Harwood's Hole and other deep and meaningful things

Mixing freely with large groups of people is not something I like doing. The thought of it makes me antsy which in turn makes me even less gregarious than I might otherwise be. Planning to attend the New Zealand Speleological Society's AGM therefore had the potential to generate many sleepless nights.

On the other hand getting away for a long weekend, going caving in new places and risking meeting the odd nice person (and maybe the nice odd one) is happily quite alluring. Thus it was that I held my breath, closed my eyes and registered to attend the weekend on Takaka Hill.

Believing that accommodation was going to be at a premium of Aucklandesque proportions I arrived several hours early. Had I been another minute earlier the hut warden would not have been there to unlock the gate for the start of the weekend. In the end the NSG hut and grounds sported only a scattering of campers, with lots of delegates choosing to stay elsewhere in the neighbourhood.

Nelson Speleological Group's hut on Takaka Hill.

   The Nelson cavers made a grand effort to offer their visitors a wide range of caving (and non-caving) options for the weekend. Thus began the next conundrum. Which trips to choose! The name “Harwood's Hole”  serenaded me like a myriad of mythical cave sirens from the list on the whiteboard – daring me to voluntarily ignore the daunting prospect of dangling 100m in mid-air on a spiders thread, neither half-way up nor half-way down, and to put my name down for the trip. The sales pitch for it made mention of suitable levels of abseiling experience and I had to admit to having only ever done a maximum of 30m in daylight and about 50m underground. I also wanted to resist the temptation of ‘just’ being a tourist, I wanted real caving. What if Harwood’s turned out to be all hype and no grist?

Another trip on the list was to Chris S.’s and Rob Ds’ domestically named ‘Mahoe Hole’. Promises were made of it being on-going, needing only a feather-light push to reach next large and thus-far unexplored passages. (Note to self: remember how gullible you are). Moreover the cave system plunged 140 vertical metres – sounded like a perfect warm up for then claiming to be suitably experienced for the long descent into Harwood’s. Done deal then, Mahoe Hole on Saturday and Harwood’s one on Sunday.

 

Transport to Mahoe Hole. V8 - sounded sooo cool...

It will quite possibly go without saying that, come Saturday, Mahoe Hole didn’t ‘go’. It was however unique (to me) in that it existed at a vertical interface between bands of limestone and marble, which looked very nice, and it will also go down as my first cave Café experience, which smelled very nice. The quantity of high precision instrumentation taken down there was equally staggering. In the end the best clue we got as to where the draft was and wasn’t, came not from the absurd selection of anemometers on hand (3) but from the simple nasal detection of whereabouts in the cave we could smell Gavin’s coffee.

Afterwards we went prospecting in The Paddock of Great Joy but that deserves its own article. Talk about traveling for cross-cultural exchanges, those boys know how to prospect… vast acreages of soft green grass, unexplored holes every 5^th step, masses of glorious sunshine…
 

Shift a rock, find a hole

Mieke re-appearing from some 10-15m under the paddock

Next up Harwood's Hole. Phil, our leader for the trip, is a man who knows how to organise. Or put less diplomatically he knows just how slow cavers really are and therefore how ridiculously early you actually have to start a trip in order to finish it approximately on the same calendar day. He is also a man who forgets to pull punches. So when he’s thinking to himself ‘the rope I’m using today, to lower these 10 cavers 200m underground, is getting very old and quite tatty so this’ll be its last trip ever’, it doesn’t occur to him that telling us as much, after we’ve driven an hour to get to the carpark (and therefore committed to the trip) but just before we spend half an hour walking to the take-off point (and therefore with lots of time to let that information ferment), might be ever so slightly nerve-racking for those of us with Nile-fertile imaginations.

Kitting up for the descent

Harwood's Hole is big, although you probably didn’t need me to tell you that. I reckon my entire half acre section back in Westport would comfortably slide into the mouth of that hole, and that without anyone shouting ‘whoa there, you’re a bit close on this side’ as it was being lowered in. Rigging the pitch was time consuming, waiting for the 4 people in the line ahead of me to descend was torturous. However by time I arrived at the take-off ledge I was ready for action. Camera on, a sincere thank-you to the long-suffering Phil - who saw all 10 of us off at nearly half an hour a piece  – and down the greasy slope I slid. And slid, and slid, and then slowly the mossy bank and I parted company and gradually it grew distant from me. So it was that I was gently eased into the approximate centre of an empty universe without my really noticing. Then I did notice.

Sheer terror. 

Instinctively I looked back to my last point of contact, now also disconcertingly far off.

So this was it, this was the great Harwood's Hole abseil. In truth it was hardly Evan the beginning, but I wasn’t to know, there are no markers on the way to calibrate the yawning nothingness stretching ever further away in every conceivable direction. Somehow at the time I decided just to enjoy it, even though the recollection of it now still makes my head spin like a first-time smoker. I invoked the all important leg-wrap (technique for slowing-down when abseiling) and promptly ground to halt, I tried opening up the bars on my rack (descending device) and caught my stomach just in time to stop it exiting my body through my mouth. I mused, as I twiddled with my home-made rack, that it was not the slowing down that I was having to be mindful of, but the keeping moving. There had to be a happy medium of a well-paced descent, somewhere where my 1.3 kg rack could ring cheerily like an over-sized tuning fork. Anyway the technicalities of it all occupied the mind somewhat and were probably a useful distraction.              

Half way. One of the things about a long descent like this, is that it takes a long time, call me Einstein I know. It’s like an All-day Sucker, it’s great, then it’s better, then it’s amazing and I’m still only halfway down. Awesome. A short while later I got my first glimpse of the bottom. ‘Ahh’, I said to myself, ‘I see where the others have left their bags and have undoubtedly sauntered off to inspect the inner workings of the cave’. Another short while later I let out a girly shriek and yell out, ‘I thought those specks of colour were your bags, but you’re the actual people, I can’t believe it, you’re soo small, that’s amazing, you’re really really tiny’, etc. etc. The blithering went on for quite a bit. By now at least my rate of descent was panning out nicely. Buzz, bizz, BIZZZ, bizz, buzz, bizz and so on. More yelling (me), the occasional indistinct holler (them) and the 'landing rock' is now visible, looking to be about the size of a marble or maybe a soccer ball, I couldn't tell. The landing rock welcoming party welcomes me and I land. I wasn’t shaking which surprised me, I guess the adrenalin had hit and run-out by then. 

Bia and Ola waiting patiently for us to descend

Having now made up a party of 5, we made a start for the base of the massive rock field. Pausing for a moment at Peter’s memorial to reflect. Peter was the leader of the first expedition who died here January 1960 after being hit by a large rock as he exited the cave. 

Within minutes of reaching the last loose rock we’re at the streamway and at the start of an awful lot of flowstone (a type of cave formation). Flowstone that defies imagination, flowstone that you can’t measure in metres this way by metres that way, because it just goes on and on and on. In fact I can’t recall if it ever actually came to an end or even had a break for the next two hours or so of caving. But then, hey, flowstone is just flowstone isn’t it. The pools however were not just pools, they were arresting. Literally arresting, stop and stare kind of stuff. Seeing these pools is the first time I’ve ever experienced a cave feature in real life in the same way as I have seen them in Neil and Marcus’ new book on caves. Mega lighting not needed, coloured filters, expensive lenses, post-production voodoo all added nothing to what could be seen and ogled at here in real life. Really cool.

I had, in all the excitement, never thought to ask if anyone in my group had been through the cave before, since such a guide was recommended. Happily one had, sadly it was so long ago that he just about might as well have not. Still we weren’t lost for too long and the cave is hardly what you’d call a maze. Then came Starlight Passage and for a second time ‘Caves: exploring New Zealand’s subterranean wilderness’ could not over-sell the real life experience. Really really cool. And, dare I say it, better than the abseil.

Having been reassured by our semi-guide that we’d finished with the none-too-scarce rope work we dismantled ourselves of our SRT (rope ascending/descending) equipment. This made the next squeezie wee hole a little more comfortable to negotiate, although upon the discovery of a longish rope immediately on the other side of the squeeze, we were obliged to re-apply all our SRT gear once again. 
Starlight Cave exit. For the third time in as many hours I got to experience in real life what I had thought was just the domain of large-format, glossy coffee-table books. Neil of course did excellently in photographing the exit, but the Starlight Cave exit is there in person and looks every bit as incredible in the real world. Really really really cool, quite literally super-cool, the water is a gasp-worthy temperature, but also refreshing with the prospect of scorching bright sunlight only a few metres further on. Harwood's Hole may be uber touristy and feature for the wrong reasons in the news too oft but it is still totally a cave worth visiting. Plenty of grist and still well under-sold in all the hype.

A huge thank-you to all those involved in organising the weekend, the food and the trips. “I’ll be baack”.


A clip of my descent can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua9ULB22XjU.


Neil and Marcus' book can be sourced via this link, Caves: exploring New Zealand's subterranean wilderness