Duration: About 5 hours, of which approximately half was spent staring at the survey in baffled silence.
I’m determined to eventually learn my way around Top, and this trip was a great opportunity to try out my route-finding ability. I lead, with a survey and a lot of talking to myself out loud. We went in via the Brickyard and not Big Chamber / Mini Traverses because Big Chamber is an annoying pain in the buttocks to cross. This involves going straight when you enter the cave and not taking the obvious left fork. Continue across the Brickyard and past where the route from the Mini Columns joins the passage on your left. Shortly after this you will pass the Jellyfish and the Dragon’s Back.
Bear left under the low wide archway at the top of Gnome and climb down to Corkscrew. Down here, down the Giant’s Steps and down Salubrious to near Trident / Judge.
The short traverse section in Salubrious
Follow the passage around to the right and…well here I kind of forget what we did. We went up a slightly awkward thrutchy climb into a chamber with about four ways on and went right. The middle passage is a Oxbow to the right passage (unclimbable) and I don’t know where the left hand passage (which is actually more like straight on) goes. The far right passage leads over President’s Leap – so actually I do think I know where the straight on / left passage goes – it goes to the Crossroads! I’m really wishing I had a survey to look at right now. I think that, after President’s Leap we emerged at Shatter Pillar and took the straight on passage to Selenite (turns out this is wrong, it’s Selenite first and THEN Shatter Pillar). Down Selenite Passage, we emerged into Crossrift across the slippery climb. We went right along Crossrift, and passed two junctions on the right before getting close to the climb up to Moonlight.
At the second junction, we thought we were at the climb up (the description that a member of Birmingham Cave and Crag had given us was to climb up at the junction where the floor drops away and there is a diagonal wedged slab that you climb over). Well the floor did drop away, and there was a diagonal wedged slab but it was very high and I couldn’t imagine climbing over it! We didn’t like the look of the climb so, despite thinking that this was the right place, decided to give it a miss and explore a bit further.
The floor of Crossrift drops down and then curves back up at the next junction on the right. When we got there, we could see that the floor also dropped away again in front of us (a lot more drastically this time) and there was another jammed rock, this time much lower and with a wiggly squeeze to get past and onto it. After wiggling up this, there was a climb on the right that looked worn. It wasn’t a particularly hard climb but it was made more nerve wracking by the drop. Because the passage dropped away so quickly, although you have only climbed up to stand on a rock at about head height, the drop on the other side is a really really long way down. There are jammed rocks so you’d have to be extremely unlucky to fall down the climb and through one of the holes, but the worry was still there!
I went up the climb and back down to test it, and then Will went up and had a poke around. After 10 minutes of improbably loud wriggling sounds, he terrified me by speaking and sounding like he was directly next to me. This was just weird acoustics because he was actually quite some time away – he must’ve been in the roof or something. Turns out it was actually very pretty up there so back up the climb it was. There’s a crossroads at the top – left is a massive hole in the floor, ahead is a passage we didn’t go down, and right is a climb up a slippery sandy slope to a flat out crawl.
Once up, there are a few very well decorated chambers, including an absolutely gorgeous white crystal pool. These chambers aren’t even on the survey, although the crossroads that lead up to them is. I haven’t been to very many pretty places in OFDii so I don’t know whether this is because, comparatively speaking, they are pretty enough to leave off, or whether it’s just because they are small and a dead end. Either way I’m very glad I know they’re there!
Not doing the Crystal Pool justice.
Ooo sparkly.
Grotto
After this, we decided to head out of the cave. Annoyingly, the way ahead at the crossroads – the passage we didn’t go down – was actually the way to Moonlight (we think)! The first junction climb that we decided against was just a random climb and we actually were in the right place. To go to Midnight, I believe we would have gone back to Crossrift and continued along, dropping down with the passage.
On the way back, we continued on down CrossRift past the turning for Selenite and instead exited via the Bold Step rather than President’s Leap. We also took the well hidden left hand turning after the Jellyfish and went out across Mini Traverses rather than the Brockyard – for no other reason than it have a helpful bit of context to the cave layout near the entrance.
Big Chamber Near The Entrance
Flos Caves 