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
Nearly two weeks ago, Iceland’s new eruption started (I wrote a blog about it last week) and half the country flocked to see it. I don’t blame them, I’d be among them if not for the plague. But a similar eruption happened in 1973, the birth of the volcano Eldfell, and things worked out very… More Eldfell: the people who fought a volcano
Back in 2014, I finally did something I’d been wanting to do for a while. Given the lack of English-language information, putting it all together and figuring out how to do it was a bit tricky and so let me save you all that. This is how to climb Esja. Esja is Reykjavik’s mountain. If… More How to climb Esja
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
Last year I was briefly employed as an outdoor activity instructor. I didn’t actually do any teaching but I was paid for two days of training to enlarge my repertoire from just archery and fencing. The bit of training I was most excited about was climbing. I used to climb a bit. When I was… More Stay At Home Storytelling: learning to boulder