Post date: Feb 25, 2019 10:32:02 PM

Team: Petie, Muh

Time: 9 hours

The aim of this trip was to scour the far end of the Mayfly Series for high-level passage, hopefully get some surveying in too. Claire, still nursing an injured hand from Tassie, opted for a surface hike on Cuilcagh, but accompanied us to the entrance.

This was the first trip to pass through the refurbished Georges Choke. On our way through we did a bit more tidying inside the scaffolded chamber, dismantling a tottering pile of terrier-sized boulders just above the entrance squeeze before passing on through. The choke is now easier to get through than ever before - the space left by the collapse material means that rather than doing an awkward crouch to get into Gorges Pitt and strenuously reverse leg-first through it, it’s now possible to slither directly into Georges Pitt and pass through headfirst. What a doddle! The collapse in 2017 is one of the best things to happen to Georges! (though those on that trip might disagree). There’s still a bit more work that could be done here. There’s two short scaffolding bars that aren’t used and are sitting inside the scaffolded chamber - must bring some couplers on an upcoming trip and put these in somewhere. Ideally we'd slather everything in sight with cement, but maybe that's a job for another generation.

We first headed to 18:30 in order to work back up the passage. Just above the Young, Free and Desparate Sump there’s a note on the survey indicating ‘climb to loose boulder chamber’. This we shimmied up, but it just leads to a rocky ledge overlooking the Balcony Dig. We pottered about here for a bit but there was nothing of worth so we dropped back down to the stream and started working our way upwards, checking all promising leads along the way. There were a lot of small holes found by climbing up steep mud and boulder ramps to the roof, though most of these went nowhere. Muh found two sections of crawling passage running parallel to the stream, each about 10-15m long, but they were too paltry to consider adding to the survey.

We reached Sump 2 and had a look at the high level lead just to the right of the water-slide into the sump. Here there is an obvious climb where a canyon passage shoots up 10+ metres into a rocky chamber. Unfortunately it doesn’t look to be free-climbable, at least not without a considerable degree of risk. I assume no-one has been here? It looked as if it would have to be aid-climbed.

We kept on going upstream, and found a few more tidbits of little importance. Finally we reached the only boulder choke in Mayfly where there was a known high-level passage, marked by a cairn Steve Bus put here years ago. Just downstream of the choke you go up an iffy mud climb, then through a sticky squeeze between boulders and pop out in the bottom of a really big chamber. This is a fairly impressive space, 40m long, 15m wide and about 5-10m high. We started surveying here and quickly crossed the chamber to the downstream end where there was a continuation in the form of a flat-out crawl over hard dry mud. Just at the entrance we found an odd formation - some sort of soft yellow stuff that looks quite like a spatter of cow-shit. It seems to be growing on top of the mud - gypsum related somehow?

The rest of the passage was flat out crawling and scrambling up and down mud slopes under the roof. It’s very wide (15m in places) but quite low too. There was quite a lot of gypsum crystals spread about the place, in various different forms. After about 50m we reached the end, where the gap between the roof and the mud drops to about 10cm. You can see about 7m ahead along the passage. Bus recommended this to me as a promising dig and it’s not too bad. The digging would be easy-ish, spoil removal fairly easy as there’s loads of space behind the dig. There’s even a gentle draft! That said, it’s only about 50m from the high level passage visible above Sump 2, so it might be worth pushing there first.

The tie-in at stream level was straightforward, and we packed up and left. Anyone thinking of returning to the chamber would be advised to bring 10m of rope to put in a handline up the climb from the streamway. The mud footholds will give way eventually.

We also found a lot of bits of old rope on this trip. Muh found a random 2m length of knotted rope just beyond Georges that must have been washed through the choke. Nearby he found a neatly coiled hank of rope which again looked to have been washed through the choke from somewhere much higher up the cave. It looked to be 10-15m long and it’s obviously been in the cave for a long time as it was filthy and stinky. It’s still good to be used as digging rope or for handlining so we carried it back to Mistake Junction and left it at the depot of digging gear. Finally, just above Young Free and Desparate I found an old set of cowstails, from god knows where. This we carried out with the other bit of tat and some other bits of rubbish we found along the way.

A healthy 164m added to the survey, also about half of Mistake Passage checked off for high-level passages. Getting there.

- Petie