My Motley Meanderings

I went to the caving club again tonight, climbed up and down all the rope pitches in the training tower, and found them all dead easy so came back home. I need to arrange to go on a real trip soon but it will have to be something easy to start with because it's been years and years since I used to go regularly.

At the caving club on Thursday, John talked me into going on a trip to an abandoned lead mine that supposedly breaks through into a natural cave. I found out on the way up there today that Pete Hartley found it thirty years ago, nobody's been down it since, and we don't know exactly where it is.

( Wandering around a hilltop looking for an abandoned mine... )

I went to the caving club again tonight, and trained so hard that I got totally drenched with sweat and developed three blisters on my right hand, one of which burst. Free-hanging changeovers are still proving difficult, but I've (re)discovered that changeovers against a wall are far easier (I'm not totally sure why, but not spinning around every time you stand up to unclip the chest jammer might have something to do with it).

( Here are some pictures. )

When we used to do caving trips for SPLASH (a volunteer-run youth activities scheme intended to keep Burnley kids off the streets during the summer holiday) the kids were always endlessly fascinated by my caving lamp. It's a carbide lamp - you place calcium carbide rocks in a gas generator attached to your belt (the black cylinder in the photo), and when water drips on them they give off acetylene gas which travels up a pipe and burns in an open flame on the front of your helmet:



They're messy, smelly, need a fair bit of maintenance, can be unreliable if you don't treat them right, and have the annoying habit of blowing out when you walk under a waterfall. But they have one big advantage over electric lamps (which many cavers do use): an open flame illuminates the whole area around you, rather than the single small spot your head is pointing at. The flame might not look very bright in the above picture in bright sunlight, but it's plenty bright enough in the dark surroundings of a cave, or the garage with the lights switched off:



There are a couple of other advantages of carbide: the reaction generates heat, so you can use the generator as a handwarmer when you're sat around freezing your arse off at at the bottom of a big waterfall pitch, and on very long trips you can carry extra carbide with you and refill the generator underground when it runs out (that came in handy on the 24 hour sponsored cave we once did to raise funds for the club).

One of the things I've learned the hard way is how to tell when unused fuel is "worn out" from sitting around in the tin too long. If you try to use it on a caving trip, it will typically start off working OK, but before long the gas production will drop off and it'll cause endless trouble before dying altogether after a couple of hours. There is a backup electric lamp, but it tends to not get used very often, and if you don't remember to check it as part of your preparation routine you may discover that it has a flat battery or corroded terminals when you're at the bottom of a cave (something else I learned the hard way). It's generally a good idea to carry an ordinary torch as an extra backup for just that kind of eventuality. Hiking back from Bar Pot at night when only one member of the party had a working lamp and he kept skipping away into the distance was an experience I'd rather not repeat in a hurry.

Of the fuel I had in the tin, there's probably just enough for one trip that looks OK, and the rest was clearly worn out, so I'm using the crap stuff up now and will buy a fresh tin as soon as I can get to a caving supply shop. Edit: the crap stuff wasn't as bad as I thought - it actually lasted about four hours; less than the roughly seven hours I've had from an ideal run with fresh carbide, but more than the two hours I've had on a bad day with carbide that's been sat around in the bottom of a tin for a long time.

I went down to the caving club tonight for the first time in... a few years. Come to think of it, the last time I went was to do with a political thing that I won't get into now. I saw a few old faces, a couple I recognised but couldn't put a name to, and a couple I'd not met before. I paid my membership fees, then got straight into the SRT training tower.

The good news is that I remembered how to do the various techniques first time and managed not to make a complete fool out of myself by getting hung up in the middle of a changeover or a traverse (though my execution lacked finesse). The bad news is that I'm very unfit. All the exercise I get is in the form of walking between the office and the bus station twice a day, and pedalling for about half an hour on the exercise bike a few times a week. SRT makes heavy use of a completely different set of muscles, and they've clearly atrophied since I last used them in anger. I was hoping to go on a club trip down Marble Steps in a couple of weeks, but I now think that's probably a bit over-optimistic for my first trip back.

They have a fairly decent setup in the training tower now, including a new climbing wall and a steel cage to hold all the club tackle. The only thing I missed is that the tower in the old clubroom (I'm going back quite a few years now...) had a rope that ran up inside a corrugated iron tube - very handy for practising those awkward tight pitches where you can barely move your arms.

On the way home I took the familiar route to the bus station via the main roads, only to realise afterwards that I probably could have taken a more scenic route along the canal-bank and over the aqueduct. Then after I got to the bus station, I had to wait 45 minutes for a bus, which is probably about what it would have taken me to walk home instead (albeit up a steep hill).

I've since had a look at the Google satellite view of the area, and the canal towpath route from the caving club to the bus station is about the same distance as the main road. The clubrooms are in the middle of this picture, between Bank Hall football club and the Leeds-Liverpool canal. We're on the site of the old Bank Hall pit, the biggest colliery in Burnley before it closed in 1973.

It's been two years since I last went caving, and about four since I went on a trip that involved SRT (Single Rope Technique: climbing up and down ropes). I fancy getting back into it again so I dug my caving kit out of the garage today to have a look at it. Most of it was bought when I first started caving ten years ago and has never been replaced.

• Lamp/helmet: The gas pipe and burner were blocked with spent carbide, the terminals in the battery box were rotten, and the webbing inside the helmet was mouldy. Now fixed (it still looks rather tatty but ought to work fine).


• SRT kit: The metal parts (jammers, descender, krabs, etc.) all look rather battered and scraped but work perfectly after cleaning and oiling. The fabric/rope parts are starting to look a bit tatty. Not dangerously so, but they'll probably need replacing soon if I get back into caving regularly.


• Suit: totally knackered. It's a surplus Royal Navy drysuit and wasn't in all that brilliant condition when I first bought it. It's had patches on top of patches, and the last time I wore it most of the important seams fell apart. Daleswear sell proper brand new caving oversuits for £55, so I'll probably just buy one of those (or something similar from their competitors) before I go again.


• Everything else: Wellies are fine apart from several generations of dead spiders inside; knee pads are looking a bit worn out and never were very comfortable, but they'll probably last a few more trips; gloves I have loads of (I bought a job-lot of them on eBay ages ago). Haven't looked in my tin of carbide yet, but the last time I left one in the garage for a couple of years it didn't work very well afterwards (presumably the lid wasn't completely air-tight).