Report by Jules Barrett
Cavers: Jules Barrett
(EPC), Sam Townsend (EPC)
Sam and I were after a quick evening trip before the Eldon Thursday
night meet
and I'd fancied a trip to Crewe Junction (the end of Hypothermia Crawl)
in Rowter
Hole for a while. Hypothermia Crawl was pushed by Stan Kowalik (CCPC),
Mick
Stratford (CCPC) and Ben Bentham (EPC) in 1975 and it's something of a
collector's piece being just 25m of tight, wet crawling to Crewe
Junction at the
other side. The original write-up from the CCPC journal makes
interesting
reading and explains the name. Ben Bentham pushed it in a T-shirt! and
ended up
in a bad way. Sam, John Taylor and Tony Revell had been in a few times
in previous years
working on the choke but it's not a bit of cave that sees many visitors.
Both of our SRT
kits were elsewhere which
posed a problem given that you're not going to free-climb the Rowter
entrance
shaft. Fortunately between us we managed to cobble together two
pseudo-SRT kits
which just about did the job. We arrived, sorted the kit and got
changed into
full neoprene. Walked over to the Rowter entrance, tied the rope onto
the
scaffold bar and abseiled in. The start of Hypothermia Crawl is where a
small
stream emerges from a low, narrow bedding plane 9m up the wall near the
bottom
of the entrance shaft. We climbed up to the entrance to the hypothermia
inlet.
At this point helmets came off and neoprene hoods went on. 25m and some
90
degree bends doesn't sound
like a long way but your helmet's off the whole time and there are a
couple of
squeezes to make you think. You're crawling upstream in a stream so
it's not
warm! The first squeeze is just after the first left-hand corner and
that was
fine. The crawl continues being tight but not desperate until the
second
(tighter) squeeze which is about 20m in. The second squeeze was not too
bad and
soon we were at Crewe Junction. To the right here is the fairly
unpleasant-looking boulder choke that John
Taylor and Sam had been working on. To the left are a couple of nice
small chambers
well-decorated with stal. We were very careful here as it would be easy
to break
something; the stal is right above your head. After a poke around and a
look up
into the choke we made our way out and back up the entrance shaft.
A very enjoyable
evening trip in an unusual bit
of cave. Crewe Junction manages to feel remote even though you're only
25m away
from the bottom of the Rowter entrance shaft!
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