By Gemma Jones
The trip started off with a flight from Stansted. I was driving from my mum’s house in Skipton to pick up a friend near Pontefract and then we were driving down to the airport together. Within the space of 2 months I have become utterly attached to my Tomtom and am now not seen without this essential item. I was not worried that I had never been to Pontefract before as Tim (the softly spoken English male voice) would guide me there. However, I hadn’t anticipated a road closure. Despite shouting at Tim that the road was closed, he still led me down the road and past the bollards. I felt relieved when I saw a vehicle coming up the road. Maybe it wasn’t really closed. Four miles in I saw that no - actually it really was closed and there were workmen in the middle of the road. They all got out of their vehicles and folded their arms. “Now, now, then, young girl where do you think you are going?” “I have a flight to catch and it’s not my fault. The Tomtom led me down here. I thought the road was probably open as I saw a car coming back up the road.” “That’ll be the car we told to go back, then.” Now I was worried. I’d end up missing my flight and had no alternative route to go down. However, thankfully, my female charm came through as I frantically batted my eyelids and they decided to move their vehicles and let me through in the end!
We arrived at Stansted at three in the morning, as the flight was at six. There were a few of us going from Stansted and it was obvious who we were. I guess caving attire just isn’t that common amongst non-cavers! Ryanair’s new tight baggage allowance meant that my pockets were filled with batteries (the heaviest things) and Mars bars and I even considered wearing my helmet through customs! Thankfully I managed to fit it into my hand luggage bag at the last minute, though.When we arrived in Pau we had a short drive of about an hour to the campsite where people had been arriving from all directions. I managed to go on a walk to “Les gorges de kakuetta;” a walk in a gorge with a tunnel and a pretty waterfall and a small show cave at the end. It really was a very impressive gorge with imposing cliffs on both sides. The elite members of the YSS had gone and rigged the PSM during the day, but decided after the rigging to carry on straight through the cave, like you do?!? The next morning the elite cavers recounted how they had never done a cave quite so hard before and how tired they were after their 18 hours underground. I did reflect upon this, thinking, these are people who probably do Quaking in their lunch break and they seem to think it was hard, how is it going to be for me? I reassured myself that it couldn’t be that bad as it was a through trip and, after all that meant you didn’t have to go back up. I had a little think about all the nice easy through trips I have done, like Calf Holes and Yordas and decided that they must be exaggerating. I listened a bit more and was surprised to learn that there were several hundred metres of abseiling at the beginning and 9km of passage. I had meant to get round to reading about the cave before I went on the trip but just seemed to have been too busy.We set off in the back of a van up the slopes towards PSM laden with items I had nabbed that morning. I had no idea I was supposed to have a bivvy bag in case we needed to stop on the trip, or a sleeping bag, or a stove. Clearly the “be prepared” motto had bypassed me. The road was so bad we ended up getting out and pushing the van quite a bit of the way. Not really brilliant for preserving the much needed energy for the trip ahead. It was a forty minute walk up to the cave where we had photos and got our SRT kits on. I got on the rope and started abseiling. Although it was several hundred metres, you couldn’t really see the drop until quite near the end so it wasn’t totally frightening. I was really enjoying the swinging about over the pitches and the sense of excitement you get at the start of an adventure. At the end of all the abseiling, which had taken about two hours, I got off the rope and sort of expected congratulations. I mean, I had never abseiled that far before and I didn’t have any wobblers at all. However, Stuart was there, saying how because we (i.e. me) had been so slow the rest of them had gone on ahead. Oh! Not put off I enthused about how great the abseiling was and how amazing the feeling was to have abseiled that far and secretly thought about how great I was to have done it. Stuart was keen to press on when the other two from our team got to the end of the abseiling section.We set off and I was loving every minute of it. We didn’t want to get lost so were following the survey very closely. After a couple of hours we stopped for a Mars bar and Chris pointed out that that section was only supposed to take us five minutes. Still feeling like I was the world’s greatest caving hero for abseiling that far I excitedly pointed out that it was five minutes further from our goal though and went on about how well we were doing. We carried on and it was lots of smaller stuff at the beginning and then started getting bigger and bigger. We got lost for 2 or 3 hours in the Grand Canyon. The words didn’t match the survey. I pointed out that it was a large passage with a deepish stream in so must be the Grand Canyon, but they didn’t think so, so we went back to look for a turn off, over and over again. After realising there was no turn off they decided to carry on and low and behold, it was the Grand Canyon. I refrained from saying “I told you so!” though, as it was obvious I was the weakest link in the team and probably needed them more than they needed me!!We had a break of soup and pain au chocolat before doing the very wet stuff. By this point we were well into the night-time. We had a problem finding the inflatable boat at the Tunnel de Vent. We found the lake but there were a few places you could approach the lake from and none had a boat in view. Eventually the water was braved to locate the boat and we paired up to cross the lake. You had to pull yourself along the lake on a bit of rope in the boat. It was very novel. We’d now been caving for about 18 hours. Unfortunately this was only half way though. However, I kept focusing on the “wow” aspect of how many kilometres we’d done rather than how many more we had to do.The next section was really big passage and massive chambers and a seemingly non-ending array of boulder piles to go up and then down. The chambers were so big your light did not reach the other side at all. Helpful red and white markers guided the way though. For some reason unbeknown to me I had kept my harness on for the whole trip and remember that the last few hours of the trip were really difficult as every step caused immense pain in my groins. There were still bits where abseiling and prussicking were required every so often with fixed ropes. We were exhausted by this point and found that we were nodding off at tops of pitches whilst waiting for someone to abseil down. Not a good place for a catnap really! We had another break of soup and pain au chocolat and passed the grave of Marc Louvrens who had been involved in the cave’s initial discovery. The chambers got bigger and bigger until we heard voices. I was worried that it was going to be international cave rescue (who charge a fortune) wondering what had happened to us. It was instead the friendly voice of Andy Jackson, BPC and Wessex member. He was taking photos of the chamber and told us the Salle de Verne was only half an hour a way. Phew! There was some dodgy traversing on ropes crossing deep water though, similar to what we had done earlier but now I had very little muscle reserve left. After some cursing (and promising a dance to someone in the Helwith Bridge if they helped me!) I got through and our welcome party met us in the Salle de Verne and we had hugs and congratulations galore. Surely I was a proper hard-core caver now, I thought! The Salle de Verne was absolutely massive and I think they may be turning it into a show cave, so there were lights and it was lit it up for us to see how spectacular it was. A short walk through the EDF tunnel and we were out after 26 hours underground! After food and sleep we spent time recounting our trip to others. Interestingly, not that I am at all competitive, honest, but I did notice that we weren’t the slowest as one group had spent 32 hours getting through the cave! I also managed to have the most impressive injuries as the harness had rubbed so badly that it had gouged chunks of flesh out of my groin. Lovely!The next day was spent going to Le Pont Suspendu d’holzarte - a huge suspension bridge not far away and a nice walk through a village where the Tour De France had gone through! The rest of the YSS went on to explore Cueto in Spain but I left to go to a school friend’s wedding in Germany. All in all a fantastic and very memorable trip, which I thoroughly enjoyed!Thanks to my team mates Stuart Weston, Chris Tate and Lisa Wooton and all at the YSS for helping organise such a superb trip.
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