John Gillett

Almost the story of my life - by someone else starting a few decades earlier. It's the personal recollection of a few caving trips over 4 decades of caving, mostly in the UK, but a few trips abroad too. This is not the recollection of some caving hero, these are not the deepest hardest longest trips anywhere, there are no new discoveries or tales of peril and hardship. It is instead, the joy of caving, the fun, the banter with friends, the 'sport' an attempt to explain why the author goes caving, and is very similar in experience to those that most of the 6000 active cavers in the UK undergo every weekend. There is a good chance we've met somewhere, in a hut or a pub. I don't recollect the name or the face, but it's a fairly small community and we've been active over some of the same time in the same areas.

Most of the chapters are short accounts of specific trips, usually a goal or target that has been a while in the planning. I'm not sure how much relevance they'd have for non-cavers, although the author keeps the technical descriptions to a minimum it's sometimes hard to avoid that these are part and parcel of the challenge. I was obviously much more interested in those that referred to places that I've been, some of the classic welsh and yorkshire trips, as well as County Clare in Ireland. It is interesting to note the progression of gear, from carbide to the early electric cells, which is about the state of technology when I entered the sport. Ladders had already been replaced by the SRT system, which is somewhat earlier than I'd expected, but the use of wetsuits continued further into the author's career than many of his contemporaries, as these are now fairly seldom used except in almost permanently wet systems. The author has very sensibly avoided any temptation to enter the dangerous world of cave diving, and no mention is made of it, save obliquely in reference to systems that were discovered by diving, with the flooded passages now bypassed.

In addition to the descriptive chapters there are a couple that are more philosophical in nature. I was particularly amused by the Eight Fold Way of Caving, contrasting to the buddist Tao. The planning, the travel, the prep, the Cave, Exit, and the Re-Hashing, cleaning gear and Returning Home. Each is wryly contemplated in a paragraph with frequent mentions of one of the most important aspects of caving - the pub and social congeniality that makes it such a great team endevour.

An interesting read for the british caver, but probably of little interest to those outside that niche. Generally well written, some of the trip reports start to drag a bit if you don't already know the systems.… (meer)