Trip Report – Baume de Cretes

What I love about this cave is you never get bored as it completely changes during the adventure.

Due to the sun we rushed out from the car parking area, across a fine cow pat field and avoided an electric fence and barbed wire fence to reach the safety of the woodland around the cave entrance. It was so hot…..I.e really hot for uk standards. I advise several journeys to stash equipment in the trees.

Matt enjoyed a challenging rigging experience with traverse at the entrance which, to be honest, is a deep and frightening chasm, however there are loads of P bolts (indeed too many) which keeps one reassured.

A fine descent of ~35-40m ends at the top of a brilliant sloping cave at 45 degrees, it’s really steep and absolutely massive with great flow formations coming out of the walls high up and those lovely pancake stalagmites.

At the base is an empty chamber with rustic boulder furniture; on the derigging trip we sat around as three the three witches from Macbeth and plotted.

The way on is over and under some boulders, a strange descent using rigging with awkward rope angles/pitch head. Then we got lost going uphill, but the way on is down a chute into nice chamber with pools and formations. You then stagger across the gloop, up a climb; down a climb and a further double (broken) pitch and you land in a lonely seep sided chamber with only a lovely flow stone for company. Over some boulders is a cascade to a blind pitch. We amused ourselves by increasing the flow over the cascade to a satisfying splash. But the way on on is behind you through a crawl and down a rift to just above a streamway. Then you either wade through the steamway and duck up to your neck in water to avoid a boulder, or climb up an in situ rope to an upper gallery. Either way, eventually you end up back in neck nigh water and squirm into an annoying boulder choke.

Then it gets easier, a climb down, then canyon in which you swing your legs over some holes. Then down a cascade into a pool that is a bastard to climb back out of on return. Then climb up to arrive at the final pitch into the main steamway, which is exposed and lovely. Mandy rigged and we bottomed with speed.

The main stream way is lovely and wide, many jaggered cascades and waterfalls to climb up and amusing deep pools to navigate around, though I would seriously not like to do this outside of dry conditions. On first trip we didn’t have enough rope to get to the final chamber upstream, however, I returned on the de-rigging trip with more gear and we got to the last chamber which is apparently right next to the Verneau! Good formations but there was a roped way on which we didn’t pursue sadly.

The downstream route to the sump has exciting large rocks to navigate but these become progressively covered in more and more slimey mud. Eventually there are mounds of mud all around with no apparent sump. It’s was really grim and we exited in haste. Clearly the whole canyon ends up underwater!

— Tam