Claritas Caving - 23 December 2013

The April edition of New Zealand Geographic has a major feature on the current attempts to link two of NZ's longest caves, Stormy Pot and Nettlebed Cave. Jonathan Ravens, who heads the Claritas development team, has been involved with Nettlebed exploration for the last 30 years, and is part of the team searching for the connection from the Nettlebed side. The caves are 10 and 24 km long, and the cave surveys (another of Jonathan's creations) say there's a 80m gap between them. But as you might guess, mapping systems like this isn't the easiest job, and with no way of getting a GPS fix with 500m of rock above your head, that gap could be 8m or 180m. Unfortunately, we do know that it's very heavily faulted marble; a loose chaos of boulders, untouched by human hand. So it's an exciting time for the NZ cavers.

When the connection is made, the through trip from high up on one side of Mt. Arthur, under the mountain to the base of the other side, will have a 1200m height difference, making it the second deepest through trip on the planet. Given the extreme nature of both caves, the through trip will take most parties three days to complete, with two underground camps on the way, which will make it probably the longest and hardest through trip in the world.

The NZ Geographic article includes some stunning photography which we acquired in a couple of 5-day trips in 2012. Some of the photos that didn't fit into the magazine article are viewable online at http://www.nzgeographic.co.nz/magazine/latest-issue/issue120/caves