Post date: Apr 23, 2019 9:12:21 PM

Team: Petie Barry, Matt Palmer

Time: 7.5 hours

A Good Friday trip to revisit the mysterious side passage not shown on the COFAC survey that I'd explored the previous June. Heading through the entrance squeeze the draft was extremely strong, audibly whooshing past me as I wriggled through. Arriving at the start of Cryptozoological Mystery Tour we cracked out the survey gear and worked our way along the passage. With the strength of the draft this was very chilly work indeed.

Arriving into the large rift chamber we found a second 10m high aven I’d not noticed before. This appears to connect over the top to the aven I’d found previously, and appears to be the better climbing option. After surveying a few side rifts we entered the low crawl I’d previously been into, and soon reached the 5m climb where I’d stopped before. Up this we went, and immediately the cave changed character to something more like Hywell’s Horror - i.e. a bouldery rift heading off in several directions. The way on was not immediately apparent, with rifts heading in multiple directions. I found a way upwards which climbed up maybe another 6m, following the draft, and this ended in boulders, with a small chamber visible above. A (scary) bit of levering of a flake overhead might produce a way up into this. We were running very tight on our callout at this point so we called it a day without pushing all the shitty rifts to the bitter end. The final survey station was marked by wedging a broken pencil between the rocks and we headed out.

Just over 150m of passage was surveyed. I’d say that most or all of it has been entered before, though perhaps the low crawls leading to the 5m climb is new - the entrance to this is fairly well hidden. I was hoping this passage might run west towards Brookfield but instead it went steeply upwards towards the surface. I haven’t processed the data fully yet but I think that this passage ends up very close to Whiskey Holes, closer than any other part of the cave. I’m In two minds about returning - the way on at the end appeared to be more of the same bouldery mess and it’s unlikely that a way through to the surface is going to be found here. Not that that’s an objective anyway. The avens half-way along the passage are worth a climb, but the likelihood is that they’ll quickly end in the same bouldery fault area...

Petie