After a great weekend of caving with the club at South Wales Jess and I realised that if the rescue on the Saturday had been more than an iced door, then without knowing our way around we’d have been of very little use. We therefore decided to have a go at a little navigation around the Ogof Ffynnon Ddu system.
The week before, Keith had challenged us to find our way to Gnome Passage which, after a fashion, we did and although we managed to go the very long way around, we had begun to get a feel for the entrance to the system.
With significantly less snow on the ground we set off on Saturday morning with the intention of having a ’play‘ in Top Entrance. To my surprise we found our way to Gnome Passage straight away without any problems. We went to the end of the passage to check we could recognise the beginning of Edward's Short Cut, which we did, and after this made our way past the Wedding Cake to the Corkscrew boulder choke and down in to Salubrious Passage. We followed this to the Trident and the Judge and then skipped across the traverse and in to Selenite Tunnel to Shatter Pillar. We made our way back to Crossroads and went to see the top of Maypole Inlet climb then retraced our steps back up the Corkscrew boulder choke & on to see the Chasm.
Feeling very chuffed that we had no navigational errors we crossed Gnome passage back to White Arch, then back to the Brick Yard. Finally we popped up in to the Bedding Planes for a nose around before heading out.
Mark at Shatter Pillar
Sunday saw us doing a repeat of our round trip with Brendan in OFD1, again route finding went extremely well and within a couple of hours we had made our way up the Toast Rack, over the pots and upstream to Lowe’s Climb, through Roundabout & Pi Chambers and down to Bolt Traverse, back to the stream way and out via Pluto’s Bath.
Jessica on Bolt Traverse
A thoroughly enjoyable weekend with no ‘events’ for a change!
Present: Mark Burkey and Jessica harding - Trip report by Mark.
Well done you two.
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