Post date: May 8, 2019 5:28:15 PM
Team: Petie Barry, Emily Punzalan
Time: 29 hours
Aim: Survey Bat Chamber, and clean up any other surveying tasks needing doing.
Initially this trip was for a party of four, then for three and finally two. It was nearly zero, as I was ill enough during the week to have to take a sick day from work on Friday. Since beginning an overnight camping trip on Saturday while still ill seemed fairly hellish, the trip was pushed out to Sunday instead. This mean that the third member of the party, Steve Muh, wouldn’t be able to camp, as he had work on Monday.
So in the end it was just myself and Emily trudging up the track, loaded up with all manner of pharmaceuticals. I’d brought as many ibuprofen tablets as I thought reasonable, along with some caffeine pills that I hoped might dig me out if the going was too much. Muh had shamelessly opted to do a tourist trip to 18:30 with Aileen and two York cavers - Pete Talling and Tony Buxton. Plan for this trip was to survey Bat Chamber and a few small oddments of passage including the Snake Trap.
Emily and I followed about 15 minutes behind the tourist party, and caught up with them at various intervals. At 18:30 we overtook them, and ploughed on into St Patricks Extension. Just beyond the climb down from 18:30 you meet some breakdown where there was supposed to be some high level passage, according to the Shannon surveying to-do list at least. The entry read: Large High level chamber that is entered by climbing up the right handside of the passage, just before the breakdown leading back down to the sump re-emergence at 940.
I climbed up the breakdown here but didn’t see any large chamber. Climbing back down we passed through the breakdown and the stream re-entered from the sump. Looking up high again there was more breakdown visible, but way way up beyond it we could see a large black void. I made a note to climb up here on the way out the next day.
At the end of Paddy’s Parade I decided to double back along a high ledge and see what lay in this direction. About 30m back up the passage the ledge pinches off, and I crawled up over a teetering stack of boulders into a possible way up. As I took my weight off the boulders the top one rolled loose and thundered down into Paddy’s Parade. As the lead clearly closed off, I gingerly crawled back down and heard Aileen and Toby tramping through below, less than a minute after I’d sent a several-hundred kilo boulder down to the stream.
After bidding farewell to Aileen and Toby, we dumped our stuff at camp, made some coffee, popped some pills, and then headed off to survey. At the entrance to Bat Chamber we left our bag, and then went on a quick tourist jolly to the sump. Aside being a bit of a tourist excursion, I wanted to check out what the passage looked like down here so we can re-sketch the survey in places. Parts of the survey drawing in St Patrick’s are weird and confusing, showing roof steps for walls and generally not being the most descriptive. Re-doing these will hopefully improve the quality of the drawing.
Arriving back at Bat Chamber we started surveying. Bat Chamber is basically one huge chamber, separated by a massive rock bridge across the centre, so it feels like two chambers. The first one you enter is the one where I’d taken a tumble two years ago, and this was my first time back to the scene of the accident. Looking at this again, all I can say is that I am a very lucky boy. If the huge pile of collapse material wasn’t bad enough, there were many tens of tonnes of material above this that I think must have all slid down about a metre - I remember approaching the collapse area via a pile of rocks much higher up that doesn’t exist now.
Anyhow, there was no way to get up to the top of the chamber from this direction now that everything had collapsed here, so we had to leave this section unsurveyed. Instead we went around to the other half of the chamber, on the far side of the rock bridge and surveyed up the mud slope to the roof. Here we found one of the Bat skeletons (quite cool), and surveyed around till the passage closed off in a crawl. Back in the main chamber we took in the epic view back across the full length of the chamber - looking across the rock bridge into the other half of the chamber and around the corner into blackness. We tried to get a shot to the very back wall with the Disto, but it was actually out of its range. It was probably about 45m away.
From our vantage point I spotted a ceiling-level crawl along a ledge that seemed to run around the full length of the chamber to the far side. Climbing up to the start of this I found tracks, and we were able to follow these along an epic flat-out crawl with a 12m drop into the chamber below just to the side. At the far end we were able to climb down into the far end of the chamber, where I’d previously been two years earlier having scaled the climb that would subsequently collapse. Clearly another group had been here before me though, via the epic crawl, so it wasn’t virgin when I found it. The chamber ends in a 15m pitch down into the stream here but we were able to survey back towards the entrance to the chamber, shooting a 20m leg down to a distinctive boulder. Then we went back around through the crawl, down through the second half of the chamber, and back into the first half, to shoot a tie-in leg to our survey cairn. Bit of a rigmarole, but we got it done.
Having wrapped up the survey of Bat Chamber we turned to a side passage we’d noted on the way in. Just past where the stream slides off to the side and sinks, you can enter a low-level fossil passage in a beautiful ogive-shaped passage. This isn’t on the survey and is simply marked with a too-low symbol. Clearly there was a bit more to it than that, so we started surveying it. A few legs in we found a dab of red nail-varnish on the ceiling, so it seems to have been surveyed before, but the crawl we continued into appeared to be untouched. A few legs later Emily said she could see a black void overhead, and I looked up from where I was. Indeed, there was a large chamber overhead. I climbed up a sketchy hole through boulders and looked about me. It was Bat Chamber. We shot a few tie-in legs back to the survey cairn.
We packed up the survey gear to head back to camp. A minute later, passing the stream sink, I followed the water to see how it ended. The stream flows noisily into a narrow cataract here, and again the survey indicates the way on is too low. But there’s an obvious dry continuation over the top through walking passage for 20m or so. Reluctantly we cracked out the survey gear and surveyed down into this passage. After the walking passage a crawl begins, we followed this until it closed down. There was 42m of passage here.
The following morning we breakfasted on porridge, washed down with ibuprofen and caffeine pills. Before heading back down to the stream I brought Emily up into the upstream end of the Campsite Series so I could check out the end of this passage. I recalled vaguely from a visit here two years ago that there was a possible dig that might access one of the sections of missing high-level passage. The end of this passage is a mix of boulders and sandy mud rising to the ceiling. You could certainly dig forward for about two metres, but the way on seems to solidly choke in mud beyond that.
On our way out we had some survey tasks to attend to. First up was the Snake Trap, the Snake Escape’s less interesting sibling. Steve Muh was of the opinion that this was too short to be worth surveying and he could sketch into in to the main survey. Having surveyed this for two legs and 6m of passage, I’d be inclined to agree, but look, we’ve done it now…
Further up the passage we reached the climb we’d noted the day before. Dekitting here I found a scaffold pole and a long rusty pry-bar on a ledge just above the stream. These should be moved back up through the cave some time… The climb up into the high-level passage began well enough, with some easy moves getting us about 6m up from the stream and into a crawl. We followed this for about 25m, passing a wide array of gypsum formations, including some tiny spiral ones. There was a single set of footprints here. Surveying back from the choked end of this to the stream I kept an eye out for any possible ways up higher. Arriving back at the ledge above the stream I looked at two options. The first was a very dodgy and exposed climb up a muddy incline. A bit to the side of this I found a low inclined upwards thrutch towards some black spaces. Shunting up this for about 5m I reached a squeeze, and after a bit of digging I enlarged it enough to wriggle up.
Lying on my back half out of the squeeze I looked about and was delighted to find myself in a huge chamber, the ceiling almost out of sight. Stepping out into the middle of it I could see the chamber appearing to continue way up at the top. Most remarkably, almost every surface was covered in fluffy white sand which I was sinking into, ankle deep. Emily followed up with the Distox, and I plodded off up a huge ramp of sand towards the top of the chamber. This was an amazing experience, ploughing up through the soft powdery sand, which was coming loose and cascading down in sandalanches around me. Giggling, I reached the top, where the sandy ramp met a sheer wall of beautifully stratified sediment 4m high. Above this the passage seemed to continue, but climbing up the sediment was out of the question. You’d have to maypole it. Emily shot a single 25m leg from one side of the chamber to the other and then tramped up through the sand to meet me. Together we marveled at the sand, and looked longingly at the black voids ringing the top of the chamber. It was an utterly daft place, and by far the coolest thing I’ve discovered in my decade-odd of pushing. The name we settled on was Pill-poppin’ Powder-puffin’ Parlor. I wanted to call it Pill-poppin’ Powder-puffin’ Pampered Poodle Princess Parlour, but I guess you have to draw the line somewhere.
We exited after 29 hours underground, a very satisfying and productive trip. An slightly unexpected 260m of passage was racked up, making Shannon now just under 8.3km long.
Petie