Oxford University Cave Club

1999 Expedition News

12th August 1999

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Just thought I'd add a few details to flesh out Paul's slightly brief newsflashes.

10/9: One Hilti cap made the terminal squeeze passable to me and a bit of hammering let others through to... another squeeze, a spacious 20m pitch (as promised), a loose climb, another squeeze, a short pitch, another squeeze (passed by Pippa and, with some difficulty, Rich) and some more tight passage, not pushed to a conclusion. Total depth (unsurveyed) about 50m.

GSP: 10m pitch at last year's LOE rigged, easy rift, another 10m pitch, some good fun stream rift (climbs will need handlines when this is the trade route) and a Big Pitch "Space Trout" a little over P100 with the first section a 83m freehang (off naturals). It joins the shaft series about 15m below Armageddon ledge (where the shaft noticeably enlarges) and gives a much freer hang than Armageddon and The Hundred (2 rebelays as opposed to 10 or something) down to the drippy ledge at the top of The Pitch Down to The First False Floor, supplying some of the water which makes the ledge so drippy. Also found a route through the boulders at the bottom of Tumbling Dice thus bypassing the 2 (hammered) squeezes and knocking a few minutes off the trip time. Further time could easily be saved by capping open the hole at the corner in the Pablo Pot bypass, which seems quite straightforward. On the basis that GSP will become the new trade route, we started completely to strip the old route (after bagging the once-in-a-lifetime round trip, of course). Only downside of all this is that now we'll have a loop closure to show just how bad our surveying is.

29/5: This is a small cave a couple hundred metres off line to downstream 2/7, with a highly Yorkshire-esque feel (open shaft in grassy shakehole, slippery mossy slope down to head of 1st pitch, dead sheep at bottom, etc). Gavin and I capped our way up to the previous LOE before Gavin dropped the firing pin down the rift. Hopefully the next shopping trip will have purchased a large magnet to retrieve it...

Re expedition 2000: 2/7! 2/7! 2/7! Both down- and up-stream. There's only one downstream lead so 3 pits and 6-9 digging masochists who want to find The Way On is plenty (me and Gavin makes 2 of those for starters). Upstream there's a long way to go before Oliseda, and there's (still) the chance to connect with Verdelleungua, and its the ideal place to go if you want to find passage (all you have to do is get lost round there and you're in new territory). If there's sufficient interest then we could perhaps run a Xitu tourist trip in parallel?

Lev Bishop