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1996 Yangtze Gorges Expedition
Dong Ba
Jiang Kou Area
Back in Tien Xing, above Jiang Kou, efforts now shifted to Dong Ba, a cave also thought ideally placed to drop in to the continuation of Furong Dong. Unsettled weather had kept us out for the first few days. The cave is very flood prone and contains two ducks (where water nearly comes to the roof of the cave passage) just beyond the first pitch. The 1994 expedition had discovered a beautiful clean washed active streamway with plenty of pitches and climbs. They had run out of time at the head of a 45m deep shaft at a depth of -168m.
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Tobacco fields above Dong Ba
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Ben, Ali and I rigged Dong Ba to 30m down the pitch at the previous limit of exploration. We then became victims of our own success, because the rest of the team had found other exciting caves to push as well. We didn't have enough rope to push all of them at once. |
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We found ourselves in the invidious position of having to cease exploration of one of the caves, Da Wan Dong. The ropes would have to be pulled out of it, to allow further exploration of Dong Ba.
In the meantime Ali and I went down the 45m pitch beyond the 1994 limit in Dong Ba, then three short wet pitches of about 9m each. This led to some smaller horizontal passage, which intersected a large calcite vein. All the passage walls were pure white. This unusual passage suddenly broke out at the head of a vast shaft. We had no rope left.
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The Li Zhong Xue family invited us into their farmhouse to eat, drink and be entertained by songs from the children. It was another example of the spontaneous hospitality and generosity of the people we met.
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The rest of the team had photographed, surveyed, explored more of and finally derigged Da Wan Dong. After a late finish, they were too tired to join Ali and I as we headed back into Dong Ba the next day, with the 135m of rope they'd got from Da Wan Dong. Within two hours of reaching yesterday's shaft, we had used all but two metres of the rope. Ali had done most of the rigging and I was only called upon to do one bolt. The 108m shaft was nicely broken up by two deviations, three rebelays and a knot pass. We had reached a little horizontal passage, before yet another pitch of 30m.
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Having used up all the expedition rope, we had no choice but to immediately start derigging the cave. We had reached a depth of nearly 400m. There was no sign of the cave joining Furong Dong and at this depth it had probably passed it. It felt frustrating to be thwarted by lack of equipment. We knuckled under and by 7:00 pm, we had all the rope back on the surface we had taken in that morning.
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