![]() In some of the squeezes, I've had to remove my harness in order to get through. Thanks to the bags, which always seem to stick where the cave is too constricted to turn around, getting my 6ft 3in frame and 48in chest through has been something of a struggle. If we hadn't each had to carry two reinforced PVC kitbags, with food, rope, dry clothes for the camp and Tony's diving gear, the occasional squeezes that punctuate these passages might not have seemed difficult. Potentially, this could be the deepest 'through system', joining mountain tops to valley floor, in the world.īetween the shafts, we've had to pass a series of 'meanders' - winding rifts in the rock. The hope now is to discover the further links we know must exist inside these hollow mountains - some by climbing and other 'ordinary' techniques, and others by the hazardous process of diving 'sumps' (flooded sections without airspace). Texa has already been connected to another cave nearby, Pozola Tormenta. Its exploration, co-ordinated by cavers from Oxford University, continues. Using surveyors' instruments, other members of our team have made an accurate map, finding that the furthest reaches discovered so far lie more than 3,700ft below the daylight. We're heading for an underground camp in the pothole known as Asopladeru la Texa, and we don't expect to re-emerge for the best part of a week.Ĭave explorers Rosa Clements and Max Minckler making their way up a 'pitch' to base camp There are four in our party: photographer Robbie Shone, cave diver Tony Seddon, computer expert Rosa Clements and me. ![]() To get here from the entrance, a gaping rent in a flank of the Picos de Europa mountains in northern Spain, we've already descended more than 30 vertical 'pitches', from shortish drops the height of a house to vast echoing chimneys up to 300ft deep. Then I thread the rope through my abseil device, squeeze its 'dead man's handle' and start to descend.Ībove me, beyond the reach of my headlamp, the roof is also invisible, but I know it's holding up about 2,500ft of limestone. For a moment I dangle from the bolts, hard steel rawlplugs drilled into the rock, and adjust the heavy equipment bags that hang from my waist. It is the top of a vertical shaft whose depth I can only estimate.įrom somewhere below comes the rumble of falling water and a chilly draught. My harness clipped to a nylon rope, I swing my legs and then my body over a blade of rock, out horizontally over the darkness to a pair of metal bolts drilled into the wall. ![]() It's well after midnight, more than ten hours since we left the surface. Often cold, muddy and uncomfortable, and sometimes extremely dangerous, its active participants in Britain number at most a few thousand Caving has always been a minority pursuit.
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