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Da Dong Entrance
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1996 Yangtze Gorges Expedition
Da Dong
Jiang Kou Area
Dave Brook, Ali Garman and I, saw the entrance to Da Dong while being shown another cave entrance by Zhu Xuewen and local guides. We didn't know if we would be allowed to explore it, because it was in a different jurisdiction, although part of the same geographic area. However when rain stopped work in Dong Ba, we managed to negotiate permission and transport, to begin exploration.
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On August 15th, Steve Mulhull, Anne Gallagher, Eoghan Lynch, Dave and I, just had time to survey 200m into the cave. A clean washed streamway with deep pools began 30m high and became on average 10m high and 6m wide. This went down a couple of climbs to a pitch. It looked promising!
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The next few days were taken up with getting the ropes out of Dong Ba, finishing up in Da Wan Dong and surface reconnaissance. Our problems with lack of equipment were also solved. Adrian Gregory travelled to Fuling and got 350m of rope and 40 bolts from Andy Eavis. Andy and Pete Hall had flown to Hong Kong to free the freight and were on their way with a team to the 'Great Crack' near Xin Long.
On August 19th, Ben Lovett, Ali Garman, Jack and Laurie Sheldon surveyed 307m in Da Dong and dropped a further 83m in depth. This involved tackling many small climbs and pitches, between which were deep pools of water.
The 20th was largely devoted to tackling Mi Dong and our other sites. As all the threads of these different projects came together, I was unreasonably frustrated to spend a day going to Jiang Kou Town to take a phone call.
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The pressures of leadership start to tell! In reality, on this expedition there was only 'nominal' leadership and decisions were achieved by consensus. How this was done, was an interesting psychological exercise.
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We now had less than six days left in the field. Many of the team were suffering from minor injury, exhaustion, and sickness. It was fairly obvious that we were being stretched to tackle more than one major deep, cold and wet cave. We would soon have to decide which one we could concentrate on.
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