204 - Merry Fucking Christmas pushing (or not)
Nial Peters
Decided, much to the amusement of Tony, to try to drop the pitch
01-68A in Merry fucking Christmas. Set off, and were fine, until we
reached the end of Bonsai crawl. From then on, the trip descended
into chaos, as we struggled to find No pain, no gain, due to
difficulty deciphering the surveys, then proceeded merrily to a large
passage ending with a pitch which, upon seeing an ice formation, Nial
recognised as Wolpertinger way - a part of the cave off the edge of
the survey we were using, and most definitely not where we wanted to
be! After a certain amount of confusion, and such plans as "if we go
back to no pain, no gain, then try again", and "well, if we go past a
branch on the right and keep following this wall", we eventually
managed to find the correct bit of passage, at which point we found we
had to climb down a small hole in the floor for 3m - Nial and Kathryn
managed fine, but for some inane reason I ended up trying, and failing
miserably, to fly down it, tweaking my elbow in the process. Nial,
who at that point was half way along the very tight tube at the
bottom, was told to come back, by a slightly panicky Kathryn who was
convinced by all the mutterings and groans that he was suffocating.
Due to my elbow, we decided no to push merry fucking christmas and
instead went back to lead 03-1B in Magic Roundabout chamber - a
journey which took 3 hrs on the way in only took 1 hr to reverse!
Once there, we surveyed the lead for a short distance up a narrow tube
which carried on from [what we thought was - later found that we had
resurveyed a fair bit] the last survey point - will have to return to
carry on.
We then decided to go for a bit of variety and to exit through 204 D -
which seemed a good idea until we reached the innermost up climb out
of suspended solution [apparently the floor had shifted since people
were there previously, making it very hard] - Nial rigged a handline
down off a rather dodgey boulder, which proved to be necessary as both
me and Kathryn had problems with the climb - I ended up going up it
backwards, and Kathryn prussiked up the handline. Nial then rigged
the entrance climb from the bottom up, and we scrambled out over the
snow plug into the blazing sun.
We then returned to base camp, timing the walk to perfection as it got
dark just as we reached the cars.