Vercors, France - Wed-Fri 27-29 August 2008

On Wednesday morning Keith and Pete were the only takers for the trip to the Grotte de la Luire. Paul didn't fancy 200m of ladders, although he was feeling much better than the day before and I was completely seized up from the day before. Paul suggested quite an ambitious walk (it would have been ambitious if I hadn't been as stiff as a post!!) and we debated that for a while before settling for a short loop of it, which was a relief to me as I knew he'd be carrying me if we went any further. I was in pain!! As we drove past the car park where the original walk would have started, I knew that we'd made the right choice!!

We followed a valley, Coombe Claire, up to an auberge and stopped for coffee and some delicious summer fruit tart. From there we continued down the other side of the saddle (on the wrong path I suspect) to what I thought was going to be a viewpoint, but turned out to be a viewpoint with lots of trees in front of it, at which point I chucked my dolly out of the pram and Paul threatened to disown me.

We finally found a map showing some cross country ski routes and found our way back to the refuge and followed the track to the refuge back to the road and down there to where we'd left the car.

We then had a call from the boys and met them in Lans for a Coke and then went to the supermarket to buy lots of food, which we scoffed back at the apartment.

By Thursday morning I'd loosened up again and was up for some more underground exploration. Paul had a phone call soon after breakfast from a French lad who wanted to join us. As Boyd had opted not to come we had a spare place, so we agreed to pick him up from the registration area.

We then drove out to the Trou Qui Souffle, parked up and changed and walked back down to the entrance, which is just brilliant - sit on the edge of the tarmac with your legs down the hole and attach your descender!!

To cut a long story short, Keith, Pete and Tibon, the French lad, went down, I followed, heard Paul struggling with a tight bit on the entrance pitch and then heard Pete calling back to say that Keith had hurt his finger. Paul retreated back up the pitch, Keith came back with a wonky finger that I taped up for him and while the two of them left, the three of us continued. We dropped several dry pitches and did some fairly straight forward but airy traversing that Tibon didn't seem to happy with and then came to a point where the main route appeared to continue down a series of short drops, but the bottom of the rope we'd just descended had a piece of string attached to it, which led into a side passage.

For some reason Pete decided to take the side route and for some reason we followed him into a crawling muddy passage (very reminiscent of a Derbyshire crawl!) to a pitch that Pete assured me was only about 20m. He seemed to take an awfully long time to go down and then Tibon seemed to take even longer and I changed my mind about going down several times before I leant right out and saw how far away the two of them actually were at the bottom. I was very glad I hadn't bothered when Pete came prussiking back up to say that we were on the wrong route. At that point we decided to head back out, we obviously weren't going to find the through route very easily. Good fun though!!

Back on the surface, we found Paul and Keith waiting for us. We did suggest that Keith should go to hospital, but he declined and went to the first aid tent back at Speleobar. They taped his little finger to the next one, but by the end of the evening he'd taken the tape off because it was hurting more when strapped up.