I can’t say I was particularly looking forward to walking up to the Gaping Gill area for a second day in a row, but Damian wanted to do the topos for Grange Rigg and Christmas Pot and this seemed like an obvious opportunity. None of us had been to Grange Rigg before so I probably should have been keener. The plan was for me to rig Christmas while Damian and Ian went in Grange Rigg, meeting up below the third/fourth pitches.
Having been left at the entrance I was even less enthusiastic than before: the shakehole had subsided and large quantities of gooey mud covered the entrance rocks. Unfortunately, it was not in danger of blocking the entrance and wanting to keep my kit clean was not really a valid excuse ….. The mud continued down the first few climbs/pitches and the rope soon turned brown. Damian had admitted earlier that he had guessed rope lengths, so I might not even get to the bottom. I was quite pleased to reach the bottom of the pitch with rope to spare. Since my previous visit I had forgotten that most of the cave is a boulder choke in a rift, not particularly tight or awkward, but not that inviting either. Finally I reached a climb/pitch – it didn’t have any bolts, but since the walls were mainly broken boulders there wasn’t really anywhere to put them. On what was starting to feel like a solo trip I was wasn’t keen to squeeze through a hole and drop down what might have been a pitch without knowing I could get back. After some deliberation I tied the rope to a rock (which seemed to be held in place by calcite) and dropped down to find the second pitch. At this point I could hear Damian and Ian somewhere below and suddenly it all seemed less remote.
The trip to the bottom of the cave was uneventful. Ian was the only one interested in pursuing the cave to the end – and he came back raving about small crawls and said “I didn’t get any wetter than I was already.” Since Damian was making a topo we had to rig everything that had p-bolts. This involved him rigging the free-climbable pitches and abseiling down, leaving someone else to derig and climb down. You then measure how much rope you’ve used and start again with the same rope on the next pitch. Well it’s different!
Damian made a swift and, I believe, uneventful exit via Christmas. Ian and I went through the acrobatic rift, along the crawl and then got lost. After some crawling around in the small stream Ian found pitch which wasn’t free-climbable, I tried an alternative squeeze – the rock was worn on the other side, but I didn’t fit through the gap. Finally we found the climb which bypassed the wet crawl and led to the pitch we had rigged. After this the trip was fairly uneventful and actually quite enjoyable.
Party: Damian and Fiona Weare and Ian Walker
Time: 4 hours
