Alice and Jonty then went for a mega shop whilst Hamish and I began unpacking the loft.
Charlotte, Harry, Hannah C, and Chris arrived, shortly followed by the return of Alice and Jonty, finally getting us up to the eight people apparently required to successfully set up the bier tent.
Alice and I (successfully) tested the Blue Box's number plate on the toll road, then returned to basecamp to admire the now completed bier tent, which shortly thereafter facilitated the frying of 2025's first batches of basecamp chips, shortly before Russell and Joel.
Evening came, accompanied by some splashing around in the river and much packing of top camp bags. Jonty got the tatty hut wifi working shortly before Dan and Dylan arrived by train. No Ella in sight, however, as she became separated from them during a particularly faffy train changeover, and is now due in an hour later. Lara and Hannah UG due by car past midnight.
Then we arrived at Linz, with dan and Dylan exiting the train. Ella however, was hit with the most egregious faff ever seen. And then suddenly, the beep of the train, the rising of the step, the closing of the doors…and the train rolled away with Ella onboard. RIP.
After, a slightly mad panic and laughs at the nightmare of a situation, it was worked out that Ella could get the LAST train to Bad Aussee. Thankfully, all worked out, with us arriving in two groups after 18hrs and 19hrs. This was followed by some unsuccessful putting up of tents in what felt like a car park, but a good night’s sleep despite the tent looking like an old man’s ball bag.
The hope: to be done with this early enough to go and push Joel, Jonty, and Julia's newly discovered cave SE of Balkon: 'Reflectorists'.
We set off up the hill along with Harry, Hannah, Ella, and Hamish, with Becka and Chris a little ways ahead. At the col we parted, with the latter two walking to Topcamp and the rest of us heading straight towards Homecoming. On the way we passed many very enticing holes, most of which had been logged in 2023 but not dropped. The plateau along that walk is practically swiss cheese!
Upon arrival at Homecoming, we had a break and some flapjack before packing rope (and a few bolt hammers and through bolts) whilst Harry, Hannah, Ella, and Hamish headed up to Garlic Camp to collect useful gear. We managed to take the majority of it, but there was still a considerable amount left.
We then set out across the plateau towards Topcamp, the sun absolutely sweltering hot, but very fortunately obscured intermittently by clouds.
We had a break at Fishface, spending awhile enjoying the cold breeze in the entrance. After saying hi to Becka, who was on her way to Homecoming to pick up more rope, we started back on the path.
This section of the walk felt like it went much quicker, since most of it was taken up by Joel and Jonty trying to remember all the many sections of the path they'd named on previous expos.
It wasn't until we got to the top of Mount Densham that Joel realised he'd lost his phone. We feebly attempted to locate it on google maps, but all this told us was that he was as Basecamp 13 hours ago, and we determined it had no signal by attempting to send it whatsapp messages. After a little discussion, we determined it had most likely been lost around Fishface, since it was the last place we'd stopped. Joel and I dumped our bags and headed back to Fishface whilst the others continued on towards Topcamp.
Oh my god, walking across the plateau is SO much nicer without a bag. You can jump!!! It was a lovely walk back, and we found Joel's phone almost instantly in the entrance to Fishface, propped against a wall. I refilled my now emptied waterbottle with some snow from the meagre snowplug at the entrance, then we headed back to our bags and onwards to Topcamp. Once we got back, we dumped rope and had some food. The Garlic Camp group arrived, having also taken some rope back from Homecoming.
Given that it was already around 2, and Julia needed to be down the hill for her train at 8, and Jonty had injured his ankle, we decided to head down the hill early, unfortunately abandoning our hopes of pushing Reflectorists for another day. We substituted Joel for Ella, as Joel was planning on sleeping at Topcamp, and started on our way.
The walk down went smoothly, but was incredibly hot. We passed Becka on the way back, who had managed to take the last of the rope back from Homecoming, leaving only the drum of metalwork there. After sweating through the rest of the walk, we finally returned to the carpark, did a quick shop, then headed to the lake via Basecamp for a very lovely and refreshing evening.
During the walk up to Homecoming, we found a few promising holes that we thought would be worth prospecting further in a few days. Once at Homecoming, we donned our caving gear, and Ella rigged the first 3 pitches. This then allowed us to haul the ~1.2 km of rope out of Homecoming, which was left in a nice pile under a tarp to be transported to top camp the following day.
A rather tiring walk from Homecoming to Top Camp with caving gear and some rope was then done - rather exhausting in the heat of the day. The cool offered from the top camp tarp was enjoyed by the party, and noodles and a yap to the other groups offered a nice break from the long day's walk.
Finally, a nice stroll down from top camp - 18 kilos lighter this time - allowed us to get back to the car park and bottom camp in good time to enjoy Becka's delicious risotto.
A very fun but tiring first experience of the plateau. It is hard to imagine what the plateau is like to someone who has never been before, but it is far sharper than I imagined. It felt a bit like what I imagine the surface of the moon would be like, just with more gravity and less spacesuits :( Same lack of aliens though, unless we find them down the promising holes we saw on our walk.
We did some fettling of the entrance series to prevent rub. One deviation still needs adding - a spit is already there a third of the way down the big pitch on the true left. Hannah did what she called ‘back seat rigging’ shouting up suggestions of what to edit.
We set off with confidence at the bottom of the pitch and immediately got lost. Luckily Chris’ memory and Hannah’s vibes ensured we didn’t go down any wrong passage for too long. I had unhelpfully fuzzy memories of every passage. This pattern continued, taking up quite a lot of time until the rope washing station.
Here it was packing more packing and trying to avoid mud unsuccessfully. Armed with three disgustingly heavy bags on top of our own we continued, and Chris regaled us with tales of expos past until we eventually found Honeycomb. I did my best to fall down a big hole by going straight at the last tuning but thankfully failed.
We zoomed down some very slippy ropes and Hannah nearly died on her simple multiple times (her words). And got to the crawl before Mongol Rally around 6:30
Here my true motivations became apparent: I had stuffed my tackle sack with a crowbar , a few spoons and a mess tin with the goal to win a fight with the crawl. Unfortunately by this point psych was low and we were all worried about how long the way in had taken us. Deciding we’d still been helpful in carrying the bags, we left them at the top of Mongol Rally for others to rig. In order of closest to the pitch to furthest they were: blue (three small ropes), green (two big ropes, one thick) and blue (one spare very big rope). There’s also a drill, hangers and maillons.
Wanting to at least have a token dig I spent 5 minutes whacking the crawl to surprising progress! It’s wider and was easy to dig. For the good of the collective others are required to give at least three whacks with the crowbar as they pass by.
Annoyingly the way out took no time at all. Some lovely prussiking and good caving and we were at the bottom of the pitch series in a few hours. We left some cairns in the hope others won’t struggle with nav as much as we did. Hannah blasted some music on a very fucked (although new) cave speaker for motivation for the last prussik and we emerged around 10.
On the walk back an ominous voice shouted to us over the plateau and we managed to ask Joel to put the kettle on from 15 minutes walk away. A lovely day out.
Written with additions from Hannah.
After placing the Col fixed node and poking around I realized the remote admin key I used was for a node at home. I fixed this in the Col node and it needs fixing in all the nodes up the hill :( Another observation is I am not seeing position reports. So a few mesh things to do around base camp.
Next I flew the drone. The shitty closed source DJI control program made me login before it would let me fly. This was a bit awkward finding a place on the plateau I had enough data to actually create an account and login. Once I completed these tedious sets I launched the drone. I flew around quite a bit trying to take overlapping photos to examine at the tatty hut over beer. It is hard to see details on the phone used to control the drone. Then I took some photos of the team that came down the hill with Harry to go caving.
After recovering the drone I went to say the cave Harry found, just off the track to Garlic Cave. Yep, I've looked down it also. After they started down, I flew the drone around and took some more downward looking photos. The wind was building and storm clouds were building, so I recovered the drone and headed down the hill.
During all this I ran across 1976, 1623/198 (Maybe t198 in QField). The position in QField seemed a bit off, but I haven't worked out distance measuring in QField yet. The cave description https://expo.survex.com/1623/198/198.html suggests they found rock choke, so no hope of melting snow leading to new discoveries.
At this point, I hurried off the plateau and just beat the rain back to the car park. When I neared the car park the cable car wasn't running, but it was running again by the time I made it down.
Finally, I can complete my tedious basecamp paperwork!