Through trip

An opening wide enough for a person is not necessarily an opening a person should go through! When we reached breakthrough the week before, we had produced a narrow gap with lots of hanging death. Not good! So the week after we'd go back and go to the top of this passage. If you throw things down a narrow, vertical passage you had better do it from above! So we set off.

The nicest pic of icicles I took at the entrance

The path was slightly less treacherous than the previous time. We got to the entrance, which was beautifully festooned with icicles, and we got in. There were only three of us, the Anglesey delegation; Don was already in there. We reached the chamber with our dig in to the sound of rumbling rock; he was already hard at work! He came down to say hi. And then we decided Don would have some well-earned coffee, Paul would continue trying to drain the main passage so we could get in without getting too wet during the Victorian trip, and David and I would scamper up to the top of the dig, and see if we could clean it up. 

It sounded easy, but it wasn't. David and I couldn't find our way and had to come back down to be shown the first stage by Paul. And from there we went in the wrong direction a few times more. But in the end we got there! And found lots of loose rubble with an enormous boulder on top of it.Would that rubble be keeping the big boulder up? We didn't want to dislodge that thing; that would kill us! But it seemed to be properly wedged in and we set out to throw rubble down. David with a bit more panache than me. And after a while we figured it was clean enough to chance coming through. We rigged the rope as a hand line around a big boulder, and down we went. It worked! We have a through trip! We had a donut (provided by Don) to celebrate and then we went out. Soon we'll go and show off our work to those who hadn't been there!