Alum Pot, Visited with Andy and Jay.
I've visited long churn and Alum pot a number of times, and no matter how many times I’ve seen it, the view from the bottom of the dolly tubs pitch as you walk out into alum pot takes my breath away, it is one of the most special things I think I have ever seen while caving.
This trip started in Clitheroe at 9am when myself and Jay met up with Andy, we loaded the cars up and headed up to Selside, a quick call into the farm to pay the trespass fee and then over the road to the parking spot, seen us getting ready by 10.30.
On the walk up it was raining and we were soaked, we decided to enter mid system just to get out of the rain, rather than heading up to Dr bannisters basin! As we had all done this trip more than once, missing the first half of the trip was a small price to pay to get out of the rain.
We made our way through the cave until we got to the top of the small climb down to the dollytubs pitch, there was a group of explorers coming up, it looked like a youth club type trip, we had to wait about for a short while before climbing down.
Once down, the dolly dubs was rigged and off we went again, at the bottom of the dolly tubs is the thing that makes this trip special, walking out into the middle of Alum Pot and seeing the waterfall, and the giant slab of stone which is wedged between the 2 walls, this would was probably once part of the roof when the hole was a chamber.
We headed down to the bottom of the slab where Andy rigged a rope down, I had never taken this route down, but the usual route was a no go due to the amount of water. He was on the rope for ages, I had no idea what was going on, it was so noisy and I couldn't hear if he was shouting up or if he was having problems, I was about to head back up to the other side of the hole where I would be able to see him, I was just getting onto the rope when he came to the pitch head after ascending the rope he was on, he told us it was squalid down there, as Jay is fairly new to SRT, and there was a deviation to swing out to, and it was so wet, we decided not to put him in a situation which could turn nasty, I had been down to the bottom before anyway, and if it was as wet as it sounded, you wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway.
We turned around and headed back, it took around 25 mins to get up, de-rig and make our way back out.
All in all a cracking little explore, which I will no doubt heading back to at least once more this year.
As i cant be bothered resizing the pictures to 600px and uploading yet another set of pictures to photobucket, if you want to see the pictures. you'll have to look here - http://www.dspexplores.com/#/?p=276