In November 2021, a man was severely injured in an accident in a cave in south Wales. The subsequent rescue involved around 300 people and took 54 hours. It made national news. It made international news. I wrote a blog post about the complexity of the cave and why it took so long. And now BBC… More The Rescue: 54 Hours Under the Ground
There are certain sports that come with a lot of kit. With caving, depending on your budget, you can just keep buying more and more stuff and although vertical kit will give you easier access to certain caves and certain parts of caves, keep in mind that “more kit =/= better caver”. If you’re a… More Caving kit to buy as you get into it
After my post the other day about the big rescue in OFD, I thought it was about time I did some more cave content. I picked this particular trip because it involved a nice “bimbly” trip with photos – underground photos from my caving days are spectacularly rare – but it also, and completely coincidentally,… More A long caving weekend in the Mendips
Over the weekend, you may have caught this story, which made headline news across the UK: Man rescued from cave after two days, the story of an injured caver in South Wales who had a somewhat… difficult rescue. In fact, it took 250-odd people more than 53 hours to get him out. If you’re not… More Why did it take so long to get the injured caver out of the cave?
If you haven’t noticed, there’s a volcano in Iceland still going strong. It’s a great tourist volcano – it’s fairly small and it’s pretty but mostly not dangerous. It’s producing a bit of gas and every now and then it has to be closed because of the volume of gas builds up but the lava… More Inside the Volcano
After Monday’s post about enjoying caving, let’s have a lava caving story. In the UK, if you’re going to crawl around in a hole in the ground, it’ll be a limestone one formed by water action. It’ll have a certain smell, similar to petrichor, you might find fossils and it’ll probably have a mixture of… More Lava caving: crawling under an eruption
Come and meet the love of my life. I don’t talk about caving much here (apart from our 2004 trip to Ireland the other week) because I don’t do much of it these days but it absolutely captured my heart back in my student days and I wish I could do more of it. Well,… More You might enjoy caving if…
Back in June 2004, my caving club went on an “expedition” to Ireland. That’s caving-speak for a holiday. I don’t write a lot of caving stuff but I used to spend half my life underground. We chose Ireland mostly because that’s where they’d been the previous year and because there were plenty of caves. In… More A student caving expedition in Ireland
I was a caver at university. Have I mentioned that? Well, in these isolated days of little new material for travel and adventure blogs, I thought I’d show you my SRT kit. Sometimes you need to climb up or down a rope. Big caves in mountain ranges across Europe make this, plus several miles of… More Stay At Home Storytelling: meet my SRT kit
You may already know that when I was a student, I was a very keen caver. That all ended twelve years ago with graduation and I’ve been back twice since then, the last time being four and a half years ago. I just don’t get to go anymore because you need someone to go with… More Cavers do it in rubber socks: a half day in Goatchurch