The Whinging Pom

Here's where it gets all serious. Not very serious but more of a description of what we do underground. Caving is such an awesome thing to do but it does only appeal to a small group of people.

Hopefully this will take some of you there with me for a few moments, at least in spirit.

Every year since it was discovered in 1983 a group of cavers have joined in gradually exploring Bulmer Cavern, under Mount Owen. The mountain can be seen for a short time as you drive north out of Murchison and looks completely different to anything else around it. The slopes above the main entrance to Bulmer starred briefly in the first Lord of the Rings film, as the exit to the mines of Moria. Twisted and fissured and folded into the most amazing shapes by millennia of uplift and erosion.
Beneath the surface is a labyrinth of passages, chambers, shafts and rifts. Some of the rifts are 100m deep and over 30m wide with house-sized boulders jammed in, suspended there, needing to be climbed over and around, mindful of the black open spaces beneath. I have perhaps sounded overly dramatic in my description but Bulmer is definitely one of the toughest caves to get through in New Zealand. It now totals over 70 kilometres in length and 750m deep.

This year as part of the expedition myself and two friends decided to go back to a part of the cave last visited in 1988 called the Whinging Pom Streamway. Apologies to all you Poms but apparently the Poms on the initial exploration trip really did complain a lot.
This year, after some squeezing and climbing the three of us found a way past the end of the stream and up a rift, popping out into a shaft 30m above the floor. From there it look us three days to climb across the face of the shaft towards an open black space that could have been anything at all. The rock was covered in mud and rotten to boot, breaking off as soon as we stepped on it. I magnanimously suggested someone else do the climb in the spirit of discovery. In retrospect I would rather have done the climb since I had to spend three consecutive days sitting on belay in mud, in temperatures on the wrong side of two degrees. Good one.

On the third day we made it to the other side of the traverse and found over half a kilometre of passages never seen before by anyone, ever. The way continues on, eating into a blank space on the map. We just need to get past another climb, which is our next project for another day.

This image is very grainy as I shot it just using the available light from our cave headlamps. It shows the darkness, cold and atmosphere of a cave as it really is.