Titan Streamway

By Chris Playfoot

3/10/09

After a drunken conversation with Mike on the thursday night after the Plug Social (which was awesome I might add) we decided to have a relaxed weekend at the TSG hut in Castleton. Before I get onto that, its worth a mention about Martins blue face painted bald head in Plug on thursday. A hilarious night was had by all who attended so everyone should make effort to attend the future socials! (if not only for Martins smurf like head)…

Anyway, on the friday night me, Mike and Sam headed out to the TSG and had a relaxed friday night in the pub with Big Jim, Jess and various other people who were down for a TSG meeting. On saturday we were talking about a Titan – Peak through trip because i’ve never done Titan. This fell through and Larry (Tsg) was already going down Titan derigging after a group already doing the through trip.

Me and Mike decided to tag along with Larry and do a little Titan streamway trip, plus derig.

In what we thought were about grade 3.5 changing conditions rapidly changing to a grade 4 with the wind and rain it was a relief to drop into the entrance shaft where it was relatively warm. After getting to the pitch head of Titan and peeking over the edge it was only then that I grasped the sheer scale of the shaft. (or not, because our lights weren’t powerful enough to give the full perspective) The rope that the through trip team had used looked and felt very odd which was slightly disconcerting. It was absolutely fine but just a different ‘posher’ rope than we’d all been used to. Dropping down to the Event Horizon was interesting on the 80m pitch with the rope slowly spinning me round for some reason. After we were all down, a traverse to the left  into the streamway followed. This brought us to an awesome streamway which was awesomly clean and according to mike, not something expected of Derbyshire!

It had a few interesting climbs which required a bit of teamwork but nothing too arduous! We reached a bedding plain where the passage closed down so decided to head back out and de-rig. My first time down Titan and we only got halfway down and was already knackered prussiking just the half way up! (and i wasn’t carrying a bag)

Through trip next time.

Chris