Coventosa
Billy, Connor, Damian, Gareth, James, Jasmine, Scott, Sophie H, Tom
Coventosa is the bottom end of the fabled through-trip from Cueto that we were due to de-rig later in the week, and given that only Scott had been into its main streamway (Damian and I had only visited the entrance chambers before) it seemed rude not to get stuck into this classic Cantabrian resurgence trip.
With Billy & Sophie arriving late morning we mustered at Casa Tomas and headed up to the parking spot at Val d’Ason and made friends with the local beggar cats. A sweaty stomp up the scenic valley-side path and the blast of cool cave air drifting across let us know where to scramble up to the entrance porch.
After a bit of debate about what the fenced-off area was about while kitting up (turns out it’s cave paintings that turned out to be fake), we headed in through the mighty wind tunnel funneling air from 800 metres above us, and into the entrance chambers. We spent a good hour noseying around these nicely decorated chambers, rigging a little climb up into another pretty room where James managed to find some grotty crawling to satisfy his Barbondale homesickness, before Scott returned having rigged the next pitch down.
Once we were down we shuffled through the short crawl to Scott’s side mission, and what a side mission it was – the Sala de los Fantasmas. A long steep slope led us downwards, with tiny lights twinkling ahead. These were the only other cavers we’d bump into on the trip, one of whom was wearing a fetching Toyota oversuit. Upon reaching the bottom, vast columns and bosses reared up ahead tempting us up a short scramble, to a fantastic view. Fantasmic indeed, as ghostly statues towered over us in all directions, and KCC spread out excitedly to explore the nooks and crannies. Around the corner, a forest of skinny columns like the Colonnades, but many times taller, stretched impossibly to the ceiling high above.
After recovering from our caving fantasms we regrouped and headed back up the mountain-like slope back to our pitch, ready to head onwards down to the main objective. Up, down, crawl, down, down, down as blackness yawned in all directions, the passages just getting bigger and bigger. We hit a wire traverse which took us out over a chasm with the stream heard well below. A short pitch and more traversing dropped us finally to stream level at the Gour pool. A pretty little spot, if a little pissy-smelling.
From here it was stomping for an hour along vast canyon, up to 100m high in places. Pitches up and down, sketchy little traverses over bottomless pools, beautiful sculpted walls, with a nice feeling of progress. We eventually hit our goal of reaching the first lake and tagged the tow line disappearing off into the water, yearning for the future time where we’d be back and organised enough to be pulling through here and gagging for a well-earned pint after 18 hours underground. But it was an easy pleasant day out for us this day, and still in good spirits we set course for the entrance retracing our steps, and plopped out happily into the balmy Cantabrian evening, properly satisfied at a trip I’m sure many of us will happily look back on as one of our favourites (I certainly did).
Photos by Billy, Gareth and Sophie
