease belaying. Very shortly after I slackened off and got myself some ability to move, a repeated banging indicated a falling rock, which I was able to quickly sidestep to move safely away from. After what seemed like a long time banging around, it finally impacted just where I'd been standing, but proved to be only about 10cm per side, albeit with some sharp corners that could have made it painful for a shoulder-hit.

Then it was my turn to climb. 'Not too bad, a bit like Poetic Justice', D said, trying to inspire me.

Now, Poetic Justice, in County Pot, in the Easegill system is one of may favourite little climbs - only about ~5m high, in a rift which is a maximum of maybe 0.5m 'deep', and which tapers off to both ends, which are ~2.5m apart.
For me, there's only really one main move sequence to get properly off the ground, and then a little caver-style climbing, jamming with any or all parts of the body to get a little higher to the point where the tyop can be easily gained. A few seconds of exertion, possibly, but always well worth it for the top-down view of people following who are too large, tall, short, or unfit to get up easily, or who don't know how to approach it.

Now, the aven climb was not really much like Poetic Justice. For one thing, the rift was just a little too deep in places to wedge feet&knees on opposing walls, and too wide to reach the tapering sides from some otherwise hold-free positions.
More significantly, rather than being linmed with human-smoothed rock and flowstone like its supposed northern sibling, this rift was liberally plastered with clayey mud which not only got slimier with every attempted foothold (which would have been bad enough), but which had another interesting feature. When finally getting some kind of feasible foot-placings sorted out, with sone vague handholds to assist them after spending a minute or two resting with feet braced on a hold and back against the back wall, it became apparent on attempted moving that one's back was now attached fairly well to the wall by a generous layer of compressed clay.

After much thrutching, I eventually managed to gain the uopper ledge, and pass the drill up on my slow way up. Between us, we probably wasted 1/2 hour to attain a height we could have reached in under 2 minutes each by regular rope-climbing.

Anyway, now being set up for more bolting and surveying out this dead lead, after a little more faffing and then some more climbing up a decaying mud slope by D, bolting on the way, it truned out that the lead was not 'dead, just leading to phreatic roof tubes that peter out to nothing' after all, but it led to a small chamber which in turn led to a 2m-wide walking-height passage, blind at one end but with an apparently eminently diggable calcited boulder choke at the other end. Someone had been in there before, but never surveyed, nor dug. This is all as reported, given the time we took it didn't seem worth my going to confirm this week, especially since we aould be returning next week.
However, we rigged a 20m static rope before leaving (and removing the climbing rope for some serious washing), and next week, we'll take our full rope-climbing kit.
It's funny - dropping pitches on a regular tourist trip, even a 50m or 100m drop is still usually just a number and a little longer time to ascend. When you've actually slowly climbed up even 12m, or (like in our most rfecent Yorkshire exploration escapade) watched someone bolt their way up a 20m blank wall over several trips while shivering at the bottom, it seems a hell of a long way down from the top , especially if you heard a rock taking what *seemed* like a long time to rattle its way down to final impact.

On Thursday, it took 6 passes of the climbing rope through our very efficient rope-washer until we stopped getting muddy water coming out (usual expectation: 3). Similarly, the oversuits, which even after muddy trips (are there any other kind in North Wales?) normally get adequately clean by one pass of the pressure-washer. This week, it took three.

The south western caves of the US would be a real *dry treat for you!

I can't believe you posted all that without the use of the smiley, when that was what I was doing, reading every sentence

I can't believe you do this for fun, and I'm so glad you're not my boyfriend/husband/brother/Dad 'cos I'd be a bag of nerves every time you left the house.



Take care my friend.

He can write what he wants!

*I* can't believe I posted all that without checking for typos.

typos schmypos

Has he seen your breasts Annie?

?????

That was my reaction too, Potholer. Meanwhile, the person has unsubbed. Ah well, takes all kinds I guess.


Glad to know you are back safe and sound.

az

Well, the bolting/climbing was pretty safe, since once the first bolt had been put in on the first trip, there wasn't any chance of hitting the deck, and on our second trip in, it was juts a pain to climb up the rock, but we were securely lined.
Loose rocks were always a possibility, but one advantage of a narrow rift-climb is that things are almost certainly going to clatter down rather than fall silently, so giving reasonable warning as well as a slower descent.

It's surprising how much it's possible to do in a couple of seconds, especially when autopilot kicks in. I remember one time in Slovenia when I was climbing down a fairly easy ~5m climb, and when I was half-way down I heard/saw something moving above me. The next thing I knew, I was standing up a few metres away from the bottom of the climb, looking back to where I'd been in to see the rock hit the ground, with no real memory of having actually moved.

Do you do anything special the day before to prepare for a climb? I mean stuff like special food, no alcohol, good night's sleep, etc. Do you stay away from coffee the morning of the climb?

It sounds like the sort of thing that the more you do it, the more you can intuit/sense possible danger. But you would definitely need to have your wits about you and be as sharp as possible.

Do you do this mainly for sport or are there other motivations as well?


az

Actually 'climb' might give the impression of some kind of elite athlete who actually does some kind of preparation. In fact, my preparation for Wednesday-night trips, generally seems to be not getting organised enough to even eat lunch before driving to Wales, and so usually caving at a steady speed relying on my fat reserves.

All *I* (or D) was doing last week was climb some unpleasantly slimy rock with the full protection of the a rope from above, and all D was doing on the previous trip, apart from the short unprotected climb up to the first bolt he put in, was a rope-protected combination of nontechnical, if somewhat physical rock-climbing on the simpler sections to get to a position to place another bolt, and in the more difficult sections, aid-climbing with an etrier (short section of ladder) hanging off the uppermost bolt to allow the next bolt to be placed ~1.5m higher.

We do it for exploration and exercise, and we really don't do a great deal of climbing - most of what we do on Wednesdays is actually much more regular digging-style activities - mainly moving rock and mud around (with some splitting of bedrock or too-large-to-move boulders) to make passages accessible, and some shoring up of less-stable areas (which I leave in the hands of the experts).