Noon's Hole

Trip report for Noones hole 27th December

Me and Ray met up at the Hub, threw the gear together, and headed off.

Ray rigged the first couple of pitches and I took the last two. At the bottom of the first pitch Ray spotted what he thought was a bit of calcite sitting on a ledge. He poked it.

It was a dead fish.

And for reasons unknown, he then sniffed his finger.

I wasn't enticed to follow that decision..

We pushed on through towards Crucifixion Crawls which were as grim as ever and made our way toward the sump, stopping a lot to look at formations and grab photos before my phone inevitably died. Standard.

Once we hit the sump we turned back and headed up toward the calcite formation that leads into a proper sketchy boulder choke. We pushed it a bit, stood there looking at it, and decided today wasn’t the day to get crushed underground. Sensible enough.

On the way out Ray de-rigged the first couple of pitches and I took the last few. This is where I made a truly terrible decision and hung the rope back way too high on the final pitch. Hanging there, stretching and swearing, I realised I may have made myself infertile.

When we finally got back to the car it was absolutely Baltic. Changing was miserable, numb hands, numb feet, and zero feeling left anywhere useful.

Back to the Hub after for a wee drink to try get some heat back into ourselves.

Later on, Ray went over the survey and realised that if we’d actually pushed on through the boulder choke, it would have led straight into a nice big chamber.

Which is… unfortunate.

Good trip. Good cave. One dead fish. One bad rigging decision. One missed chamber. Would do it again.