Post date: Sep 16, 2010 12:38:15 PM

Aileen Connor, Les Brown, Stephen Macnamara, Stephen McCullagh. ~7 hours

Steve and I headed off first to buy wellies from Armstrongs, get a lump hammer from the store, and chat to the farmer about his new quad and his horny ewes. Les & Aileen arrived just before we started walking down the track.

There was clear evidence of flooding in downstream Tullyard, including big puddles in the Rebirth Canal! Quite a surprise since we had thought this was always dry. It appears to back up from the original dig kitchen, where the water can be heard in the floor, and to overflow into the passage leading to Rebirth. This section would have been sumped in parts. The flooding probably coincided with torrential rain reported by Les the previous Monday.

We went to the end of Mistake via the high level route at Mistake Junction, and carried on up to the high digsite. It all looked reasonably stable since Pavel's incident a few weeks ago, so I dropped into the hole that had stopped them previously and was faced with a decision of going upstream or downstream (still in the dry rift). Downstream it was - in the direction of the streamway boulder choke - and after 15 metres of dry rift (crawling, stooping and walking) we found ourselves at another digsite. The draft unfortunately disappeared at the face: it seemed to be coming through the rocky floor.

At this stage we turned back to examine the upstream option. It turned a corner after a couple of metres, and by pulling out a few rocks we were able to squeeze up into a small chamber with no continuations and not much potential. With the decision made for us, we headed back to the downstream face and started our excavations...

The rock was very loose and brittle, as it is in most of this high level rift. We spent 2 or 3 hours pulling out rocks and prizing sections off the walls and ceiling, making about a further metre's progress. Soon we were met by Les & Aileen, but by this time we had given the dig a fair bashing and it wasn't looking hugely promising, so we turned around and went back down to the streamway.

On the way back, Russian Roulette claimed yet another victim - Aileen found herself trapped on the wrong side of a sizeable heap of sizeable boulders, which rolled, unpoked and unprovoked, down a mud slope. It was exactly like "The Descent" except there was only one scantily-clad girl involved. A twenty-minute dig session was required to reunite her with the rest of the team. This incident has pretty much sealed the fate of this upper didface: to unpromising, to dodgy, and for the foreseeable future, partially blocked by a rockfall.

In the Mistake streamway, we pushed into the boulder choke, past a very loose stack of rocks and through a low duck. The end is a small chamber, and the stream issues from a boulder wall. Digging would be a possibility here. The most obvious area is a section of the wall, containing head-sized boulders which could be pulled out into the streamway. The rest of the chamber is bounded by very large boulders which appear relatively stable. At this depth into the boulder choke, we think that we must be near the other side of the pot that descends from the surface, and therefore hopefully through most of the boulder choke.

However, any further work will have to wait until we stabilise the approach to the digface - especially near the start of the boulder choke. This will most likely involve pulling with a rope from a distance. The digface itself might yield to some explosive power.

After a dinner of boiled rice & soup, we made pretty good time back to the surface with only one bag.

SteveMuh.