Honing our stretcher skills

When it rains it pours. I accidentally managed to avoid Dog Hole for 1.5 years, and then suddenly I could hardly be kept away. We would have a rescue training in it! When I heard that I wondered how on earth we would do that; the entrance is a bit of a bottleneck, and on the normal caving trip a while back only three of six managed to get in. My confusion only grew when Roger, our training officer, mentioned we would be with ~15 people.

Some of the intrepid heroes of the night

The trick here of course is that what I thought of as Dog Hole is technically “Dog Hole Extension”. We would not go through the gate that closes that part of the gcave off, but stay on the more spacious outer side. Easy to fit fifteen sturdy rescuers there!

The scenario would be as follows: our designated victim would go in and fake a leg injury, and we would stretcher her out, over the tricky slopes and through the crawls. This would be a practice both in rigging (it’s too steep and slippery to just carry a stretcher out) and in stretcher handling. And due to circumstances it all went slightly different from what we had expected, but it was a good training! Next month we will take this even further... watch this space!

Our victim about to have her supposedly injured leg splinted