107
Jenny
It thunderstormed all night and was still raining in the morning so we altered our
planned trip to land of confusion and decided to look at leads in Ropeless and
Sleepless. The drill was at the pushing front so we were a bit limited. Headed to the end of
Ropeless and went down the pitch the other side of Ropefree. After a nice pitch we landed in
a drippy chamber with a small rift heading off. Sadly this got too small within a few
meters. Stuart and I surveyed out.
Headed through Pushing the Envelope into Sleepless. Olly looked down the short pitch
under the 5m rope traverse. It was a couple of little pitches and an exciting climb by
Olly. Olly could here water noise down a hole on the right (possibly connects to the
parallel rift) and another climb/pitch heading north. Decided to leave that until we had
more gear.
While Olly derigged Stuart looked at a roof tube above which looks promising but needs a
drill. Moved on to the Coldest place in Earth to take the rope to the start of the traverse. On the way out we had a look at getting into the roof tubes level with the top of the short pitch. Stuart traversed
across from the pitch and I climbed from the bottom further along. The climb up was easy and
I got to a similar level to Stuart. I knocked off a few loose holds and climbed up
further. Suddenly I was falling down the rift, briefly I had a calm sense of inevitability,
I knew I would end up hurt at the bottom of the rift. Fortunately the feeling passed and it
was replaced by the idea that I wedge myself in as soon as possible. I managed this at the
last possible point and finally remembered to stop screaming.
Fortunately I wasn’t too hurt and Olly came and helped me extract myself. My hip hurt a
bit where I wedged myself in and I didn’t want to be underground anymore. I left Olly and
Stuart to survey the roof tube while I caved out feeling very lucky and very stupid.