Providence Pot

Participants: Helen H and Ami S. 
Not fancying the cold and wet, Jason cancelled this club trip on Sunday 12th January. (A wise decision I’d say!) But 2 of us were still keen to get out on the last day of the snow. So Ami and Helen made an early start (8.20am-ish), the snow becoming deeper as we drove eastwards to Kettlewell. In fact, the snow and ice on the ground at valley level meant that we had to fork out for the National Park’s £6.50 parking, rather than venturing into an extremely icy looking £3 option.
What is usually a 30-35 minute walk took us 1h40!! Snow was deep (over 2ft in the 2nd half) and very icy. There was only two other sets of old footprints, which we presumed were left by a farmer and dog heading down the valley. We tried to follow but our stride lengths meant that new holes had to be made with virtually every step (mostly by Ami as my knee was not coping well with having to lift my foot out of deep holes at every step). We were completely exhausted when we eventually completed the 1.25 mile ‘walk’ up the valley!
After a bit of sustenance, and ridding ourselves of all the extra clothing we had worn to protect against the cold, we decided to go for a 1h30 recce of the initial section. Having had such a laborious tramp up the valley we wanted to be returning in the light so that we could see the places where we had slipped and fallen on the way! (When I say ‘see’, we had both suffered minor snow blindness on the way to the cave as, although fully equipped with (much too) warm clothing, neither of us had packed snow goggles–and they would have been extremely useful.
Having done the full trip 3 x previously, I was still surprised to discover that the first section was thrutchy and wet! We ventured as far as the Blasted Canal and completed the 18m (very wet & muddy) crawl but, having expected the continuation to be just a few climbs and a bit of mud, were surprised to find that the following section also involved getting chest deep wet in low, wet, and muddy crawls–so we took this as our turn around point.
On surfacing, with a few hours of above zero temperatures, the snow had completely changed. We could confidently push through the snow, even most of the deeper sections and so returned to the car in about an hour.
Yes, it was a mad trip. But amazing to be out in such a lot of snaow at such a low level.

Here’s a google drive link to some photos, and a video of our return trip through the really wet bit: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-8-K7853hUSyysK_ZHLlvAfxLCS7nic_?usp=drive_link