Giant's Hole

Ladder on Comic Act Cascade by Tom Howard

Tom and I found ourselves at a loose end this weekend, on Friday night we decided to go down the classic Giant's Hole near Castleton in Derbyshire. Tom came to pick me up at the entirely reasonable time of 9.45am and off we went, stopping for breakfast at Sainsbury's on the way. Upon arriving at the Giants car park, we found the usual horde of adventure activity people being kitted up for their tourists' trip down Garlands.
So we took our time getting ready and let the big group go in ahead of us. Once in we stopped to admire Upper Stream Passage and Boss Aven, commenting on the fact that neither of us has done the high level route, and we should do that at some point. We then squeezed past some other groups of people having a play at caving, so Tom could go and rig the SRT rope down Garland's. It's been about 4 years since I was last in Giants, so my memory was hazy, I forgot how long the crabwalk is, but I'm still not sure where the Vice is!


Crawl out of the Windpipe by Tom Howard

Tom wanted to take some pictures on this trip, and I didn't mind being the only model around, or standing in a waterfall on the ladder for 5 minutes. He asked if I would mind having a picture taken in the Windpipe, but I was quite pleased upon crawling through that he had decided the Windpipe wouldn't make for quite so nice a shot as the crawl out. We had a brief look at Geology Pot, then on to the climb down the rift, which Tom rigged with 8mm rope, just for the sake of using it, (and I couldn't be arsed chimneying down).

High Level Passage by Tom Howard

Coming out of the cave we found ourselves greeted by gloriously warm sunshine, I both love and kind of hate caving in the summer. One of the worst things about caving is having to get changed outside afterwards, especially in the winter. Sometimes it can take ages to get warmed up afterwards. The summer makes this infinitely more bearable, however this question always crosses my mind- do you really want to be wasting the rare British sunshine underground?

Mam Tor by Me

Off we went to the Wanted Inn for a well deserved pint in the sun. As it was still early, we were looking for something else to do with the afternoon, so we decided to walk up Mam Tor. No sooner had we reached the summit than the weather broke and we had to make our escape off the hill quickly. Off to TSG to see Andy Farrow and watch the members do a spot of DIY while we generally got in the way and took the piss. Great day!