161 - Where the Wind Blows
Becka Lawson
T/U 5 hours
Pootled along to Where the Wind Blows, _swearing_ loudly at last years deriggers, who had removed all the sodding handlines (but hadn't detackled things like the big wet loose pitch down Alternative Universe). We skipped one handline, cut our rope for the next two, then spent _ages_ faffing at the little up-climb before No Utility Belt Required, 'cos the bastards had taken the rope off that _too_, for no good reason, and our rope wasn't long enough. We had now used all our rope, and I'd misheard how many bits we'd have to bring and we hadn't expected _all_ the handlines to be derigged. To the question marks at the end of Where the Wind Blows, I wriggled down the slot on the left, 5m before the choked end.
[ sketch plan with much annotation ]
I went left, up a vertical squeeze to a small chamber then up another vertical squeeze (Sam first) and a step up and Sam went up a 4m climb to look into a _big_ echoey vertical aven. He couldn't see anything obvious off it.
Tony + Sam rigged the little pitch down the rift on the R after going through the slot on the L (by dint of sending Sam _back_ to derig the bloody up-climb to fetch the rope), Pitch to small chamber, ~3m down, then in one corner a tight rift going off (needs _hammering_) widens out below to ?20m pitch. A _small_ question mark!
Meanwhile I started digging the final boulder choke. Thought the weak draft got a _bit_ stronger. Slow going - a medium sized QM?.