2nd January 2025 - Off beat Easegill

With Tony having exclusive use of a Spanish ski resort, Mike and I were left to fend for ourselves. Mike had a think and came up with a plan to head over to Cape Kennedy and the Fire hydrant in Easegill but with a little SRT loop to add interest. 

Unusually there were ropes down Lancaster Hole, Cambridge uni. on a New Year's meet by the look of the labels, but we were on our own as we headed down the pitch and towards Kath's Way. Fall pot and the beginning of the high level series were passed with Mike covering ground fast with a steady pace but always on the most efficient route, while I zipped around like a collie pup going nowhere slowly.

I'm sure back in the day I didn't blink an eye at crossing over Stake pot by hand over handing the in situ ropes, but either Easegill is slippier, I need new wellies or I've a different outlook on life and it's harness and cows' tails every time now. 

The Stake pot series of Easegill is one of the parts that I know I don't know. Even after recceing it a few times before taking on the traverse I always had the description in hand. I know it involves a fixed ladder at some point, but that's about it. Fortunately today I had a head up display and as long as I moved fast enough to keep him in my sights, I just needed to follow Mike.

Having kept my SRT gear on from Stake pot (no time to take it off following Mike), I had the indignity of coming to a standstill, or more a liestill just before Cellar pot as I just didn't fit through the low bedding. Fortunately it's removal allowed me to pass and find Mike at the top of Cellar pot where he'd cached his gear and was ready to climb up through an obscure hole leading up to the pretties in Cape Kennedy.

Sight seeing tour over we were reunited with our gear and out of the choice of a rope, a thin polypropylene line and a chain, I chose the rope and tried to began my descent. In the equivalent of trying to start a car with a dead battery I was going nowhere. The rope had become so heavily calcited that it just wouldn't run through my descender and in the end I was forced to down climb on my jammers. Mike meanwhile made a smoother descent on an Italian hitch. It's worth noting if passing this way that Stops just don't seem to like petrified rope.

I always find the Wormway an intimidating place and today was no exception. There's something about the texture of the mud that reminds you that you really are in the bowels of the Earth. Fortunately it's not far to the 88' pitch but a more sobering view then came into sight, a metre high ring of foam about 20m up the pitch. A day or two previously where I was stood would have been 20 m underwater. I seemed to be up the pitch a bit quicker than usual.

If you're looking for a bit of an off beat adventure with a little bit of everything then this is a great little trip - just make sure the water levels aren't too high.

21st November 2008 - Where there's a worm, there's a way

Ray en-route to 88' pitch

In preparation for a traverse of the Easegill system later on in the season, this evening we made a return to Link pot.

There's something I like about snow flurries lit by the beam from your headtorch. It's possibly as it reminds me of when the Millenium Falcon makes its jump to hyperspace, the stars flying past at unimaginable speed. Soon though the real stars crept through the clouds and we made our way across the fell under a nothern winter sky, Orion just rising over the horizon.
While half the resident bat population of Hilton hall has decided to settle in for the winter, the other half was still very active, navigating its way at high speed around the complicated nooks and crannies of the chamber.

We dropped down through boulders into an awkwardly sized vadose rift, before another skwirm through boulders brought us to more solid streamway and the pitch in Echo aven. While the pitch seems to be permantly rigged for those completing the traverse, Tom thought he recognised the rope from when he had done the trip 15 years previously and so we rigged our rope too. Some of the older bolts and the karabiner on the deviation are certainly showing signs of having been underground for a good number of years.

As Tom arrived at the bottom of the pitch, the warm, soft glow of Ray's carbide lamp appeared at the top. Caving with LEDs is a bit like central heating; efficient and economical, but it does make you miss the glow and crackle of a real fire.

The way on lies under a shelf in an innocuous little streamway that Dick was quick to remind us, "fills to the roof in even moderate rain". There are signs of flooding everywhere, foam in the roof and every surface covered in mud deposits in which the eponymous worms of the Wormway live. An aven gives brief respite from the streamway. The colours in the formations a stark contrast to the omnipresent mud of the tunnel. Tatters of bang wire evidence of possible further exploration and clawed scratch marks on the walls evidence of more sinister activities?

In the Wormway

Back in the sewer a right and then a left brings you to another aven, which in turn leads to the bottom of the 88' pitch, our goal for the evening. Once again we found this rigged and though it held Dick and Ray's combined weight, we're probably going to have a trip to see what it's attached to at the top.

The 88' Pitch

The return took Ray in search of a waterfall down one of the previously unexplored passageways only for him to find himself at a sump, the sound of falling water being the sound of him crawling through the passage!

Once again Tom, our directeur de photographie managed to convince members of our party to lay in cooling pools of mud in his continuous search for the shot to epitomise the sheer joy of caving (it will have to have John in it).

Dick enjoying the Wormway

Throughout the whole of the return journey I was thinking about the last few awkward meanders and weaving the tackle bag back through them. It came as a very pleasant surprise therefore to be moving easily through a high bedding plane, looking down on the trench that had previously caused such grief.

On the way out

Out on the moors once again, the skies had cleared and we made our way back to Bull Pot farm under a stunning array of constilations and a lone shooting star, streaking its way across the sky.

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