The CUCC Blog

Yorkshire

2021-10-15 The trip started with a brief presentation a few nights before the weekend with free pizza and beer, always a good idea. After looking over past years trips, our expectations for the trip were high. We packed our bags containing all the necessary equipment the night before. On arrival, the tatty state of most of the clothing led us to wonder what we had gotten ourselves in for! Nevertheless, we got in the car and set off to Yorkshire. Five hours, a dropped laptop and a Double Big Mac later, we arrived at our home for the weekend. We followed the other cavers into the building and unpacked our bags. A 20 man bunkbed was our bed for the weekend, an underrated experience to say the least! The night quickly progressed into caving related games fuelled by a healthy supply of alcohol. After crawling through a ladder, squeezing through some planks of wood and balancing on a pan, it was fair to say we had made friends with the other cavers far quicker than we had imagined. Note to self, don’t let Wassil balance on the shoulders of Harry on a pan again! The next morning we went down to breakfast which was cooked for us, aswell as a fresh brew of hot coffee. After a short car journey, we arrived at the cave entrance. A few group photographs later and we found ourselves at the cave entrance manhole cover. The group leader lifted the cover, and as we peered down the dark hole into the cave, we turned our head torches on and headed in! A 25m drop with some scaffolding bars to clamber down was daunting for a first caving trip! Eager to get going, we climbed down to the bottom of the first descent. Relieved to be at the bottom, we crawled further into the cave system. A huge network of tight walkways was presented to us. New Phoenix head torches illuminated a large cavern infront of us, with small offshoots. Scraping through small tunnels made up about 70% of the caving time. We climbed up precarious ladders swaying as we climbed them. Pushing onwards, we delved deeper into the cave system only to be met with a large, slow moving pool of murky water. Wading into the cold water, we managed to pass through but not without a few places of swimming in the icy cold cave water. Moving on further we came to a long stretch of deep water. With the same method as before, we started wading in. The water level continued to rise as we waded in, until it was chin height and still rapidly increasing in depth. The pool must be swam to proceed. With a few jumping into the cold water from a ledge above it, we turned around and headed back to another offshoot that wasn’t submerged in deep water. After meeting Sheffield caving club in the cave, following their directions we found a small, manmade, only crawlable tunnel at the top of a ladder with a small trickle of cold cave water flowing out of it. Leading the way, Vilhelms shouted down to the others waiting at the bottom of the ladder whilst he began his crawl. One by one, each caver climbed the ladder before crawling into the passage. 20 painful metres of gravel crawling explained the ripped gloves and damaged overcoats. After realizing the passage ended abruptly with a few sandbags and pool of water, a short rest later we all tried to crawl back out. The passage was too narrow to allow us to do this without crawling to a wider point to turn around. The tight oversuits restricted movement like shrink wrap over a soft cucumber. After 4 hours of being underground, we eventually reached the scaffolding exit. After the difficult past hours, the exit ascent seemed much easier than expected when we first climbed down it! The smell of grass moorland met us at the surface, where we snapped a few “after” photographs for the gram. After showering back at the caving hut, it was time for bolognaise and beer. Table traverse followed by swimming in an icy lake with clothes left at the shore line concluded day 1.

-- Adam & Beth, Jan. 17, 2024. Category: Caving