Descent 259 will landing on your mats very soon! If you’re not up to date with your subscription, now is the time to renew. The lovely folks at Wild Places Publishing will be happy to add you to the subscriptions list so you don’t miss out.

There’s a packed Newsdesk for you, with even more snippets than usual of what’s been going on in the caving world both at home and abroad. This issue of Descent has the usual roundups of regional caving and mining news plus an impressive array of longer articles and stunning photos. The following is just a sample of the highlights on offer…

A packed schedule of science and electronics meetings sees a report: catch up here with what they’ve been up to. In more controversial news, a new entrance has been opened into Ogof Draenen and there’s a statement on this from the Trustees of the Pwll Du Cave Management Group.

In sad news, the caving world says farewell to Boyd Potts, a stalwart of the caving scene for many years who will be greatly missed.

There’s the first of two linked articles about the 2017 expedition to Mulu that takes us into the high-level passages of Creedence, a cave full of promise. In the second, cavers were helicoptered into a remote area of Mulu, with the team intent on following up known leads in the search for new passage in the Hidden Valley. Hazel Barton concludes her influential series on cave life with a description of how microbes are slowly yielding their secrets. It’s generally known and accepted that stal grows slowly, but Dentdale seems determined to buck that trend! In more concerning news, there’s been a theft of some bones from a site only accessible by cave diving.

The Gear Review section takes a look at the FixnZip, a handy device to repair a broken zip, and we can also read of the attempts to locate an elusive connection in the Dachstein – if successful, it would create a mile-deep section.

All this and more for only the price of a couple of pints of beer per issue. We’ll be bringing you a full report as soon as we can but, in the meantime, we hope the above is enough to whet your appetite and send you over to Wild Places Publishing subscriptions page to ensure yours is up to date!