Water Icicle Close Cavern - a small further breakthrough

On Saturday, Keith and I went into WICC to start doing some of the permanent taping and for me to take a look at The Elevator.  Paul was recovering from a bad cough and didn't fancy prussiking back out so he'd stayed at home.  (Three weeks later I knew exactly how he felt!!).

The taping went well, from the breakthrough to the alcove on the far side of Three Way Chamber, where we ran out of pegs.  We actually got further than we'd expected because we'd been able to use quite a few boulders to secure the tape.

Along at The Elevator I took my time descending down what is still a bit of a dodgy pitch, what with all the hanging death up above, a false floor part way down and tonnes of shattered rock at the bottom!  It's very interesting down at the bottom, but given how the pitch got it's name in the first place (Keith was standing on the big boulder still jammed at the top of the pitch and it dropped about several inches), I wasn't terribly happy wandering about not on the rope, so I headed out.  Annoyingly I'd forgotten my camera, so I'll have to go back down again at some point to take some piccies.

Back in Urchin Passage, we realised that we still had some time to spare, so we headed back to Cherty Two Passage.  Keith and Pete had done quite a bit of work on the choke and Keith said something about "stick your head through and look up".  I had a quick look up and decided that it was probably no more dangerous than a lot of Derbyshire mines, so I crawled in and and stood up.  After a bit of hesitation he followed me in and we looked around and carefully didn't touch anything.  Most of it looks as though it's now fairly well wedged, but there's one enormous block in the roof on the right hand side that you just can't quite work out what's holding it up and this is the one that they're worried about.  That whole side is being held up by some chossy crap at the bottom and as they dig through that they're worried that the whole lot is going to come down.  In the early days of progging in there, there were at least two major falls of rock and it's anybody's guess how long the stuff up in the aven will stay up there - it's a seriously dodgy place.  Keith admitted that evening that he'd never had the nerve to even crawl inside the hole, let alone stand up in there and he did literally mean just 'stick your head in'.  Ignorance is bliss!!!!

Having fetched the progging bar and some other bits and pieces from Cherty Two choke, we returned to Urchin Passage choke and Keith had a poke about.  Sadly, the last piece of passage up to the choke proper is the sort of mud that sticks badly (I seem to remember some saying about poo and blankets that seems appropriate), and he was soon covered in the stuff.  I debated taking a peek, but then decided that I didn't want to completely cake my SRT kit in mud, it was bad enough just having come through the dig.

After only a short space of time and the removal of a few small boulders Keith said he could see black space up above and suggested that as time was moving on we should come back the next day with the boulder removing kit and see if we could make the hole bigger.

Keith lying in the mud at the end of Urchin Passage

The Sunday morning saw us both caked in sticky mud, but after a fairly short time the hole was big enough for Keith to squirm through.  There was a fair amount of rock redistribution, his legs disappeared and he shouted back to say it was OK to come through but to watch my head.  To say that it was awkward was probably an understatement as the floor of the small chamber is effectively three or four feet about the floor of the passage you emerge from and the small boulders seemed to conspire with the mud to keep me at the bottom (plus I'm larger than Keith, racing snake that he is, he got the thin genes in the family).  The entire chamber is full of breakdown and as Keith pressed on straight ahead, I clambered up to the right and looked up... and then wished I hadn't!  It isn't as bad as Cherty Two choke, but I realised that most of the stuff above our breakthrough hole that I thought was ceiling... isn't!  It's just sort of wedged in there and the floor is all breakdown.

Keith meanwhile levered a fairly hefty boulder out of the way and inserted himself through a low bedding into a low rifty bit.

Keith disappearing into the next hole

He stuck his head over another boulder and said that he could see more space ahead.  We switched places and I took a couple of photos through the smaller hole in an attempt to work out what we might be looking at.  They didn't come out very well, but for what it's worth, here's one of them.  The obvious hole is about crawling height and the passage beyond looked big enough to stand up in, from what little I could see.

Running out of time again, with Keith thinking of the drive back to Rugby, we decided that rather than try to get through there and then, we'd come back the following week and have another go at it.  It was a very excited brother and sister that headed out that day.