by George North
Exploration in Easegill
For the benefit of those of you that aren’t avid readers of Descent magazine I thought I’d tell the tale of what James Carlisle, Tom Clayton, Ben Shaw, Paul Windle (RRCPC) and myself have been up to in the Lancashire part of the Dales during the past few months.The year got off to a good start when we broke through a calcite barrier at the end of a mysterious low inlet in the Far Streamway of Mistral Hole that doesn’t appear in the guideboook. An 8m high aven, Pit Pot, was discovered and about 5m of tight passage was explored at the top. Although it is a rather insignificant find in the grander scheme of things it was nonetheless an exciting discovery for us. Neil Pacey in “Grind to a Halt”Following this, during February James and Tom paid a rare visit to the end of the aqueous inlet of Woodhouse Way in Lancaster Hole. After a brief digging session removing boulders from a rift they broke through into 20m of passage with a 15m high aven at the end – Pot Pit. Several more trips followed including a slightly barmy solo digging trip by Tom, and a trip to climb ‘Radio Aven’ which we weren’t sure had been scaled. Sadly when we reached the top there was no way on and a lone bolt hanger suggested that we probably weren’t the first cavers there! Another aven scaling trip to climb Pit Pot was cut short when the explorers arrived to find the drill swimming inside the supposedly ‘dry’ bag. Needless to say the battery didn’t last quite as long as it should have done. We haven’t totally given up on Woodhouse Way yet, and we can thoroughly recommend it as an excellent sporting trip to cavers who like challenging watery obstacles!The third find this year was in The Grind in Link Pot. Notable for its tortuous nature and very slimy mud it probably hadn’t seen many visits since the original exploration 35 years ago. James, Tom, and Paul Windle made the first breakthrough by digging out cobbles from the choke at the end of ‘The Dirty Passage’. They entered about 30m of low wet passage, but with good opportunities for further progress. A few weeks later we returned and hammered our way into ‘The Dark Side of the Grind’, another 70m of mainly crawling passage. This ended at a calcite choke with a strongly draughting duck beneath it. I managed to get wedged in this for some time and enthusiasm to return to this spot has been fairly limited. Tom Clayton in “The Dark Side of the Grind”A few more weeks passed and we returned to The Grind with capping gear to engineer a route through a boulder choke in a strongly draughting body sized tube. Four hours of capping by Paul allowed us through into a tight upwards tube in the roof followed by a similar tube back down into ‘The Manchester Shit Canal’ – which was fortunately only about 6m long. This was followed by 150m of stooping height tunnel, which ended at a calcite choke amongst stunning crystal pools – a just reward for any future visitors to this remote spot! A tight downstream passage, close to the Shit Canal was pushed for about 50m by Tom around some committing bends, but sadly common sense prevailed and Tom retreated before becoming a permanent fixture in the squeeze. This point marks the end of our explorations in The Grind for the meantime, but I’m sure we’ll return once the memory of the misery involved with digging there starts to fade.At the moment (with the exception of Ben – surely deserving of its own story!) we’re all involved in other projects. Hopefully we’ll have more new discoveries to report in the near future.
George.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
