Trip Report – Giants, Geology Pot & Far Canal
Myself, Phil, Dom, Glyn, Grace and Grace’s son Andrew!
I left Birmingham after work on saterday arriving at the TSG at 10.30 -.-‘ , where I met Grace and Andrew packing up, grace had been teaching Andrew SRT ready for the next day, nothing like learning on the job. The students had been at the TSG, and must have had a pretty big party! It was time to go to bed before they got back.
Driving back from Doug Nash's funeral this afternoon, there were some seriously heavy showers in and around the Buxton area, and I did wonder what the effect would be on the Giants stream. I wasn't the only one; a couple of members got in touch to ask if there was a plan B, and what it was. I said that we should decide when we got there, and there was always the Wet Inlets, Upper West, Upper East and Boss Aven as reasonably safe alternatives.
Present: Charley Cooley, Jess Stirrups, Steve Pearson Adams.
A warm evening saw three of us meet up at the car park, but we were soon joined by a minibus and another car. However, they were not joining us - the minbus team were simply having a recce down to Garlands and back and the four in the car were doing the West Upper Series. Once at the starting point, Steve free-climbed up to prepare a pull-through and Jess and I then followed, pausing along the way to take in the views.
The party met up at Peakshill Farm for a sporting trip into Giants, aiming for East Canal.
In 1990, with his fellow explorer and cave discoverer, Mark Noble, our sadly departed mate, Keith Joule, climbed into a passage high above the downstream end of Giant’s Windpipe and entered a well-decorated, roomy crawl which led them to (yet another) Mother of all Boulder Chokes. This was serious stuff, as the small crawl turned upwards into a large chamber which was filled with millions of small (but big-enough, if you know what I mean) boulders.
Present: Ann Soulsby, Alastair Gott, Brendon Ford
Cracking trip into Giants with six of us doing the Round Trip. Garlands was rigged for both ladder & line and SRT, so folk could (and did) opt for whichever they preferred, and soon we were heading down the Crabwalk. Our last two midweek forays down this tall, switchback passageway ended up in failure of a kind, as we couldn't get everybody through either the false vice, or The Vice itself, but tonight everybody managed all the obstacles, squeezes, Razor Edge Cascade climb, Comic Act etc with no problems at all.