Team: Petie, Steve Muh, Hugh
Time: 3.5 hours
On the previous trip Jock, Paul, Miner and I cleared out the initial too-low section at the start of the crawl and reached a tight right-hand bend, which after 2m of tight tube hit a too-tight left-hand bend. Despite the cramped conditions I managed to drill a shot hole for a cap and set it off (closer to my head than I would normally like). Thankfully, this single cap was very effective, removing a big chunk of the corner, and allowing me to squeeze around the corner and look down the pitch. This seemed to be a 2m drop to a ledge, with a drop of 4/5m beyond. Reversing back up through the pitch head and back around the capped bend was strenous, as was having to reverse all the way back to the bottom of the entrance climb.
As the pitch was in theory open, but not easily accessible, I reckoned that more work would need to be done to make the pitch do-able. As going head-first out on the top of a pitch and kitting up once out there didn’t really seem like a sensible or desirable option, going leg first would be better, but to do that the capped bend would probably need more capping to make it properly passable. Also as the end of the cave was very constricted and it would be necessary to clear out an alcove / choked side passage just before the first bend to provide room to turn around and store gear and generally make life more bearable at the pointy end.
Myself, Hugh and Steve Muh made the now-familiar trek over the hill from the parking spot. Water was very low, there was barely a spatter of water was going into Fenagh. Down in Badger the crawl from the bottom of the entrance climb looked a bit different to what we’d left six weeks earlier. The flat level gravelly bottom we’d dug was a now a rough cobble floor with pools of water all along. Obviously the heavy rain of early August meant a lot of water was rushing through here, churning up the floor. Steve was at the head of the digging queue, going for a look at the pitch at the end. He returned very enthused, and somehow even turned around at the end of the cave. We set about clearing out the alcove before the first bend, first hauling half way back the entrance crawl where I was able to toss the larger cobbles into a handy alcove, and later dragged further back to Hugh at the beginning of the crawl. Soon we had enough room in the alcove to turn and generally make the place seem a bit less oppressively small. Steve then reversed back around the bends, and with a handline in place wriggled out over the top of the pitch and onto the ledge below. This turned out to be a comfy enough spot to stand and put on an SRT kit. So Hugh and I returned to the entrance climb to fetch Steve’s SRT kit and grab a few other bits of useful rigging kit. Meanwhile Steve got the hammer out and started to widen out the wriggle out onto the pitch, which was made of easily demolished chert. Hugh and I arrived back and passed Steve’s kit through, allowing him to kit up and descend the 5m to the floor of the pitch. Hugh and I followed - much to my surprise the tight capped bend was far easier leg-first rather than head-first, and we sailed around it. Hugh hauled up Steve’s SRT kit to descend, and I impatiently just down-climbed the rope arm over arm.
From the bottom of the pitch we were expecting to meet a big pitch immediately, and just beyond the first pitch there seemed to be a big drop. But instead we found a 5m climb down into a bouldery chamber. From here a low crawl lead off, becoming a twisty snaggy rift. After about 8 or 10m of wriggling forward the rift became tall and the floor fell away into a roomy pitch dropping an estimated 15m to a floor. This looked just like the top of the avens in the bottom of Fenagh. While we couldn’t quite make out what was under the pitch, I think there should be another drop below this to get into Fenagh proper.
On the way out we all took turns with the single SRT kit to prussik up the pitch and then dragged all the digging gear out of the crawl. The digging rope we left at the foot of the pitch to be used for a hauling rope to get gear through the entrance crawl when we return to drop the pitch.
So happy days! We got down the pitch with much less fuss than I’d expected and the connection to Fenagh is a dead cert. Next trip will be to bolt and rig the pitches, and possibly survey the crawls heading off from the bottom of Fenagh that we didn’t have time to do last time round. Then perhaps we can look at doing the finest through-trip in Leitrim.
- Petie