Boxhead Pot - Lost Johns Pot

Matt & Gary arrived 10 minutes early, and amazingly I was already packed and ready to go. After a diversion back to their house (!) to pick up the rest of the descriptions, we were on our way to the Dales. Bernies was reached 20 mins ahead of schedule, and after we'd long finished breakfast, the others met us (about 20 minutes behind schedule!). There was a bit of indecision as to whether to go for the exchange or whether to just have an explore at the bottom of Boxhead, but having done neither I was keen to do the exchange and thankfully that was the decision!

Off we went down Boxhead, which was pretty stunning to say the least. In hindsight, perhaps not the best cave to experiment with my Simple on, but isn't hindsight a wonderful thing?! The rocks perched above the 70m pitch were a bit unnerving, but nothing slipped so all was good!

After waiting a little while for Gary to rig the Kendal Flyover we heard a shout of, "I can't find the p-hangers", but we didn't really fancy prussiking back out, only to go and do a different route down Lost Johns, so we stood and waited. After a while there was a shout of, "It's time to go!". I thought that was a pretty odd way of phrasing things when you're half way down a 70 odd metre pitch, so I yelled down assuming I'd mis-heard. The reply came back up: I've found the p-hangers but it's time to go!. By this point I had no idea what Gary was on about - talk about a defeatist mentality! One more go and the reply again came back: "I've found the p-hangers but I've gone too low". That made much more sense and in no time at all I was on my way down!

We were soon at the bottom of the stunning pitch and negotiating our way on; the first challenge was a tight climb down, and once we'd popped through that I was keener than ever to do the exchange! I really didn't fancy going up that. The next section was described as a wet crawl ending with a brief wriggle through water. The crawl was annoying, but the wriggle wasn't too bad until we popped up into the little chamber at the end and realised that the way on was a squeeze under a block about 6 inches above the water level! Once we'd all thrashed our way through this and had been suitably fascinated by the climb, we met the others and I realised how long it was since I'd seen carbide!

Spirits rose even further at this point if they'd got that far having followed the description backwards then there was no way we could fail! The abseil down the fixed rope was stunning - I had no idea there was so much cave down there! An equally impressive stomp down the streamway soon lead us to the Lost Johns inlet and up we went. My legs were still hurting a bit from my run on Friday (poor decision), but the real challenge came doing Battle Axe traverse for the first time with a monster bag of wet rope hanging below me. All good fun though :-)

The rest of the ascent was a stunning exhibition of derigging by myself & Matt, and we were soon emerging into the failing light, 5 ½ hours after going underground. What a fantastic day! :-)