204 - Death and Glory
Deep
BECKA - actually two dates given here: 24, 25 July 06
There were high hopes of a connection between the near end and the colonnade, they were a mere 10m apart and there were several QM's that could go.
On Monday (24th) we got to the pushing front via 204a and checked out (00-70) "B" and (00-71) "C" grade leads both of which didn't go. We backed up a bit and tried out a "A" lead. It went! Crawling flat out on mud and loose stones wasn't pleasant but we were making progress. Dave was the first there finding a dodgy looking boulder choke he slowly started to pull out rocks, it was almost wide enough but not quite, then, one of them, the size of a basketball (it was bigger than that - DL) fell on his shoulder. Things weren't going well but he seemed OK after about 15 minutes.
I tried the small rift above the dodgy looking boulders, a few metres
in there was a steep chimney into a chamber bypassing the hanging
death. We were now in the chamber about the size of a small classroom.
Dave was puzzled there wasn't meant to be water here in 204.
We decided that the previous survey was shite. We
thought we were still in new territory, we named it unimaginatively,
Waterfall.
We tested out all the leads that we could find but no connection. We had almost given up and were on our way out when I spied a small 7/8m crawl sloping upwards.
Dave went up first and I followed. Half way up I heard screams of excitment, we had found the colonnade and the connection!!
We had to return through Death and Glory (Note: Death is the boulder choke/hanging death and glory is the chimney into waterfall chamber) to retrieve our survey instruments which we had left in Kidney Bean. But disaster struck once again, it was here, after we had discovered the connection that we found out that neither of us could read the compass or clino.