Do you like being cold and wet? Do you like shooting lasers at each other then interpreting your dots to form something semi resembling a cave passage? Then come on a surveying trip!
This is exactly what myself, Sach, and Anya got up to on Saturday 26th June. What started off as a plan to to go mountaineering turned into a survey trip for Cave stream. A wonderful horizontal sporty cave by Castle Hill. The cave is an approximately 560m phreatic passage with a streamway which runs the length of the short system. Water levels do vary pending on rainfall/snow melt and there are a few short climbs which involve battling the water if your going upstream but when we went the water level varied from knee to thigh. I was very impressed to find my sports bra pretty dry despite me falling off a short 1m climb into a waterfall. Don’t worry though, the tablet survived.
So what was the goal of this trip? Well we set out with the aim to produce an up to date survey and hoo boy did we do that. In a short 2hr trip we managed to survey the length of the cave following the streamway but the cold water made itself known and very sensibly we elected to leave the side passages for another day, preferably a warmer one but despite the cold toes, we did a bang up job of achieving our task. As always there was good banter, great comms reporting when the cold was setting in and some fantastic team work. All this could only be topped by being introduced to the sweetest donkey ever!! Thanks for the great weekend! Apologies for the lack of photos, I was too engrossed in playing connect the dots on my tablet in the cave.