expoweb/years/1991/report.htm

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>1991: Cambridge Underground report</title>
</head>
<body>
<center><font size=-1>Cambridge Underground 1992 pp 12-15</font>

<h1>Austria '91</h1>

<h3>Wookey</h3></center>

<p>'91 was the sixteenth year of Cambridge University Caving Club
Expeditions to the Totes Gebirge in Austria. We had 25 people, awful
weather, 40 trips &amp; 908 caving hours producing 1793m of surveyed passage,
and about 500m more not yet surveyed. We drank over 700 bottles of Bier.

<p>The pile surrounding the wookvan was about 20ft across and looked utterly
ridiculous. 2 hours later it had miraculously disappeared inside, except for
the two hang-gliders, windsurfer, 5 surveying poles, 6 aerial scaffolding
poles and 12 spare HG uprights. Iain (Miller, East Dorset SS) had failed to
get much sleep the night before as he had been fixing his car and was the
only driver. He made it to within 12km of the campsite before finally
falling asleep and blowing up two tyres hitting the kerb. Olly and Fran (his
lucky passengers) had to walk these last klicks to get Mark D to drive out
and initiate the rescue.

<p>The only other vehicle event during the expo was when Tony's 205 GTI
stopped working mysteriously on one trip down the toll road, only to work
again after the ignominy of being towed to the campsite by Del's crap
strada - still going despite the fact that it should have died gracefully
some time ago. Julian Todd's new (to him) car was also pronounced
'very ill' by those in the know when it used 5 litres of oil on
the way out.

<p>The Wook managed to break a tent pole in two places on first attempting to
erect his brand new poncy tent at Top Camp and was only able to fix it by
borrowing a pole sleeve from Paul Smith's Supernova. Wookey also later
burned a hole in it with a candle.

<p>The caving was a bit slow to get underway as the weather was far too nice
and too hot to carry loads of gear around the place. When people finally
went, it was not to 161, but to Puffball and Icing Sugar Cave (<b
lang=de>Bovistundpuderzucker-h&ouml;hle</b>), a find from the end of 1990.
This was fine, except that most of the old lags who knew where to go in <b
lang=de>KH&ouml;hle</b> were bored titless of it and so chose Puffball
instead.

<p>Our new radios provided much amusement as very little knowledge was
combined with much enthusiasm to build impressive aerials that didn't
actually work very well, especially not with the computer turned on. This
meant that it was only possible to use the radios by agreeing call-up times
in the morning and evening when basecamp would be listening in. This worked,
but after the luxury of the year before, was a little frustrating.

<h2>Puffball</h2>

<p>Rigging-in down Puffball progressed apace, with 7 trips in as many days.
Del &amp; JulianH rigged the helpful but somewhat superfluous ladder near the
entrance and the 1st pitch, whilst Ju &amp; Jon started the mammoth task of
surveying the ultra-widdly entrance series. The next two trips rigged down
'Shell pitch' and then the long vertical 'Q8' &amp; 'Dot to Dot' series of
pitches. They found the first and second 'bottoms' ('Strike One' &amp;
'Strike Two' or 'Del's Bottom') where the rifts closed down, in both cases
continuations were found by penduluming higher up.

<p>Jon, Gill &amp; Ol continued the mega-tedious Yorkshire Ripper survey
over two trips &amp; then went down to 'Strike Two' and rigged the
rather cruddy 'Bottom Bypass' pitch which proved to be the end of
the 100m drop. This was followed by the exceptionally unhelpful-with-gear
'Tarzan's Folly' which led into bigger cave with classic
streamway/pitch/ development. Puffball was looking good, and a couple more
efficient trips rigged down Natural Redundancy, Cyclotron, Cloud Chamber
&amp; NDE.

<p>It was on this 7th trip that Puffball revealed its true nature when a
thunderstorm made the place extremely unpleasant and gave Juliette, Tony,
JulianH &amp; Del a hard time (see <a href="log.htm#1991-182-7">Ju's
write-up</a> for the gory details - as if you hadn't already heard them 15
times in the pub). This distressing experience produced a sudden surge of
enthusiasm for good ol' 161.  

<p>Team Hanglider was also out in force this year - JulianT, MarkS, IanH
&amp; Wookey (in order of keenness). They had four gliders between them -
Julian's Kiss, and an Atlas, Typhoon &amp; Clubman from CU Hang Gliding Club.
MarkS had an ignominious first attempt with the Typhoon. Whilst he was
rigging there was lots of animation from an employee of the Bergrestaurant.
After much handwaving it transpired that someone had crashed and needed help
from hang-gliders to rescue his glider. Wookey drove down to the other ramp
to check it out and discovered a man with a broken arm being tended to in the
road and his glider practically on a cliff, tied to the Armco barrier. He
explained that he would sort it out &amp; went back up to get help.

<p>He was just too late to see MarkS running gracefully off the top ramp
&amp; spiralling straight into the ground (but fortunately a German tourist
had it all in his video camera for us to review). MarkS was extremely lucky
to hit the only patch of grass for miles and got away with bending his
upright, smashing his camera, and spraining his ankle. After fishing his
glider back up the slope we were finally able to work on the amusing task of
de-rigging a glider tied to a hairpin without wrecking it.

<p>Later efforts were less epic &amp; both Wookey &amp; IanH got their first
ramp launches in, although Ian bounced off the end of the ramp in a
heart-stopping manner.

<h2 lang=de>Kaninchenh&ouml;hle</h2>

<p>For the first two weeks there were only a few people doing
<span lang=de>KH&ouml;hle</span> trips; old lags (and Fran, JulianS &amp;
IanH) in France (161c), and a few rigging-in to the RH Route, carefully
improving the Dreamtime rigging for the expected heavy traffic that it never
actually got. Ian Harris arrived for his first trip and then asked 'Where's
my hat &amp; light?' - for some reason he was surprised to find that he was
supposed to have carried them up himself. Knossos was turned into a single
hang to eliminate 1990's mysterious rub near the top. Iain was unimpressed
with the rigging and re-rigged the 2nd &amp; 3rd pitches just to show how
well it could have been done; especially the second pitch which changed rigs
every five minutes last year, but was still crap until Miller got to it.

<p>On the third <span lang=de>KH&ouml;hle</span> trip Wook, Henri &amp; Andy
finally made it to Burble which needed to be pushed so that the survey
wouldn't fit on the paper any more. The crawl proved to be a pain in the bum
(especially to survey) and it unfortunately went (via a p38 - 'Vom pitch').
Andy ran out of rigging gear halfway down, so Wook got to run around the
bottom first. There was lots of nice walking passage and an obvious lead at
'Exhaustion Pitch'.  

<p>This was a long way in and getting tackle through Burble Crawl was pretty
awful so the search was on for a bypass. The next two trips down here
(MarkM, JulianH, AndyA, JulianS, MarkS in various combinations) found, a
couple of climbs that didn't go ('Shelf Indulgence' being one
of them), some more passage and leads at the foot of 'Exhaustion
Pitch', and, by climbing a 4m slope, a huge chamber ('Repton I
&amp; II'), which almost rivals Knossos in size.  

<p>There were two ways on found out of Repton II - one down the obvious exit
passage, and one down a hairy 8m climb through the boulder floor, which is
still-going running passage.

<p>France was also going well, with 3 trips confirming that the 161c
entrance dropped straight into France, and finding a passage 10m up this
'Francophobia' pitch ('Robinson Crusoe'). This was
identical &amp; parallel to the one below it connecting France &amp; the
FCII rift. It continued on the other side of the FCII rift, accessible by a
dodgy traverse. Strangely this section of passage had a welly print in it,
whilst the previous section didn't, and the climb up from the floor
looked very unlikely. Thus it was named 'Man Friday'.

<p>MarkD and his assistants rigged on down below 'The Dice', the
huge block in France, duly calling the pitch 'Roll of the Dice'. 
It was on this trip that Mark's footloops - which he &quot;had been meaning
to replace for ages&quot; finally snapped on the way out. His shouts for aid
were answered only by a &quot;What's that Mark, I can't hear you&quot; from
a sniggering Paul Smith, and there was much jollity as they listened to him
huffing his way slowly up the pitch, muttering dire curses. Later on, Henri,
MarkS, Tony, Fran &amp; Andy pushed on down another pitch to the current
partly explored hading rift pitch. They also surveyed everything below the
Dice.

<p>One day when we wandered up to the camp we found a small horde of Slovak
cavers wandering about. They were apparently there to help a German group.
They invited us to visit their caves and it looks like this will in fact
happen after the '92 expo.

<p>A trip intending to finally check out the Dungeon (left inconclusive
since the very first 161 trip 4 years ago) was sidetracked when Fran found a
big rift pitch directly below 'Automatic Doors'. This came in via
the passage that had proved to be a very poor campsite 2 years ago for
Jeremy, JulianT &amp; Animal. It also made by far the quickest route into the
system below the squeeze, thus making the newly-fettled Dreamtime rigging
superfluous.

<p>After the first week's activity the weather deteriorated and there
was much sitting about at top camp waiting for the rain to stop. A
boredom-inspired trip to de-rig Dreamtime was all that happened for a couple
of days.

<p>Four more Puffball trips occurred after the washout. First MarkD &amp;
Jon went to the bottom, re-rigged NDE to take out the knot-pass, and (due to
a severe gear shortage) rigged a couple of ladders from naturals and their
one remaining hanger to reach the current end of the cave in a gaping rift,
hading somewhat and nearly big enough to get a train down. Meanwhile, MarkM
&amp; Julians S &amp; H moved the surveying front down to the end of the
'Quark Strangeness &amp; Charm' rift.  

<p>One more push attempt was made by JulianH &amp; MarkD, but piezo failure
caused them to push the lead at the top of Q8 instead. This went down a
couple of pitches and may well make a promising alternative to the current
route into the Darkroom.

<h3>Raining Again</h3>

<p>A final attempt to catch the survey front up to the pushing front by Wook
&amp; JulianH was thwarted by another thunderstorm, the waters reaching them
just as they got to the Darkroom. After waiting for 30mins produced no
improvement, an extremely cold &amp; soggy exit was made. It was awful. At
this point JulianH resolved to buy a real oversuit next year, instead of
using his bin bag &amp; boiler suit combination.

<p>This thunderstorm had caused general chaos as it had washed out Iain
&amp; Jon down the Left Hand Route (fortunately while they were on Butcher,
before they got to Niflheim itself). It also soaked the mega-wrinkly team
down France (Tony, Hugh, PaulS, MarkD &amp; Penny). And finally the team
that had set out to do Eish&ouml;hle was trapped for an hour at the col,
before resigning and trudging back to camp.

<p>After this no-one went down Puffball again until it was forced upon us by
the de-rigging, as the weather never looked good enough.

<p>Meanwhile there was the expo dinner at Hilde/Karin's to which three
of the local Austrian cavers were invited. At this, Hans, one of the
Austrians, offered to take us down <b lang=de>Eish&ouml;hle</b>. as the first
trip had already been thunderstormed off this was welcomed by those who
hadn't been. Henri was useful in her capacity as translator, and the usual
ragged collection of 'caving' kit was assembled to get JulianS, Andy, Fran
&amp; Henri down. JulainS unfortunately lost a crampon on the exit and Hans
made a really hairy ice-climb to a different exit look sufficiently easy that
Andy followed him - much to his regret.

<h3>De-rigging</h3>

<p>People had now all started leaving to avoid the de-rigging, and this meant
that Iain and MarkF had rigged down nearly to the bottom of the Left Hand
Route but had failed to reach the bottom because of the thunderstorm, and
now had to go home. This left the Question Mark at bottom wide open for Wook
and Andy to zoom on down and check out. It went, and (after pushing the very
unlikely 'Wormhole') was connected to the Right Hand Route at an
extremely obscure point in Wobbling. This allowed us them to get out without
going back up Niflheim, which was a good thing as it had obviously been
raining again as all the drips had turned into streams.

<p>This trip caused a neo-rescue as somehow Andy managed to prussik out so
much faster than Wookey that he waited for some time at S'not &amp;
then 1 hour 20 mins at the entrance without hearing anything and thus
decided that something must have gone wrong. He dashed down to camp and dug
Tony, Olly &amp; MarkS out of bed (at 5am). Thus Wookey was extremely
surprised to find people coming to go caving at 05.45! and was soundly abused
for not being sympathetic enough to those who had come to rescue him.

<p>Towards the end a few attempts at finding new entrances were made by Fran,
Andy &amp; Henri. They investigated a couple of shafts but all were blocked
either by snow or rocks.

<p>Dan and Penny had arrived for the second half of the expo and had found
it very difficult to actually get underground as their first attempt was
thwarted by a terminal lack of carbide, and then a
<span lang=de-at>G&ouml;sser</span> bottle
exploded in Dan's hand, cutting his wrist badly and causing a dash to
the hospital. This prevented him from caving for about a week so he only
managed a Knossos tourist trip &amp; a de-rigging trip.

<p>There were also various other trips wandering around Big Sainsbury's
and Dreamtime, with a few new leads found and one new pitch rigged but not
descended due to the water in Dreamtime, as well as an instance of
'second generation cavers' where Olly &amp; JulianS
're-discovered' Bullshit Alley.

<p>De-rigging time was now almost upon us so Olly and Wook went for a mega
trip to get things finished off. They finished off the survey of S'not
pitch. This had been surveyed earlier but no sketches drawn as 'it had
been done before' where this consisted of Wookey having a quick sketch
of it a couple of years ago.

<p>They also de-rigged the bottom of Niflheim so that the rope could be
pulled up from the top, found and surveyed a new bit off the black lagoon
('Trehala'), and measured hellgrind due to insufficient time for a
proper survey. Then they surveyed the rest of 'Ambidextrous' and
went into Burble to derig the 9mm rope in there. When printing the results
of the survey data for Burble it had become obvious that Repton I was
extremely close to an existing bit of the cave - Hyper Gamma Spaces - as
they seemed to overlap. But the descriptions didn't seem to tally so a
check was necessary. Wook went down for a look and found that they were, in
fact, the same, so a burble bypass had been found. The pitch was left rigged
(with the rope from Exhaustion Pitch) so that the bypass could be used next
year.

<p>Finally they set off out leaving two tacklebags tied to the foot of
Knossus pitch for someone else to derig. This epic took 20 hours, getting
back to camp at 12:40pm.

<p>Unfortunately, that afternoon, the <span lang=de>Eish&ouml;hle</span> trip
returned warning of thunderstorms by the next afternoon - they had been given
a weather forecast by Hans. This meant that we had to get the rope out of
Puffball immediately - it would be our last chance. It would take 4 people in
2 waves. Henri volunteered to go down the bottom with Andy but whilst this
was noble it probably wasn't very wise, so it was arranged that as Wookey had
had 2.5hrs sleep he would go first with Andy (at 10pm) and Henri &amp; Ol
would do the second half (starting at 5am the next morning). As France had
already been de-rigged, this left just enough people to de-rig the Left (Dan,
Penny, Tanya) &amp; Right (Tony, JulianS, MarkS, Fran) Hand Routes as well.
Tony felt very ill and hated every minute of it but survived the experience.
All the de-rigging went well and both Puffball trips were completed in about
10hrs each and everyone was out with a few hours to spare before the rain
started.

<p>It went on solidly for four days afterwards, while the nine miserable
souls remaining hauled everything up the entrance pitch and carried it all
back down the mountain.

<p>Tony manfully pulled about 7km of rope through the washer, spending about
5 hours in the rapidly rising river. It proved impossible to dry all the
gear so we had to wait for a couple of extra days for some sunshine. Some of
the time was passed by building a tyrolean traverse across the river, which
was now so swollen that it was flowing across the bottom of Hilde's
garden. This provoked some interest and much photography from the
<span lang=de>Gasthof</span> residents and was very exciting to cross.

<p>Eventually the campsite was packed up, and despite leaving a great deal
of crap in Austria there was a stupendous pile of gear to go in the
Wookmobile. Several hours of caver packing achieved this aim, although quite
a lot had to go on the roof and the end result was a van that was probably
somewhat overloaded. This proved to be disastrous in Switzerland a day or so
later when Henri lost a valiant battle to retain control and she, Wook, a
bent van &amp; the most amazing pile of gear ended up on the hard shoulder.
Again - see <a href="driver.htm">elsewhere in this tome</a> for the gory
details.

<p>And Iain Miller won the beer tally, despite claiming not to drink beer!

<p>Cast: Andy 'Wormhole' Atkinson, Olly 'Whining computer man' Betts, Mark
'footloops' Dougherty, Mark 'The Lord's Day is sacred' Fearon, Julian
'boiler suit bravado' Haines, Ian 'Where's Belgium' Harris, Juliette 'Wet
Herself' Kelly, Fran '3 in a tent' Lane, Gill 'Fridgid' Lindsey, Dan 'Under
the thumb' Mace, Mark 'The Leper' McLean, Iain 'I don't drink beer' Miller,
Penny 'Earth mother' Reeves, Del 'boy''every penny counts' Robinson, Tony
'What's a girl' (C)Rooke, Hugh 'technicolour dreamcoat' Salter , Tanya 'Mind
the bull, you've got red legs' Savage, Mark 'Crash &amp; Burn' Scott, Julian
'Lord of the Flies' Shilton, Paul 'Jolly Blue &amp; Yellow Giant' Smith,
Julian 'Where's the engine' Todd, Henri 'Baldilocks' Welbourne, Jon 'Pretty
boy' Williams, Wookey 'The Wreck-a-tent'

<hr>
<!-- LINKS -->
<img alt="&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/0.png">
Cambridge Underground 1992,
<a href="../../../jnl/1992/index.htm">Table of Contents</a><br>
<img alt="&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/0.png">
1991 Expedition info:<br>
<img alt="---&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
<a href="index.htm">Index</a> (more detail than in this list)<br>
<img alt="---&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
<a href="log.htm">Logbook</a><br>
<img alt="---&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
<a href="newbit.htm">161's New Bits 1991</a><br>
<img alt="---&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
<a href="182.htm">Puffball &amp; Icing Sugar Cave</a><br>
<img alt="---&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
<a href="wash.htm">It's a Washout</a> (flood pulse in Puffball)<br>
<img alt="---&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
<a href="driver.htm">How (not) to drive round Europe</a><br>
<img alt="&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/0.png">
<a href="../../pubs.htm#1991">Index</a> to all publications<br>
<img alt="&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/0.png">
<a href="../../index.htm">Back to Expeditions intro page</a><br>
<img alt="&gt;" src="../../../icons/lists/0.png">
<a href="../../../index.htm">CUCC Home Page</a>

</body>
</html>