Zach Harland and Adam Baldock
Over the past few months, myself and Zach have been working on an audio documentary about caving, and I will be posting the documentary on the website alongside this rant. This rant is sort of three mini rants in one, with detail about the process. For the documentary itself scroll down to the bottom.
Beginnings:
After ranting to Zach about naked caving and smashed plates for a good hour and rifling off random cave names, I quickly captured his interest for exploring underground. Zach was doing a sound production degree at the time, and after my splurging on the topic he decided to do his field recording on caving and its culture. The assignment from the university constrained the project to only 9 minutes so the audio is packed in pretty tight. Nonetheless, I feel like we managed to capture the main aspects of caving, its culture and most importantly, the raw sounds of the caves and potholes themselves. Aside from in the caves, we recorded the training sessions, dinner meet, and chats in the car to capture the full spectrum of the caving world.
Ribblehead Caves:
To get the feel for what we wanted, we took some initial recordings in The Chemic to get used to the equipment and then headed out to our first caves – Runscar Cave and Thistle. After flushing out a barn owl on the way to find the perfect spot for a communal poo, we climbed down into Cuddy Gill Sink to stash our bags and get changed. I have always considered myself very adept at faffing, however this was a new territory; with helmets stuffed precariously in cracks and expensive electrical gear carefully balanced between drips we tentatively gained our first recordings. It’s amazing what our shit human hearing fails to pick up. Scanning the mic around with the headphones on is truly incredible, the diversity of sounds within a one square metre of trickling streamway is impressive. In fact, everyone who stayed and helped for later trips all agreed how much sitting and recording makes you appreciate the sounds of the caves which, normally, you might just bomb down and barge through. After a few hours we departed the caves with a full SD card and a good day’s caving.
Dinner Meet and Crackpot:
The next major recording session was at dinner meet. It was really great to see the interest and how excited people were to talk to Zach about the project and get involved. I always preached so highly about the cavers and the community to him, and it was really gratifying to see the response.
By the time people were sitting down for dinner Zach had been guided to Alan Brook and he was like a kid at Christmas. With the recorder perfectly protected from background noise by Alan’s beard, Zach was soon lost in the stories and audio gold. So lost in fact that halfway through he realised he forgot to switch the recorder on! It wasn’t only Alan who Zach sat down and recorded, and I want to say a big thanks to everyone who was involved and helped make recordings, the enthusiasm was amazing. It gave the documentary the variety of voices and stories that it needed.
The second cave recording session was down Crack Pot – what a great little cave! A solid start was had credit to Ben’s driving, flopping like a foul stinking oystercatcher down into Keld and Mucker. We soon rolled up to the parking with Mike already being there, and he was busy, at least his van was. It was engrossed in surveying the quality of the finest Swaledale drystone walling. Sadly, Mike didn’t approve of this new interest, and with a bit of fettling, rope, a sling and a D ring we had the van straightened up.
We headed up to the cave in two groups. The cave itself was well behaved, with some satisfying crawling which served us out into a good stream with some particularly charming deposits. We all met up at the end and Zach set about getting some great recordings of the streamway, singing and some cracking stories. After a variety of recordings from the opening a chocolate bar to about 5 minutes of Zach kicking a rock around for some genuine audio gold and great personal pleasure we headed back out.
The final recordings (Lost Johns’):
After looking at the recordings we had collated we felt that what was missing was the sound of a lively cascading streamway and the echo of a massive chamber or aven. In the search for booming echoes and raucous streamway we settled on Lost Johns’. While Ane, Angela and Simon headed down Notts II for some great photos, we made our way down through Lost Johns’ lovely entrance streamway noting the best recording spots as we went. We commenced our recording with a selection of short monologues and singing set against the mighty reverb of Centipede. Satisfied with these recordings, we made a swift exit, willed onwards by Zach’s struggle with a particularly aggressive shit.
On the way we paused above the streamway at the old roof traverse for some airy recordings above the torrent and a rather dynamic piss into the abyss, adding to the flow.
By the end of Lost Johns’ the recordings had become a lot slicker, mostly helped by the fact the device could be easily held and stowed in one hand, powered by internal batteries and the transfer of recordings onto a small SD card. I can’t even imagine how hard it was for Sid Perou to record those classic documentaries.
I hope people enjoy the documentary. We got some superb stories and sound bites that a lot of which, were not used. These will be uploaded to an audio library on the ULSA website and may be incorporated into a longer audio doc in the future.
Finally for the best listening and so not to miss a single drip, the documentary is best listened to with headphones.
