Draenen Short Round Trip

Due to pregnancy I missed the Dudley’s recent excursions into Draenen. Keen to put this right, I joined Dave and Loz for the Short Round Trip. It’s called “short” but compared to other round trips (e.g. in Aggy) it certainly felt long. I'm not sure how they compare in distance; it could be due to Draenen’s draining boulder-hoping terrain.

A leisurely start meant we entered the cave around 11am. We hit the ground crawling in the entrance series through squiggly terrain before we broke through into the main cave passages. From this point on, a lot of boulder-hopping merged together, although I'm told we went via Cairn Junction, Beer Challenge, and White Arch passage to Indiana Highway. Here the traversing was good fun and before long we arrived in Megadrive before reaching the Nunnery and the start of Perseverance II.

From here, we sniffed out the route to St David’s Hall and then through Squirrel Rifts, although these rifts proved a little more challenging to navigate. At one point, Dave attempted to post himself through a small, highly-polished crawl, before backing out when it got too tight. It appears the polish was due to lots of other people making the same mistake, as the main way on was to drop down a rift immediately before this crawl, which we had traversed over.

After dropping down to the very bottom of this rift, we located the tight, elongated squeeze into Haggis Basher Number One. Here I discovered that breast-feeding makes squeezes a lot harder and more painful, and after grunting and whimpering for a few minutes, I was relieved to escape the squeeze into larger passage. From here we sploshed up the intriguingly-named Far Agent Blorenge streamway to eventually encounter the Sewer. The recent dry weather meant the water levels were fairly low, but we still got a good soaking (nice to cool off in an otherwise hot cave). The duck in the Sewer II was also fairly low and after this we encountered a fun little traverse which took a bit of oomph to climb up to. Next we did some more sploshing downstream to the Confluence where we joined the Beyond a Choke Streamway.

Here the description told us to go upstream, however the low water levels made it difficult to decide which way this was. After experimenting, we figured it out and began the long splash up the streamway back to Tea Junction. This streamway was very beautiful with some lovely decorations, cascades and pools. It would be a great place to visit in its own right, but we simply wanted to press on and complete the trip.

With some relief we reached Tea Junction and the unmistakable, familiar route out of the cave. Exiting was about as much fun as could be expected, but after tight, drippy squirreling we eventually popped through the gate into daylight. I felt pretty exhausted at this point, but encouraged that I could do a “proper” caving trip 3 months after childbirth. I'm looking forward to going back to Draenen and exploring some more.

Cavers: Loz, Anne and Dave
Trip reprot: Anne
Photo: Anne