Saturday 29th November – County to Wretched Rabbit
Arriving at the school soon after 9am on the Saturday Damian and I were pleased to see plenty of people up and about. There was even a caving plan emerging: the meets list said Lancaster – County but this became two trips, one doing County to Lancaster and the other County to Wretched Rabbit. With some extra people meeting us at Bull Pot Farm we ended up with parties of 7 and 6. I feel I ought to add that the weather was spectacular – cold and frosty but also sunny and still, great views everywhere. Lancaster was rigged on the way over to County and that party set off first to rig County. Our group gave them a head start and then followed. Matt, on his first caving trip proved very enthusiastic from the start and was keen to explore. It didn’t take that long to reach the first pitch. With most of the party safely at the bottom of the pitch Chris quickly turned it into a pull-through to avoid abandoning the rope. After this the trip got more interesting. We found plenty of passage, then some bouldery bits and crawls. It was all a bit weird as I was expecting to find Spout Hall and Poetic Justice (though I wasn’t sure which comes first). Fortunately nobody seemed too concerned by our inability to find the way on. After quite a bit of hunting we reached a low sump. At this point we had to turn around and decided to turn the trip into a general explore and started to poke around in more passages. There was a minor concern that we would have to leave the rope on the second pitch … Typically it took us only a couple of minutes to stumble upon Poetic Justice! Climbing it took a bit longer and a lot of teamwork. From this point we made much better progress and reached the Wretched Rabbit junction just as another party arrived (at least this confirmed where we were). With a committee meeting planned for 5pm and in view of the time wasted visiting the sump Chris and I decided there wasn’t enough time to look at the main streamway and that we’d better make our way out. Fortunately our route-finding problems were at an end and it took us very little climb to reach the climbs. Everyone proved very competent and we were soon out in the late-afternoon sun with time to walk back and change before the sun set.
Party: Chris, Fiona, Isla, Bez, Matt, Paul
Time: 3 hours
