Grotte Estevan – Barbette

Ardeche trip 2025 – first trip

Estevan – Barbette through trip

Team: Tom, Scott, Jasmine, Damian, Maz & Will

After a few days of various travel plans, we all arrived at the correct place for the first adventure of the trip. Initially Tom had sold this to us as a nice easy warm up, a single entrance pitch followed by much walking amongst formations with the odd crawl in between – perhaps a statement that may come back to haunt him!

A short walk in found us quickly at an entrance, where we eagerly dived in, clearly showing we’d all spent far too long in cars, planes or both to get here! The problem was that we’d actually found the exit of the through trip (Barbette cave), not the entrance. A brief down climb through some narrow passageway finds you in a beautifully decorated chamber with many off shoots, which would be the theme for the rest of the trip also. After a quick recce about and some photos, we headed back out to find the actual entrance, which was only a further few minutes up the track.

Estevan had one of the tightest entrances I think I’ve seen, one which almost turned some team members away from the get go! Warm up cave was it?! Tom lead the way and quickly had the pitch rigged – there isn’t the luxury of CNCC resin’d anchor bolts over here, in fact the topo/description also isn’t what we’re used to, so there was definitely a lot of ‘have a go and see’ going on. Once inside and down the 8m ab, we were in possibly the largest chamber of the day. When I say beautifully decorated, there are so many formations that you struggle to navigate your way through them in places. Columns easily of 2-5m diameter everywhere, millions of stal’s, huge heli’s, it really had everything and everywhere. We were breezing past formations as if they weren’t there, but had we been back in the Dales they would have been the focal point and probably named. I can’t stress enough, from start to finish, they were everywhere, and the colour/variations of colour were incredible.

Having completed most of the main area, we found the ‘Jonction Barbette’ sign which indicates the start of the crawl and onward travel for the through trip. Remember though, this is a warm up trip and nothing too serious… Well, this was where I really thought something was off, because normally the room doesn’t go silent waiting for me to lead the crawls but here I was out front having a go. Route finding was relatively straight forward, the squeezes and flat out crawls were self explanatory, and the decorated chambers in between were well cordoned to keep cavers away from the formations showing the onward direction nicely. Occasionally we were thrown a choice of directions, I followed my nose, sometimes to a dead end or a viewing platform outlined with more cordon – someone’s certainly been very busy at some point, as the signage was also quite impressive! After a few more squeezes to navigate as a team to get everyone through, we were in another huge decorated chamber and quickly found the final onward crawl section that linked back to the first chamber we visited going in the exit right at the start, literally 25-30m away max. Just one problem, it was tight, proper tight, and clear why the route description we had called this the crux of the trip. Tom had a look and didn’t seem keen, I thought I’d found a sneaky bypass but sadly it quickly choked. Our only other option was to work our way back through the series of squeezes and crawls we’d navigated so far and we were about 3 hours in and all getting pretty tired. It was noticeably hotter in this cave, I had a tshirt and long sleeved tshirt on under my oversuit and was dripping. Some of the team had an undersuit on under theirs and they all regretted it! I followed Scott into the crux crawl as I could see that where he was 3 or so metres in it was ever so slightly wider, maybe by an inch or 2. From there, I watched Scott fight his way forward through some gnarly looking stuff including some flooded pools and a bit where he only just made it with fully exhaling. Once we established that there was the ability to turn around, in the worst case, I let Jasmine pass by me as she was chomping at my heels and I knew this was way more her territory than mine! What a pair of legends, truly awesome to watch them take it to that next level! Behind me, I think Tom and Maz had already made the decision that they weren’t coming and to make for the entrance pitch again. Scott’s final words echoed through the crawl that he thought I’d make it, and that Tom and Maz wouldn’t enjoy it, but should give it a try and I’ll be honest I wasn’t keen! I also had 2 team mates that had just given everything to get to the final 25/30 metres to find out they had to go back, de-rig and at the bottom of the entrance pitch was all of our SRT kits we’d stripped after the ab. So I retreated from the crawl and rejoined Tom and Maz. After yelling our intentions through the crawl, we then realised that Tom’s headtorch was really low as was mine, and neither of our backups were working, and we had all of those squeezes and crawls to navigate. We all understood the assignment and after about 30 mins and all losing a third of our body weight in sweat, we were at the bottom of the entrance pitch donning harnesses for the climb out. Up the chaps went while I bagged up the other SRT kits and then de-rigged on my way out.

We surfaced to a full on thunderstorm and torrential rain that had started almost immediately after we went in, which we clearly hadn’t had any effects of inside thankfully! The short walk in meant we were back at the vehicles in less than 10 minutes and it certainly wasn’t more than that again before we were all changed and inside out of the wet. Whilst we were on this trip, our final team member Chris had arrived so tomorrow we will be at full capacity.

Although by no means was this a warm up, it certainly was an incredible cave. If the formations on display were anything to go by, we’re really in for a treat or two this trip, and if that means the helmet has to come off a couple of times then so be it. Our campaign has well and truly begun, stay tuned for the next one!

(Write up and pics by Will)