Dear Paul,

Kind of heart-rending to hear of the replay of ten years ago out there on the Green Ridge. If they've persevered with 53/5 then I'm sure they'll have found plenty more tight rifts to play with. Anyway, I thought I'd include here an extract from an article that I wrote for Proc 14 on the Green Ridge and our attempts to find a lower entrance into the big systems, since it might add a little to the description that Gavin has posted. The fact that there's an upward route from Xitu under here somewhere makes it more interesting again, but we did hammer it pretty hard.... There were two unfinished possibilities in 53/5, one on the obvious route the other beyond Pointless Piranha higher up. A nasty little rift and a possible bouldery dig above it. You need to pendule across pointless Piranha to get to it....

But my money would still be on another attempt at digging in Valley of Dry Bones, which is close, and where the real draught is....

Cheers

Tim

In search of Jultayu's hidden depth a personal perspective, 

by Tim Guilford

By the middle of 1991, Choke Egbert had steadfastly thwarted the determined efforts of two consecutive OUCC expeditions. It remained a massive, unstable, and remote barrier to our exploration of Pozu Jultayu's final 500metres depth. A miserable 50 metres of indecisive passage in its side ("Tim's Bit") was about all the forward progress we had made. On the survey, Tim's Bit looked like a useless appendix, a niggling reminder of exploration failure. But it was hard to give up. 2/7's sheer scale, its fantastic shaft series, and the lure of its depth potential still gripped the club despite the frustration of the gruelling rewardless trips to the terminus. During the 1991 expedition, however, some of us had started to focus on an alternative way to deal with the 2/7 addiction. Perhaps the way past Choke Egbert was to find a route over it, perhaps via high level fossil passages, or perhaps a quicker route to the bottom of the known system? Of course, some had long thought this was the right course of action, yet others never accepted that to abandon a major system was the best way to explore it. Nevertheless attempts to find a lower entrance to Pozu Jultayu started in earnest that summer, and continued through the expeditions of 1991, 1992 and 1993. These attempts failed.

But then there's failure and there's failure. We may not have found the way on into downstream Pozu Jultayu, and its illustrious connection with the Culiembro resurgence, but our efforts did lead to the discovery of several significant cave systems. This article is an attempt to give a flavour of the exploration of the four most important of these discoveries: 53/5 (Cueva de la Rana); 66/5; Skull Cave; and Sistema Sierra Forcada (8/11). More subjective still is a second aim of this article. I think that significant changes to the techniques, aspirations and ethics of expedition caving crept in to the OUCC machine during this period, and I will try to chronicle these too.

Cueva de la Rana

From the top of Jultayu a spur of mountain runs down along the edge of the Culiembro gorge in an impressive sweep of green. The "green ridge" marks the very edge of the Ario bowl where the old plateau gives way to cliffs, rock spurs, and the steep valleys of Trea and Extremero. More important even than its stupendous scenic position looking out over the Cares gorge to the razor peaks of the Central Massif, the green ridge follows the approximate line of Pozu Jultayu's underground streamway more than 400 metres below. Just before the green ridge ends in the boulder chaos of the Val Extremero, there is a small sub-valley containing, unusually, a pond. During the dry summer months, it is a little haven for wild life. Frogs call there, Rebecco drink there, and cavers loll about in the sun. In a small cliff above the pond, is a narrow rift from which a strong cold draught whispers into the sunshine, forming faint clouds of condensation around the entrance. The perfect dig. 53/5.

53/5 was first located by Dave Horsley in 1989, and had received sporadic digging trips since then. By the time I arrived to help, in July 1991, the entrance rift had been cleared of boulders, but progress was severely blocked by a squeeze 10 metres in. It all looked hopelessly long-term for an expedition task, more a Mendip project. But even a caver hammering energetically at the squeeze soon had fingers numbed by the cold draught. There must be something big beyond. This had to be our second entrance. Soon attention switched to the boulders in the floor, and a major engineering project began. With ever more complex arrangements of pulley advantage, ever larger boulders were extracted from the rift until, at last, the monster was moved and a hole opened up below. Gavin Lowe and I squeezed down into a small chamber, closely followed by Steve Roberts and Michelle Nickerson. The rift continued: full of rocks but full of draught. Frantic scrabbling eventually enabled me to squeeze up and over a large flat rock, the Coffin Lid, execute a body pivot, and continue along the tight rift feet first (a habit of mine when pushing squeezes for the first time). As I dragged my helmet and zoom behind me, bare cheek touching cold rock, I could sense the space beyond. The echo, the loss of draught. Soon I sat up awkwardly in a small widening of the rift, pushed up towards a hole and peered into the echoing blackness. 53/5 had gone.

That night at camp, news of the breakthrough brought a mixed reception. Gavin and I elaborated excitedly about Pozu Jultayu's second entrance beyond Choke Egbert, and many were infected by our enthusiasm. But its fair to say that Gavin and I also had a reputation, acquired during the pushing of the Oxford Extensions in Dallimores, for liking tight caves. Others, then, were sceptical of the find, and stories of the Coffin Lid Squeeze just metres from the entrance didn't help. "Not tight, just awkward", Gavin said of the squeeze, as he did of many. But the truth is it was both. And so, over the following few weeks, 53/5 was pushed ever deeper by a small sub-group of the expedition with occasional one-time visitors keen to try but soon put off.

Acquiring depth in 53/5 was tough. The cave followed the typical Picos pattern of tight meandering rifts interspersed by pitch series, but now the rifts were tighter and the pitches shorter. The entrance rift led to Pterodactyl Pitch dominated by a strange bird-like rock spur that seemed almost to be flying across the pitch-head as its shadow moved in the light of the prussiking caver. A large chamber with a vadose trench in the floor led on via a series of decorated traverses to the start of Big Biscuits Rift. Chert ledges (the "big biscuits") provided temporary footholds in the descent of a long series of awkward climbs and tight holes following a small stream. By this stage, I routinely carried a hammer in my wellie as essential pushing accessory, and the cave never let up. Big Biscuits eventually went horizontal and into a boulder choke, forced feet first to the top of the next small shaft series. "Which Doctors" were named after Dr Horsley and myself who, in our excitement that the cave was finally going big, had managed an exceedingly bad rig of the twin shafts.

But go big was the one thing 53/5 never did. Shortly after Which Doctors came Shagging the Hedgehog, another tight, oversuit-ripping rift into a complex series of squeezes and short pitches. The last of these entered the dreaded black limestone, with its reputation for shrinking passages and resisting hammers. Progress was still possible. But by this stage, most of the expedition had lost patience with 53/5, and even the few breaks we small core did have at higher levels ended up in the familiar pattern of desperate rifts. We decided it was time to bottle out and look elsewhere.