County – Trident

Damian, Maz, Paddy, Tom

A very soggy march over the moor, but arriving at the entrance, the gill wasn’t running so we headed in. There’s something dead at the bottom of the entrance climb somewhere, we couldn’t find the source but we discovered Paddy’s low tolerance for bad smells – perhaps he’s in the wrong sport (or the wrong club at least). 

It’s not often the entrance passage is active but it was trickling tonight, definitely not an evening for going anywhere too flood-y. Down the pitch and into Broadway and we headed off towards Trident, with a quick dive through the Showerbath. Splash chamber was quite spicey and again another soggy duck through the waterfall saw us at the top of Whiteline chamber. Paddy basically skipped across the Cadbury Traverse, and Maz followed with a more pensive crossing. Damian and I headed back through to Splash Chamber and popped feet-first into the streamway – the other route through to the Right Hand series – and rejoined Maz and Paddy.

We made tiring progress up the awkwardness of Key Passage, occasionally being foot-stools for others to gain height. Up a climb and we were into Paper Floor Passage. The Paper Floor itself is a few metres above the streamway we’d just come up, allowing a multi-storey chat with Maz below. Over the Paper Floor with a quick bounce to test the strength, and Paddy announced there were pretties a couple of corners ahead. After admiring them, we reached a pitch on some questionable wedding-ring looking anchors installed back in the 1400s, but it had some reasonable looking in-situ on.

My curiosity at figuring out this part of County sent me down the pitch to see where it linked up. After a couple of corners I popped out somewhere I recognised, the shelf heading into Whiteway. Chuffed to have linked up another route over here, I headed back to the pitch and shouted up to Paddy that I was going to head round and back up to Whiteline and meet them there, while they headed back the way we’d come as some had ditched their SRT kits. 

The Trident streamway was absolutely churning down here and it was clear there’d been some decent rain while we’d been down. I traversed over to the crawl connecting back to Whiteline, reluctant to end up in the powerful current swirling below. Back at the top of Whiteline the waterfall coming into Splash Chamber was considerably more ‘refreshing’ than before and I shouted down the scaffoldy climb that Damian and I had descended to tempt them to go that way rather than the traverse. It’s an awkward little climb that almost stole Maz’s SRT kit, but we got out of the rowdy water and had a rest and calm down in Battle of Britain.

Back at the pitch, Paddy had offered to haul us all up to practise his rescue skills, and who were we to turn down a business class exit from the cave? The heavy rain of course restarted just as we approached the farm, just to ensure we had an uncomfortable change and lots of sopping wet gear to sort out at home.