Oxford University Cave Club

23rd July 2002 - from Chris Rogers by email

Exploration has been slowed buy a major epic underground, everyone is fine. The streamway has hit a big pitch, of uncertain depth. Rigging starts tomorrow. At the moment the streamway is several hundred metres above the expected sump level, so this may be the start of another pitch series.

The big chamber through which we entered to hit the streamway seems to be one of many. There is tonnes of dry fossil stuff kicking around, surveying team in today to try to pin it down - difficult to tell what is going on as it is so big, but we have found two more chambers of the same sort of size as the first one, with several leads off of each. Exponential growth of leads in fossil stuff!!

Rumours abound that we have stumbled upon the 'mysterious fourth streamway'. Adding up Xitu + 2-7 + Muxa streamways comes to about 3/4 of the total volume of water in the Culiembro resurgence... Leading to question marks that a fourth streamway exists!!!

A first analysis of survey data indicates that we are heading towards 53-5. This is near to the downstream end of both Xitu and 2-7. Anyone's guess what happens next, surveys will be drawn up asap...

Chris