Wednesday 15 February 2012

Serendipity

3rd February

Becka, Fleur and I had a fairly quick trip into Link Pot before the Red Rose dinner, the aim being to find the Serendipity pitches and Easy Street. We'd all been in that part of the cave before, but were all a but hazy about the route, so Fleur took Northern Caves underground with her and we managed to navigate our way through a slightly confusing maze of crawls after leaving the 'usual' route towards Mistral. Eventually, a flat out crawl led, somewhat unexpectedly, to the top of some pitches; Serendipity. Becka rigged, and we were soon down into a very pleasant walking sized streamway. We stomped all the way down as far as the sump before heading back out again. T/U 3hrs

Back at the bottom of the entrance pitch, a pile of snow at the bottom suggested that conditions above ground had changed a bit, and sure enough, after a hand numbingly cold climb up the ladder, we emerged to find a couple of inches of snow had already settled. A somewhat exciting escape from Bull Pot Farm followed in a blizzard, with ice and snow on the road, in order to make it to the dinner near Kendal, 15 miles (or 2 hours drive) away.