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

Without wanting to jinx anything, it seems we may have made a little progress in the North Wales mineshaft dig.
After removing several feet of domestic and farm rubbish and ~60ft of rocks and mud, we seem to have reached some kind of level (horizontal mine passage. It appears to run in two directions along the direction of the sloping vein (fault) that we have been excavating down. One way is currently partially blocked, but the other lead for 10ft along the vein, then turns 90degrees and runs for 10ft through the hanging wall (the overhanging face of the sloping vein), before reaching the top of an underground shaft 20-25ft deep, which we are yet to descend.
It seems possible that the miners reckoned it was easier or safer to mine the offset lower shaft through more stable rock to intersect the vein at a lower level, but we won't know about that (or the other horizontal posibility in the level until we return, probably on Saturday.

Fingers crossed.

Well, it didn't go anywhere - the second shaft was completely blind, and there wasn't any way on at the bottom of the surface shaft unless we wanted to mine along the vein towards the main mineshaft.

We still have both digs in the nearby valley, the main one of which we should be able to reliably get into soon, as water levels fall.

There's also some ongoing work digging out a rockfall in a nearby mine to try and enable a round-trip between two entrances. So far, it's been quite entertaining, not least on the occasion where the floor started slumping away underneath us.

There's another dig over the mountain (in an actual proper 100% cave), and a sandy/rocky crawl to dig out in yet another mined-into cave.

Yorkshire digging has been ongoing as well - the most recent work involved bolting ~20m up a wall, but only gained a small chamber with no way on, and someone else had been there before us by a rather different route. There were a couple of very pretty stalagmites off to the side of the chamber, and it was muddy and very loose getting there, so it's probably better not to say where it was in case it encouraged someone. We did learn various lessons regarding bolting technique and gear coordination, and it was sometimes fun, even if we did occasionally stray quite some way towards medium hypothermia.

Nope. I'll stick to climbing above gorund, thank you very much.

The moving floor incident was quite amusing.
We'd climbed up a series of horizontally-separated pitches in a large mined-out and stoped rift (~1-1.5m wide), with the final picth being ~40ft high.
The floor above the last pitch was gentle slope of boulders - the top of a dry-stone infilling of the rift with a basically vertical front face descedning from the picth-head (we'd rigged the rope well away from the edge to avoid the ris of knocking anything out.)
Following the floor up away from the pitch-head, a blockage was soon reached where boulders kept falling in from above as ones underneath were dug out. Somewhere beyond the blockage was passage we were trying to reach to make a round-trip possible.
Some weeks before, there were ~6 of us above the pitch, passing along rocks dug out of the blockage, and throwing them down the pitch. I was the last in the line, and tried my best to throw the rocks cleanly away along the rift, though a few would sometimes bounce back on their way down. Very occasionally, in addition to the sound of rocks falling, there would be a short unexpected rumbling noise when a rock obviously dislodged something somewhere.
The time of the incident, we had got bored of hand-to-hand passing, so we switched to a system where the person at the blockage would throw rocks half-way along the pitchhead passage and another digger would pick them up and throw them over the edge of the pitch while the rest of us waited out of the way, sitting bridged across the passage a few metres up.
Because rocks were being thrown only just clear of the pitch-edge, more bounced back towards the vertical dry-stonework on their way down the shaft, and the uncued rumbling incidents became notably louder, more frequent and more prolonged than on the previous trip.

Eventually, at a point when the over-the-edge thrower was standing a few metres back from the pitch-edge, trying to manouvre a large boulder along the floor, another rumbling started, and a second or two later, the floor at the pitch edge started to sink, eventually ending up with a section ~5m long dropping by a few metres, with a rather surprised caver still standing on top of it. A slight pinching togeteher of the sides of the rift ~3m down had prevented a larger slumping, and helped provide us with a new pitch-head, albeit one of uncertain solidity.

The seriousness was fairly limited, since the rift was easily narrow enough to bridge across in the case of a rapid floor loss, but it was certainly an interesting event to see happen in apparent slow-motion while sitting safely across the rift above it all, though I must admit, as the line between static and falling floor worked its way back from the pitchhead, I did start to wonder just how much floor was going to drop, and by how much, and how tricky it might be to traverse across to the rope.

I've had a few "Mind that flake it's a bit [crash bang desperate scrabble] loose" experiences in the Lakes. Always livens things up a bit.