New Year, new start - I had the idea of ramping it up a bit after
the potter trips and suggested that we do the round trip to get a good dose of
exercise. It started off okay, into the mine, to the Brownley Hill North Middle
Vein, then working your way to the top of the Great Limestone and finally to
the bottom of the sump that connects up to the High Level. Once here we had a
little break, bit of water and proceeded to prussik up the sump. Karli has been
doing caving and has had lots of practice, but for me this was the first bit of
SRT I've done since 2019 involving prussiking so it was a bit harder than I
remembered.
Finally in the high level, we cracked on and then we came
to the first junction on the right, which was the short dogleg to the climbing
sump. Going past this we shortly came to a sharp left, Karli seemed to think
that this was the route to Jug Vein, but to me it didn't feel right despite it
drafting strongly (we have fallen foul of this before) and I carried on a bit
further which led me to another left. Strong gut feeling this was the way. In
hind sight looking at the plan if we had taken that first left we would have
ended up at Tatter's String like once before - the route a painful slog with
lots of falls. Taking the second left brought us onto the Brownley Hill Sun
Vein, this part always sticks in the head that it is painful with lots of falls
to crawl over, however it all felt quite easy going. We hit the bend to the
right that is the crosscut to Jug Vein and this is where all the falls and
crawls are. At this point trying to keep a reasonable pace going and all the
crawling started to hit me with the realisation that I was quite unfit despite
all the walking and bike riding I had been doing. One benefit of the stops was
that at one point we just happened to stop in the right place and Karli noticed
a shell fossil in the wall - nice to see that, however it just all seemed like
nonstop crawling over fresh roof falls all along the crosscut and it felt like
it was taking for ever - surely we should be a Jug Vein soon? Finally I got a
shout from Karli ahead that he was at the sump for the way back down. Thank
heaven for that.
On this trip Karli had brought along some rope with a
view to re-rigging the sump as he seemed to think the original in-situ rope was
rather old. His assumption was correct, there was a date on it and it was from
1992! The old rope was removed and replaced with the new one. He abseiled down
first and when clear in the stope, I followed afterwards. The last time we had
come here, we had installed some big chunky anchor plates and we had rigged the
second pitch so you did not have to abseil down over the rubble and all the rub
that gave to the rope. The second pitch (using the same rope from the first
one) had always been belayed to a buried scaffold bar - this rope was cut from
it and the new one was attached to a backup anchor and then linked in to the
anchors we had put in for the second pitch. Having cut the old rope from the
scaffold bar we did a quick inspection of it and to our horror (maybe a too
strong a word) we found a squishy area in it, it looked like the sheath had
received impact damaged from the rocks above. Now we can't tell if this part
would have been under load for the second pitch or whether it was the end part
of the rope for the first pitch as we had put it down and then picked it up
again after coiling. However, it certainly focused the mind when it comes to
using in-situ ropes - inspect them.
After all the rope faff we dropped
into the main level on Jug Vein and headed south out of the water for a lunch
break. Messing around with the ropes and then sitting around for lunch we got a
bit chilled and felt it was high time to get moving. Turning around and heading
north we got to the drop in the level that you have to climb down and then we
reached the main horse level horizon. In my mind I was thinking it was a
relatively short trek until we joined the main vein (as in Brownley Hill), but
I think coupled with the fact I was starting to feel really tired it ended up
feeling to me like a never ending roof on floor horror show experience.
Irrespective of how I felt there was new material on the floor all over in this
part of the mine, not particularly inspiring to me or Karli - a lot of it
hadn't even seen traffic. To top it all off, having reached the first junction
- a cross roads, I was convinced it was a left, left my arse - we ended up
grovelling to a forehead for a total of around 400m there and back -
arrgggghhhh. Returning back to the junction we turned left (as if carrying on
straight) and eventually came to the Brownley Hill Vein and the promise of a
relatively fall free exit. Catching my breath (Karli seemed to be fine) here
and having some choc's we both decided that there's no need to this trip again.
The last time we had done this round trip was March 2014, and passing
through the falls on the main vein to get out was a bit of a mind bender for
me. I don't think anything had really changed apart from the fresh falls on the
connection from Jug to Brownley Hill Vein, but what had changed was my exposure
to this type of ground. Years back, I had been going along this part of the
mine for many trips when exploring the big stopes on the West High Cross Vein
and thought nothing of it - desensitisation by exposure, but not really having
done that much in the meantime it all was a bit like being a newbie being
dropped in the deep end.
Finally, we reached the junction with
Guddhamgill Burn Cross Vein and it all felt safer with the exit not far to go.
I felt battered that evening and the following next few
days. |
