Dudley Caving Club: Hanging around in Gnome Passage

For the October South Wales weekend Jess, in her new capacity as training officer, sent an email out offering some SRT training to go with a spot of caving in OFD.

We were joined by Brendan, Ian and Mike for Saturdays trip and met at Luigi's for a spot of breakfast before continuing on to the SWCC. We headed in via the Mini Columns and bedding planes to rig the head of the newly bolted 28M pitch in to Gnome passage. Here we took some time to show Ian and Mike some basics of rigging before descending the pitch. After dumping the kit we headed off down Edwards Short Cut to Frozen River before continuing on to Shatter Pillar.

Finding myself in need of a running stream, I headed off to Salubrious, but having taken a tumble the weekend before, found the bruising on my back to painful to contort through the restriction and had to leave this to Mike and Ian to pop down. Next we headed through Selenite passage and in to Salubrious with a quick divert to have a look at the Trident and Judge formations. With Mike suitably impressed we headed back to the pitch to take a couple of photo's of Jess Ascending.
Mike and Ian decided they'd had too much fun already and so Brendan took them out the standard route and left Jess and I to de-rig and bring the kit out via Speedy Caver and White Arch.