Snake Mine - Jess Stirrups

The last Tuesday night trip before the lockdown and it was a good one. Several of us arrived at the parking and got changed, I was running rather late due to underestimating how long it takes to drive there so ended up throwing the car in where it wouldn’t get clobbered by a passing quarry lorry and threw my kit on as fast as possible. We had been asked to avoid the yard due to corona virus so we hacked up through the wood and across to the shaft top – having been there recently made finding it much easier. We then had a short discussion on who was going where.

Given its been a couple of weeks, I can’t remember everyone who was there so if you’re missing feel free to add yourself! Myself, Rob, Katie, Sally and Julian all went in the climbing entrance, myself and Katie having been down the shaft the previous trip here and were keen to try and make the exchange happen this time. Mark, Grace, John, Jenny and maybe 1 other? descended the shaft.

As before, we could see and here each other for the first part of each entrance due to the windows between the 2. The climbing route then headed off sideways, past a turn to a rather dodgey climb down an even more dodgy shaft/winze with a lot of hanging death, until the main route met a hole in the floor with “140ft” or something similar scratched above it. There was much debate as to whether this was the 140ft shaft on the rigging topo, and whether we should split into 2 further smaller groups and try and rig the other set of shafts as well or just stick to this one. I began to feel a bit like a jack-in-the-box rigging the pitch head as I had to scramble back out every time we changed our minds so people could climb past me in one direction or the other due to the hanging death at the pitch head. Eventually we decided this was the right shaft, and we would stick together so off down the shaft I went, looking for the rebelays promised by the topo. After descending down a fine rift/stope bounded on both sides by decent looking pack walls I eventually reached the bottom without having encountered a single re-belay despite some fairly thorough looking. The rope did rub in a couple of places so the pitch really could do with some more bolts… I then finished the last bit of rigging and popped out into the lower level just as Katie appeared behind me, also having not found any other bolts.

This route drops into the lower level through a hole between some very dubious bits of “ceiling” that we had just been stood on and the other group had been about to go under as I got there – worth being careful here. It was good to see the others as it meant we could exchange as planned this time, which we all did successfully, our group exiting up the engine shaft and arriving on the surface a little ahead of the others due to the simpler nature of our way out.

We all felt that there was more we had not seen here – a trip down the other set of shafts in the climbing route and a good poke around at the bottom of the engine shaft (the survey seems to indicate and even lower level which is accessible?) so it’s likely that there will be a return trip at some point. It was quite a late finish but due to virus concerns we had already decided the pub was out so we all wished each other luck and that we would see each other on the other side…