Caving – my newfound passion

Caving is an extreme sport

Please do NOT get carried away by the flow of this article. Caving is classified as an EXTREME SPORT and hence, do consider health and risk issues before jumping headlong into the underground world. You have been warned.

It all started when our MBA class started planning a trip to Wales. There would be mountain biking, caving, pub-ing, and also the option of doing noth-ing. The trip would cost £150 or thereabouts… Now the thing that changed all this was, that I did my research. I became a member of the SWCC, South Wales Caving Club, who were good enough to tell me that although North Wales has good mines, and that mining is entirely different from caving, North Wales doesn’t have many caves per se. So if I accompanied them on a weekend to South Wales, I could have the flair of caving and it would cost me £28. The person who would be guiding the caving trip in North Wales, was a fellow classmate, who was kind enough to tell me that South Wales is THE place to go caving.

So I weighed options – it just boiled down to two things:

ONE: Spend £150, have the company of fellow classmates, a select few of whom would go caving, and end up pseudo-caving.

TWO: Spend £28 (food and accommodation included), have the company of completely new people (the SWCC), and go do some REAL caving.

Apart from the incentives, a cursory check on the Internet revealed that South Wales is preferable to North Wales for serious caving.

As many of you would already have reckoned, I chose the latter. I asked many of my classmates to accompany me, but apparently they were going to North Wales to hang out in pubs and drink – nothing much different than what they did in Manchester, as I later found out. Anyways.

So, the UMSC (University of Manchester Speleology Club) booked their weekend with the SWCC in South Wales, and we were off. One minibus and two cars. 19 people.

SWCC Headquarters

South Wales is pretty far from Manchester. We stopped at a McDonalds midway and reached the SWCC headquarters at around midnight on Friday, 20th Feb. The SWCC is an old cottage style building with fireplaces for heating, but completely modern kitchen and bedrooms. I guess the “socialising” room where the fireplace is, was just given an “old” look to mimic the 1950s caving environment – old handwritten records of new caves being rectified by amateur spelunkers.

It was then that I realised that I was in the presence of professionals. And I mean PROfessionals. One of us had a “caving guide to the UK” with us and we told Kevin (a PRO) that a particular cavern was 600m long. He replied by saying that the map in the book was off by 200m, coz he had a mental map of the entire system !! PROfessionals. We had our own food – a plastic carton labelled UMSU, and everyone cooked for everyone. Those who helped in cooking were exempt from cleaning. I made two caving trips – one to the OFD 2 (top enterance) and the other to OFD 1 (OFD stands for Ogof Fynnon Ddu in Welsh, pronounced as Og off fan on dee, and translating to Cave of the Black Spring). What a reassuring name for a cave.

Visibility in a cave

Having made up teams and delegated team leaders we were ready for the next day. The first cave was a horizontal system – the OFD 2. Relatively easy for a professional, slightly challenging for a novice. We were being led by an experienced leader and so were lucky enough not to lose our way. The average visibility inside a cave is NIL. Period. Once underground you are as blind as a :-[ (Despite that I managed some cool shots – c.f. Facebook (smart) ).

The trip was cool. It was surprisingly cool inside the cave and we saw many formations: stalactites, stalagmites, crystals… some of these have actually been named ; “The Trident”, “The Judge”, etc.

The OFD cave system is the largest in the UK and the second largest in Europe. It stretches about 70 kms with some connections and routes still unexplored and waiting to be discovered.

Our second cave, the next day, was OFD 1, and we had a caver cum mountain climber cum geologist to guide us !! This cave was a challenge beyond our expectations. It started off pretty decent, and then we started to follow a streamway upside – against the direction of flow of water. Two obvious dangers were that of losing foothold against the heavy rush of the water and not spotting any vortices and holes in the ground. Neglecting any holes in the ground would mean sinking down in a vortex and in the dark the rest of the team would not be able to render much help. My boots were wet – knee high wellies weren’t of much use – and without any wet socks my feet went numb. The cave itself required a *lot* of energy to navigate. Big boulders in the way, waterfalls and slippery calcium surfaces didn’t make the day any easier. We moved on to see what was known as the “Crystal Chamber”.

Wedging in-between the "cliffs"

To reach the crystal chamber was an ordeal in itself. Imagine this: Two near vertical rock faces, and you have to move diagonally upwards, wedging your body in between both the faces. Added to that was a small complexity – there was no floor !! No floor meant no foothold and a 50 ft drop to the roaring river below (nrvs) .

All the effort was well, very well worth the lights reflected off the semi-transparent stalactites and stalagmites in the crystal chamber, not to mention the newly formed crystals in a crystal pool !! (Y)

The next part of OFD 1 is called “the lavatory”, for the simple reason that it is a vertical controlled drop in a *very* slippery shaft. Again – there are no footholds. So basically you just wedge yourself in between a vertical set of walls, and loosen your body just enough, to fall about 6 inches or so. Any more than that and you run into the risk of a contour change in any of the walls, and hurting yourself. And trust me, you don’t want to hurt yourself underground (nogud) (nogud) (nogud) .

The next part involved a simple abseil off a rock face. Its amazing how things change when you just cant see a damn thing and have to abseil down to nothingness…

Abseiling in the dark

The next part in the cave involved a combination of rock climbing, swinging and hand gripping – with the added touch of absent footholds. So essentially: Its pitch dark. You are hanging into nothingness. Your life depends on rope which is screwed into  a rock. And now without paying attention to the sound of the roaring river you have to nudge yourself across the rope, take off the support and hook on to another rope and move on. This continued for a good 50m. The tough parts were now over. We camped, had some bits of chocolate, taking care not to drop any crumbs – fungus forms around food crumbs, which amounts to vandalism of a nationally protected caving site. And then we moved on. By the time we reached the exit, we were drenched – off sweat or water, no one was sure. The only thing we were sure of was that if you don’t stretch yourself to the limit, you can never know your own capabilities. We were dropped at the SWCC headquarters by Andy, and EVERYONE of us went in for a HOT HOT HOT SHOWER and a HOT HOT HOT cup of tea (C) .

An hour later it was time to leave. Apart from stopping for services on the way, no one talked much – everyone was literally BROKEN with the caving excursions.

As far as caving is concerned, I am looking to go really advanced now and therefore the next target is Dan Yr Ogof – mainly involves swimming and camping inside the cave. For more caving pics see the album above.  An interesting speciality in caving, btw is Cave Diving. Usually when people explore caves they reach two kinds of dead ends – a mud face or a water sump. Some people dig through the mud face to find new connections. Yet others, dive through the sump(s) to find newer cave systems…I’m going to get more adrenaline rush on my next newfound passion: ******. I won’t tell you till I do it. :-P