12th November 2005
People present - Duncan Jones, Rob Santus

After some thought on where to go and with the weather looking suspect we opted to have a nosey at Peterson Pot. Not having been there before or into anything above Hall of the Mountain King made us wonder whether or not we would find the connection into Pippikin, so we had a quick word with Andy in Bernies and we weren’t totally convinced about finding the connection but we had a brief description to be going on with, so we gave it a go.

After kitting up and wandering over the fell we managed to walk right past the entrance, but a simple back-track found us at the right hole. The in-situ rope, which was looking rather green didn’t inspire confidence so we slung our own rope on and used that instead.
Once down a short shuffle and the second pitch is reached, although this is more of a climb than a pitch, from the bottom of the climb the obvious passage quickly descends to a choke/dig (interesting to know where it theoretically might go).

The only other way on is the rather aptly named Roly Poly passage, the first section being an interesting twist around a couple of corners, easy enough, but it gets better and the ensuing passage where you are crawling/shuffling/thrutching along the roof tube of a keyhole shaped passage is purgatory.
After what seemed like an age and a lot of effort it relented for a metre or so, it was at this point that myself and Rob decided that finding the connection was a priority and going back out this way was not an option we wanted to consider!!
After yet more awkward progress along this delightful passage we reached the Skydive, another aptly named obstacle, somehow I managed to attack it in completely the wrong way and found myself dangling over a few metres of air with my legs stuck in the passage. Cursing, swearing, grunting and lots of energy wasted I thankfully managed to extract myself from it. Much to my disgust, Rob slipped through it without any problem whatsoever.

From here the third pitch follows immediately, although again, this is climbable, at the bottom a rope is seen disappearing through a small hole, following this reaches the head of the fourth pitch, but the rope traverses over this and leads to the connection, things were looking up for us.

Muddy passages were grovelled along before an enlargement into Svengland, going on the description we had things were indeed looking good, that soon changed as the description we had suggested a climb and we were looking down a pitch, confused we back-tracked and had a nosey around for a bit and found nothing obvious, so with no other options we decided to go down the pitch, whereupon the description thankfully matched what we saw again and looking down the large pitch I was sure it had to be the one into Hall Of The Mountain King. Descending this pleasant pitch I definitely knew where I was and we were both relieved at the thought of being able to exit Mistral and not Peterson
A straightforward plod through the easy cave was had before we emerged into the night after an intersting but challenging trip.