This caving trip was the reason the Andy Heath had organised a trip to the Haute Savoy. Described in the French caving guide “A Travers le Karst” as the best through trip in France, we were all keen to go. Unfortunately, the book also says that you need settled weather for the trip as heavy rain makes the streamway dangerous, so we had to watch the weather forecasts and choose the day for our trip carefully…
Our objective: La Grotte de la Diau
We left the Isca van at the Chalet L’Anglette on the Parmelan Plateau and began an uncomfortable 1hr 15 min walk to the entrance in our wetsuits.
Chalet L'anglette... with tiny Isca van!
The backs of our knees might have been chafing already, but it was a beautiful sunny morning. We were surrounded by alpine flowers and fantastic scenery.
crossing limestone pavement
Considering this was supposed to be one of the best caving trips in France, the entrance didn’t look very impressive. It was just a smallish hole in the limestone pavement.
Mandy Voysey at the entrance
The entrance series comprises of a series of lovely fluted pitches in pale limestone, including an enormous 88m pitch which can be split into 3 smaller ones with ledges in between.
Andy Rumming on one of the entrance pitches
The part between the bottom of the final pitch of the entrance series and the Puit Des Echos is muddy, nadgery fossil passage with a couple of slippery traverses. We had our lunch stop in this section to try to cheer ourselves up! We’d been underground for about 6 hours at this point and were in need of a boost to morale.
Puit Des Echos is absolutely magnificent. We treated it as 3 pitches of 6m, 20m and 39m but it’s even bigger than that as we popped into it part way down. It certainly lives up to its name.
Helpful signage at the bottom of Puit Des Echos
From here the character of the cave changes and it becomes a lot more fun. We were now following an active streamway down lots of small pitches. This passage was a lot narrower than we had been expecting – no wonder the cave is dangerous in wet conditions; there’d be a lot of water going through some very narrow spaces! Eventually, we reached the final abseil into the Diau streamway. We were now in known territory as some of the group had previously recced this end of the cave and to celebrate we stopped for more food in the Salle De Chaos. Mr Heath’s “Mur et Frambois” sweeties, described by Andy Rumming as having a smell somewhere between fruit and air-freshener, were voted top snack of the trip.
Andy Heath: trip organiser and provider of gourmet sweeties
From here on it was relatively easy caving through deep pools of water. Simon and Andy Rumming were left to bring up the rear and opted for a couple of laps of the entrance chamber before finding their way out. The entire trip had taken us 12.5 hours.
"No photos" Becky waves away papparazzi in the streamway
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