Cavers: Chris Scaife, Don Miller, Alex Ritchie, Dan Jackson, Mike Skyrme, Chris Sharman
Mike and Sharman were in a hurry, so ran off to rig with Don’s ropes and my carefully crafted laminated rigging guide and map, leaving the rest of us in Inglesport to enjoy a leisurely breakfast. We then headed out into quite dense fog, but were lucky and found the cave without too much fannying around.
After the entrance climb there’s a short, wet crawl, then 3 short pitches in quick succession. The third, Black Dub, lands in a pool with a traverse around the edge. The water in this pool was far shallower than I thought and we could have easily managed without a traverse rope. There is then another short wet bit followed by Thunder Pot, which leads straight onto the 82m main pitch, Black Rift. We met up with Mike and Sharman at this point and Dan took a few pictures. Dangling in space above an 80m drop on 9.5mm Spelenium gold while Dan works tirelessly to achieve the perfect photograph is more unnerving than you might think.
Some more crawling and stuff led to a 6m pitch, then like walking and crawling and traversing and we were at the sump. All very pleasant caving with no real issues.
But.
At the foot of the 6m pitch, Wacko Jacko shouted out, “Shit!”
I thought maybe he’d stubbed his toe or something, but no, he’d forgotten his hand jammer. Sharing and lowering someone else’s jammer down 6m pitches is fine, but the 82m pitch with a rebelay and 3 deviations posed something of a quandary. Sir Isaac H. NewtDon came up with a most ingenious way to overcome this terrible problem and in the end, Don went up first, then Alex went to the rebelay and Don lowered his jammer down to the rebelay; Alex descended past the deviation, having unclipped the lower deviation, and lowered Don’s hand jammer down on the rope. Alex then headed out and Dan and I were able to get out semi-normally.
After this mensa-tastic ascent, the rest of the cave was literally a walk in the park. I mean, figuratively.
Ten years ago, Black Shiver was my first ever Black Rose trip, so of course I spent the whole of Saturday evening in tears as the enormity of a decade of joy had gone full circle inside my head.
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