161 - Old Men to conservation tape
Julian Todd
Having arranged to take over Djuke's camp bed and space, someone who thought I was not coming up made sure it was packed and sent down with her. So there was an unfortunate scrabble to find somewhere that wasn't bare rocks. Frank's hole had a badly rigged tarp with a pool of water touching the floor. Olly and I reriged it to form a diagonal shelter off the incorrect side. I retired early in a mood. Noone had the energy to pop round to see how things were doing, even though I could hear them chatting for hours about all the trips they did have the energy to do in the next several days. Things went badly when it started to rain heavily through the night as the wall under the tarp drizzled as much water as if there hadn't been a tarp. I rerigged it all in the morning, this time with the dry side under the shelter, but the mood was not seriously deteriorated and was being sternly ignored.
The walk over was hot, dry and sunny. There were lots of going leads in the Old Man bit above Repton chamber to look forward too. Wookey led the way so he could point out where the path was going to be across the interesting mud in the wide passage. However, after I'd arrived at the junction last, they all moved on while I put my extra layer on. After waiting a while it was evident that noone cared enough to come back and show me where not to trample the pristine mud. They did, however, spend the next hour conservation taping a lane along all the passages whilst I took some crap photos. Then it was time to explore some 'new' stuff off the chocolate river that didn't actually get out of sight of the chocolate river, except for one climb that a novice like me had to be ordered not to do. Back at the junction I eyed up the south passage, which didn't immediately become a pitch as expected and would have been worth surveying. However, it was 6pm and time for novices to leave the cave and come back to the same stop to the millimetre the next day - well rested by a crap night in the bivi and 4hrs of caving and scrambling each way. We left a Chunk of flapjack on the tacklesack for Olly and departed via the Tyrolean of death which Wookey and Nial had rigged over strange acrossfall. The blue string snagged at a point where I was having to apply maximum arm-pull and I needed to be rescued, partly by swinging the down rope so I could prussick up the vertical distance the tyrolean was sagging. We got out in daylight and walked back in the dry.