Mendip Man - and Silver Moth
Adam Baldock
We set off to the Fishface gear store on a fine sunny day. I was Promised some proper Mendipesque horizontal passage, exactly what i came to Expo for. Kai showed me into Mendip Man, past the dollop of snow in the rather impressive entrance and set off down boulder and rubble floored crawling passage. At a junction we started to survey a descent lead to the right. I was on disto and Kai on book. The passage was low and surveying was pretty tight. We surveyed on and the passage gently descended with a few turns and low squeezes and a junction halfway on the right. The roof lowers and craps out after about [no number given] metres. The ceiling is decorated with cloud and plume like lumps of calcite. After the passage crapped out we pushed back and surveyed along to the right. This just led us round in a loop to earlier in the entrance series. Before going left at the first junction I attempted to dig out a slope while Kai went for a piss. The dig was fruitless and we proceeded on through a rather rude and grumpy bit of low passage with a sea of rude routes on the floo and pushed into a standing height chamber with boulders in the center. There were two leads here. The first was a small crawling passage, not quite flat out, which ended quickly, and was filled with bat poo and fungus growing up on it. The other lead was after a climb up through a squeeze. After the squeeze a 4m rift appeared, human sized in width! It seemed to descend to floor level and we didnt descend it. It is still a open lead but definitely a D lead, and probably goes back to floor level. We surveyed to the rift and called it a day on Mendip man. Without a good dig it doesn't appear to be going.
Before heading back to camp we checked out a hole which Luke had found which needed some digging near Mendip Man. With energy low but the draft exciting we took turns pulling head sized boulders out of the entrance until we squeezed through to a sitting height junction. The route straight ahead crapped out after 11m but to the right a strong draft and a [?] great echo. The passage started as a sharp calcite crawl then dropped down in a series of free climbable steps descending 40ft to a 4m wide hole. We surveyed tired and excited up to this point and left it as an A lead. We named this Silver Moth as the passage had a lot of moths and took silver from the fact that Luke had found it. With a great draft out of the hole we were excited to come back in 2 days time after the rain.