Digging: it's worse than it looked

I've been keen on making a breakthrough for ages! It's such a good feeling to crawl through a gap for the first time and see terrain nobody has seen for a hundred years. But we were stuck where we were, since forever. But the previous time we'd blown some rock up, and maybe now we could make some progress! I was keen.

As usual, I was the first one up. I first attacked a rock that had already been loose the previous time. I had it down soon! With its mate! And I had a bit of a prod on the side. The wall is awful and I tried to bring some loose bits down. Unfortunately, it has lots of these! Soon the whole place was clogged. But Miles appeared, so we had a cleaning out session. I slid stuff down and he stacked it near. He didn't want to chuck it down; we had a firing line going down, and we kept damaging it by throwing stuff on it. We should stop that!

Rocks that were too big to handle easily Miles broke up. We did several rounds of bringing things down and then stacking them away! At some point, all that was safe to move was down. I had a bit of a look at the situation. It looked challenging! I like second opinions, so Miles came all the way up too. He didn't like it too much either. But we've been there before! Just keep going. Sooner or later it will give.

The problem is a bit that we thought the ceiling stepped up about a meter; that leaves you with a meter of rubble above your head. That's bad enough. But it turns out to be more than that! God knows how much we have vertically above our heads! But we will proceed. Sooner or later the ceiling will go back sloping away at some 35 degrees. We'll just have to keep pushing!

When Miles went down he undid the firing line, and I pulled it up. When he was safe I chucked a lot of the rock he had stacked down. Better get rid of it! But by then it was time to come out. Into the freshly fallen hail! That seems to be standard these days. But days are getting longer and spring must be on its way. We'll be back to try to make our way up!