Something Added, Something Taken Away

Thursday 13^th March 2014

In very exciting cave news, I have got a new pair of caving boots.  Caving usually happens in wellies.  I know. I didn’t believe it either.  Anyway, a good thick rubber sole and a reinforced toe section, such as you get with Etche wellies are ideal for safety and grip.  Not you, style: The problem I have with my Etche wellies is that in order to get my foot in, wearing a wet-sock, I have to have my wellies a whole size and a half bigger than my usual size 5 shoes.  So my feet literally feel like they don’t belong to me.  I am, at best, a bit of a Bambi-on-ice down the caves, so this has been a real drawback. Until I went caving last month in my old walking boots, not by choice but I had to lend my wellies to someone in the group, as they had forgotten theirs and mine fitted, plus I had some walking boots to use instead.  These are old boots that I leave in the car or the cave trug, and they have next to no useful tread left so the caving was a bit slippy, but the feel of the smaller shoe on my feet was great. So last week, I bought some Etche Canyoning boots: I LOVE these boots so much!  They are an Etche wellie shoe, with a reinforced back to the heel and toe, but as you can see, they’re ankle boots so I can wear my usual foot size – in fact I got a 4.5 and then I went caving for eight hours last weekend in them.  A revelation!  A miracle!   They did not (and to be fair, the chap I bought them from did not promise this) make me an epic caver, possessed of profound skills, and quiet, calm courage.  But, they did make my feet feel like they belong to me and this, it turns out, is a massive bonus.  Who knew? I miss the front-of-shin protection the long boots offer and I have a lump on my shin the size of a quail egg.  But I think children’s shin pads will sort that.  Oy, more kit… Last weekend, we returned to the majestic caves of South Wales.  Oh, how I love these caves.  I also love the place we stay, the South Wales Caving Club.  Here is its Club House: A row of former quarry cottages, now converted into a fantastic cave hut.  Hut?  It’s a palace.  Lots of bunk rooms, a family cottage area, a huge kitchen, a lovely big sitting room, a dining room – and look at The View! Also, some of the best caves evah are in walking distance of this hut.  The first of these, this weekend, and new to me was a cave called Cwm Dwr.  Cwm Dwr is in the old quarry a few hundred meters from the hut.  Here is a link to the fantastic video that Dudley Caving Club made of their trip.  Our trip was very similar but we didn’t go to Diver’s Pitch. The entrance is lovely, easy climb down a tube, another tube and a well-engineered drop/climb to the cave itself.  Shortly, you reach the CD crawl, which varies between easy hands-and-knees, and belly-down elbow-thrutching, but at no point is it a proper tight squeeze.  There is one low bit of passage, where yes, you are in close contact with both the gravel floor and low ceiling, but there is side room to really push and it’s very brief and easy.  The trick is to turn your head so your helmet goes easily and then keep shuffling.  I loved it! I know there are challenges in this cave, such as the complex boulder choke, through which Flos and Will route-found with complete ease.  Here, the going is bendy rather than difficult, it’s quite a long boulder choke, and you are posting yourself in and out of small gaps, but it’s never super-tight or at all hard, it just makes you breathe a bit hard, as if you’d walked fast up a steep hill – at no point is it any more arduous that that. Once you get through these two obstacles, the cave is your oyster.  There are huge walking passages, with many options.  We wanted to find the best way to the Main Route, which we did, with some deliberate deviations along the way to explore features, all of which were new to me.  At 2.5 hours, we had a drink of water and decided to head back, thinking well, it might take 2.5 hours to get out, and I am building stamina, so didn’t want to push it.  In fact, we rocked out in 1.5 hours and I was very sorry we cut it a bit short, but better safe than sorry.  I was thinking of the exit via the choke and the exit crawl – both of which were rapid and easy. Four hours caving is nothing to a lot of people, but it’s a good trip for me.  There were no lengthy stops, no photos, no snacking.  I used to cave with energy gels in my pocket, because I got so scared and shaky and tired, but I just don’t need them now. I had never been in CD which is the middle section of a huge linked series of caves called Ogof Ffynonn Ddu – OFD.  There is OFD 1, at the bottom, then in the middle is Cwm Dwr, then at the top of the hill, is, um – Top! Or sometimes called OFD 2.  These caves can be ‘done’ as through trips, one linking to the next though I think that route finding is a bit tricky and it might be a long trip, for me.   The next day, we caved for four hours  in OFD 1, where we did the standard round trip, with a detour to the Waterfall Series. I have done the round trip once before.  I love this cave except for the first part, where you walk (or stumble and moan like the east wind) up the streamway for about a decade.  It’s sporting!  No, it’s not.  It’s a right pain, but there we are.  I don’t like it because the water is more than playful and I can’t see what I am doing.  The last time I did it, I hadn’t caved much so while the others ‘traversed’ as far as possible to avoid getting really wet, I waded through it.  This time, following Florence, I did the traversing thing too.  Kind of.  I was OK for the first bit then my legs seemed to shrink and I was alternately trapped on one wall or another, often leaning right over to place my hands on the wall opposite.  There are scaffolding poles across great big whirling pot holes, so these are not too bad, but the endless yomping  through the merry stream was just not my idea of fun.  This cave floods, by the way, so there is a step on the way in and if the water over this stone is higher than your foot (or it might be ankle, I am not sure), you don’t go on, or you go the other way.  I also clears of water fast so despite rain last week, it was OK.  It was lively though. The streamway bit is totally worthwhile for the rest of the cave though.  There are challenges, such as two wire-traverses, where you clip yourself onto a rope or wire that has been bolted to the cave wall in places where there is a very narrow ledge to get along, over a big drop down, with maybe a bulge in the wall here and there.  I absolutely love doing these. An image, again from the Dudley Cave Club, of the start of one of the traverses in OFD1: There is also a neat little traverse and a couple of quite nervy ‘bold steps’ in the Waterfall Series;  you can leave this part of the cave  by means of climbing (very fast as it’s wet through!) down the little waterfall itself.  I loved all this, and the bits I had done before, such as a shoot down a chimney, called by us, maybe not its real name, The Elephant’s Arse Hole.  Yep.  Try it.  You will see why.  It is fantastic fun, if you like your fun tinged with fear.  I do.  More boulder choking, some rolling, some crawling, some traversing, a neat climb up Low’s Chain, with the aid of, this time no ladder but 2 ropes and Will’s hand-jammer, which is actual MAGIC.  It makes you levitate up the climb with no effort whatsoever. The cave is dramatic, moody, pretty and really good fun.  Here is a pretty bit, called The Bees Knees: Yes, the bendy column looks just like a bee’s knee!  Clever cave. There is also a huge chamber that looks like the lighting consultant whose last gig  was The Oscars and also Peter Pan’s Neverland, minced through the cave and sprinkled a bazillion little fairly lights and then added some Clinque body glitter powder.  I wanted to find you an image, and when I Goggled ‘sparkly chamber in OFD1’ images, I got (along with a fair bit of weirdness) this: It’s me!  Caving on my birthday in June 2013, in the Mendips, and Will and Florence had brought surprise treats! I love that if you put in sparkly cave you get me.  My work is almost done. I am also proud that my cave suit, now  2 years old, has just come back from cave suit ER where it went for reconstructive surgery as I had caved the arse out of it.  Not all the way through but I’d seriously worn the outer layer of bottom-canvas.  I like to think that this is because I am a frequent and energetic caver, and not because my default cave setting is on my bum. So this week, in caving terms, I added a new pair of caving boots.  I also gained eight solid hours of caving  with few rests in the trips, over two days.  I was not tired.  I was not  scared.  I felt I had really changed.  OK, these things are relative and my starting base line is low.  But I am pleased and I am ready to try for the Swildon’s Sump 1 trip.  Gulp. What have I lost?  About 2kgs!  All packed back on with a huge roast on Sunday!  But really, I did notice that something was missing.  Fear.  I have always, without fail, approached every single trip with a sense of high anxiety bordering on fear, often degenerating into actual fear, and sometimes tears.  This year, that has gone.  I feel elevated sense of awareness, apprehension at times, but I am not afraid.  Someone in my club once told me that the fear (I may not have said fear, I may have said anxiety, but it was fear) would pass but that it is good to retain a sense of caution.  I waited.  I caved.  I had breaks.  I went back.  The fear was still there, but the urge to see new caves was just strong enough for me to (usually) overcome the fear, just about.  But, perhaps with caving, as with so much in my life that I love and value and cherish, I am a late adopter and a late developer. It’s going to come back at times, I know it is – and I think I will be more ready for it, but I did say that if caving kept being something so challenging that it made it very hard work, something to overcome rather than to love, I’d quit.  I just will not put myself through emotional torture just to prove some random and possibly irrelevant point.  But happily, and without me even noticing it, the dominance of fear has slipped away. Something else has gone.  It is the pretty constant feeling that I had underground of this being odd, radically different to my norm, a sense of complete other-worldness.  I think this may have been a side effect of the fear.  Because I suddenly noticed, back in February actually, that I didn’t look at the cave entrance and think:  seriously?  I am going in there?  I just thought:  let’s get out of this wet gale force wind.  I didn’t think, whilst caving:  oh my God this is so weird, I am under the ground!  It just feels normal.  I still feel awed and amazed.  But I have slipped a little further into the world where to cave is (almost) as normal to me as it is to cycle or to run. Who’d have thought it?  Certainly not me, and probably not the legions of patient, stoic and kind cavers who have got me this far, especially Florence and Will.  Not you, rude man who said to me recently that he should have brought a sharp stick along with him down the cave, to poke me with.  I know!  I *may* have had a sense of humour failure at that moment. It’d be like me (or you) saying to a knitter next to you at an event:  blimey, can’t you knit any faster than that!  you loser! No, we’d never even think it, let alone say it.  Well, mean sharp stick man, you won’t be getting any sparkly body dust at Christmas, that’s for sure.