Post date: Dec 1, 2016 8:30:31 PM

Claire Dunphy, Stephen Macnamara, Eoghan Mullan, Adam Prior, Michal Spigiel. ~6 hours.

A beautiful day on Cuilcagh with recent snowfall, a cold sun and blue skies. We were seriously tempted to go prospecting on the surface instead, but our bolting gear and ropes were waiting at Creature’s End for us and we were conscious this would be our last opportunity to visit this side of Christmas. Eoghan arrived in Blacklion in the morning, and we all called up to Aghnahoo to pick up Adam and say a quick hello to UCD and DIT. Michal was waiting for us at the car park when we arrived at about 10:30.

There had been some heavy rainfall in the last few days, and we were quite aware of the risk of snowmelt to add to levels. Eoghan and I jumped into the cave first to have a look at levels. They were quite high, but seemed to be on their way down judging from higher foam. After some discussion we decided to proceed with caution. Once through the entrance series, Adam placed a level marker rock at the stream edge so we could examine on our way out.

We had a quick tour of the Creature’s End area and potential leads, before Claire and I kitted up to resume our climb, and Michal, Eoghan and Adam went to investigate another climb in the chamber immediately before Creature’s End.

I prussiked up to our previously-placed Y-hang at the small platform, clipped myself and bags in, and called Claire up. There wasn’t a lot of room – just about enough for 2 people standing. We prepared the drill and gear with the space we had, pulled up the rope from below, and I started the climb with Claire belaying. This section was quite sloped, allowing relatively quick progress by freeclimbing. The rock quality was much better here, and rock screws worked well compared to the lower sections. Claire was in a very drippy, cold spot in the line of rock fire, but bore it all in a very waterproof manner.

There was a fair bit of loose rock and calcite on the way up. Near the top of the slope, the rock got very hollow sounding but I managed to lasso a boulder to protect the last few metres’ climb to a narrow ledge. At this point, there are two options: a traverse to the left into a continuing rift (difficult to see what’s round the corner), and a further vertical climb of about 8 metres up to a dripping slot (again, wont’ be able to see if it continues until we get there). Both are significant enough pushes, and wouldn’t be achievable on that trip: Claire was pretty cold at this stage and the others had arrived back at the foot of the climb.

I installed a couple of bolts at the ledge and rigged a Y-hang back to Claire. We then re-rigged the previous Y-hang to the bottom of the climb and rejoined the others in their Kishu. They had completed some freeclimbs on the other side of the chamber but will leave it to them to describe below…

Thanks to Michal we all had loads of food before packing up all of the gear excluding rope, and heading back for the surface. The water levels didn’t seem to be much different – confirmed when we checked Adam’s rock and found that the waterline was about half an inch below its previous point. For a bit of fun we split up going back through the exit. All out in time for dinner and pints in Blacklion.

So the climb remains for the next time – the Christmas/New Year break. We might even get two groups doing traverse and climb in parallel?!

Steve.