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.
At the ungodly hour of about 7:15am, we set off from basecamp, yawning and tollroad-bound. The weather was absolutely sweltering, and we made sure to lather ourselves with suncream and stock up on water. Chris, Harry, and Hannah were first on the trail to the col, whilst the rest of us faffed a bit. And then up the hill we went! We soon reached Stoneybridge, having made sure to reflector the plateau monster on the way (red eyes to instil appropriate levels of deference). Due to an incredibly efficient chain of hands, the storage cave was emptied within an hour of our arrival, and focus shifted to setup beneath the bridge. Chris oversaw rigging of the first water tarp, and the tarp support was set up during a lengthy process which consisted of many dismissed ideas and scrutinisation of several old topcamp photos, before the decision was made to just wing it and lattice stuff to death. This resulted in a lovely, 'novel' setup which we decided would be sufficient, partially because it looked super cool and partially because it was getting late and we were craving basecamp chips. After setting up the second water tarp, we headed down the hill, partially reflectoring the route on the way. I say partially because it turns out the reflectors left at basecamp (which we'd assumed were the reflectors taken off the col-topcamp walk at the end of last expo, and had taken up with us) did not in fact exist in sufficient quantity to reflector the route, and also a fair chunk of them were white on both sides. It's likely these were spares, rather than ones taken off the plateau last year.
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.
Given the option of either bimbling up the plataeu to help setup top camp or the gruelling task of pulling up hundreds of metres of old rope out of homecoming, I decided to choose the former option as a nice introduction to expo. Once we arrived at top camp, I dumped all my kit in my Bivi in a (hopefully) non drippy area and looked out for tasks to help out with.
Mike suggested preemptively scouting out the route to KH as a group would be returning the next day, so I happily agreed to help out. Heading south east we plodded along, missing the Grike (as we were instructed to follow), arriving at a bunda forest. With no obvious way around we plowed though, popping out and carrying on following a path along the right edge of the plateau. After a considerable amount of time we realised we had messed up and headed far too south east. To remedy we turned sharply and followed straight in the direction of KH, which caused us to wade though a sea of bunda, do a fair amount of scrambling and scale the side of a cliff like mountain goats. To our annoyance the GPS coordinates were about 10m off the actual location of the cave, which cost us a lot of time waking and climbing in all directions trying to find the damn entrance. I found a window into the main entrance which allowed me to clap like a mad person whilst Mark searched for the actual entrance.
Eventually it was found, and we headed back with more or less the same difficulties that we had on the way here.
After spending the morning walking up to top camp and tarp-fettling, we set off after lunch with the task of reflecting the route to Balcony within an inch of its life. We aimed to search for pastures new after completing this task. Due to our extreme diligence, however, the search manifested less chronologically favourably than planned. Unperturbed, the B-team of Bonty, Bulia and Boel set off from Balcony with expectations of great cave.
Much like Columbus, the B-team took to naming parts of the plateau that had already been discovered, such as Japanese Garden and New Stoney Bridge. They soon found themselves looking across a vast expanse of bunde, which according to the entrances map had not been explored. From the viewpoint we had, there were some promising looking holes in sight across the valley. Unfortunately, due the unrelenting march of time and the distance in question, we had not time to investigate further. Instead we agreed to loop back around towards Balcony in order to make our way back. During a routine pincer manoeuver through some bunde, Boel stumbled across a hole in the ground - much to the excitement of the group. Given the proximity of the hole, it was decided that the B-team would drop it immediately as it was probably the next big thing.
Having cunningly packed bolting gear, including the new-to-expo Petzl Pulses, the top of the entrance pitch was soon bolted (following some scrutiny of the bolts' documentation booklet). The entrance proceeded down a shallow rift encircled by bunde before plummeting into a 10m shaft which could be traversed to a flatter patch of plateau beyond. Rigging was initiated from the far side of the hole i.e. the bunde direction, before a y-hang allowed descent of the pitch. Both Boel and Bonty bravely bottomed the beast, discovering a further pitch scores of meters deep which resonated with every rock despatched into its depths. With excitement building but time running short, it was decided to draw things to a close and return another day with sufficient equipment and people power to properly survey the passage and install further rigging. The B-team wrapped up and headed back via Balcony to convey the good news to the others at top camp.
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.
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.
We managed to pack three sleeping bags, four mats and a tent between us. A comical tug of war between moving forward, and being dragged down by our massive bags proceeded on the way up to balcony. At the balcony, me and Alice reveled at the coolness of the draughty shade, after a very sweaty walk, and finally regained the energy to cave.
Following closely in the footsteps of Lara Hannah and Chris from the previous day, we made sure to get a tad lost on the way to Honeycomb pitch from the bottom of the entrance series. Alice's memory led us most of the way, apart from one sneeky left turn which missed, leading to a lot of fun snooping around incorrect passages and dumping bags in inconvenient places. After a very exited sighting of the promised three dead bats (which looked more like spiders), we were finally sure to be enroute.
The bags where left at the end of the tight crawl before Mongal Rally, and a good riddance to the extra weight and seamless ascent followed.
We managed to pack three sleeping bags, four mats and a tent between us. A comical tug of war between moving forward, and being dragged down by our massive bags proceeded on the way up to balcony. At the balcony, me and Alice reveled at the coolness of the draughty shade, after a very sweaty walk, and finally regained the energy to cave.
Following closely in the footsteps of Lara Hannah and Chris from the previous day, we made sure to get a tad lost on the way to Honeycomb pitch from the bottom of the entrance series. Alice's memory led us most of the way, apart from one sneeky left turn which missed, leading to a lot of fun snooping around incorrect passages and dumping bags in inconvenient places. After a very exited sighting of the promised three dead bats (which looked more like boney spiders), we were finally sure to be enroute. The bags where left at the end of the tight crawl before Mongal Rally, and a good riddance to the extra weight and seamless ascent followed.
Having the previous day decided he was definitely taking a rest day today, Jonty ascended the hill to explore Reflectorist with Buck, Joel and Becka. This was following a long day the previous day of Basecamp -> Homecoming -> Top Camp -> Basecamp, and a mildly sprained ankle. Jonty was then again personally victimised by the plateau, despite having consistently bowed to the plateau monster on passing. Sometimes the will of the plateau monster is indecipherable by lower minds. Fortunately, Doctor Alice Kirby was on hand to apply magic cream to the scrapes - a nice change for her as Jonty did not try to kick or spit on her (being neither a llama nor in danger of castration).
Soon the group reached Stone Bridge and gathered supplies - including some flapbuck and jelly snakes - which Becka insisted she would never stoop so low as to eat. The Reflectorist team set off with the Balcony supply team, who were somewhat overencumbered with Balcony supplies. They had taken differing approaches to bag carrying, Alice carrying one backpack stacked onto the other, and Ella with a second bag hanging off her waist in front of her. There were advantages and disadvantages to each strategy, but neither was optimal. Alice's method ultimately ruled superior when Ella's rucksack chest strap ceased to perform both its task of suspending her second bag from itself, and being a chest strap.
Having made it to Balcony with no other predictable events occurring, Buck, Becka and Joel lent a hand to Alice and Ella to get their bags onto the Balcony balcony. Jonty decided to scoot down the far side of the hole underneath to replenish water bottles from the snow plug, predicting continuation of the sweltering 30 degree midday sun. The group was soon underway again, attempting to follow the recorded return track from the previous prospecting trip to The Reflectorist. There were multiple route prospects so the group decided to execute a pincer movement to find the best route. Buck and Jonty's pincer involved some slightly tricky moves, but they still proudly reached the convergence before the other pair, who almost definitely had chosen the better route. The cave entrance was finally reached, despite Becka's worries that the original prospecting team had forgotten where it was.
Jonty and Joel descended the first pitch to start paving the way, while Buck and Becka stayed top-side to calibrate the Distox and SAP6 that had been brought. Jonty and Joel spent the next hour gardening the bottom of the first pitch and top of the second pitch until it reached a state they were brave enough to descend. This involved some quite intensive manhandling of numerous large and small rocks, and some enthusiastic hammer blows. They then called up to the surface team who called back that they had not yet started the survey but had heard some very large rumblings coming from the floor. Soon, however, they were shooting their first legs and Jonty was on the way down the second pitch of the cave. About 10 metres further down, he encountered another ledge that took an additional half hour to garden, and a skyhook to drill a well-placed deviation. He then continued down the rope onto a boulder choke that unfortunately spelt the end of the cave. Of course the whole group was saddened by this news, but Becka decided this was a good excuse to start bodging some survey data.
Joel, on his inspection of the bottom of the cave, found a skeleton that he claimed to be rodent-like and then professed to be a Gemse. Its true origins remain a mystery though, perhaps even being some kind of proto-human. Nevertheless, Jonty and Joel began an ascent from the killed-off pit, reaching the surface to again be greeted by the glaring sun, with Buck following close behind and Becka shortly after, having helpfully derigged the cave. She did however express her surprise about how easily the Petzl Pulse anchors could be removed.
While Becka tidied her things away, Buck led Jonty and Joel to a nearby hole that he and Becka had found while meddling with the survey devices. The hole - 2005-06 - had been tagged but never dropped, as far as the group could discern. Given the groups existing presence with cave-dropping gear, a crack team of Joel was sent to check the cave, with Becka's instructions to perform a 'quick and dirty' operation. He performed some impressive bolting maneouveres and after only an hour reached the floor, 15 meters below, having dropped Jonty's safety glasses down the cave twice. Unfortunately this cave proved, again, to not be the one that would cement these CRESH members' spots as big-cave-discoverers - "2005-06 description: 15m pitch to a too tight continuation". Serendipitously, there was another snow plug at the bottom of this cave, which the group sent water bottles down for Joel to fill with, despite their earlier chiding remarks of Jonty's superfluous snow plug excursion, and his soon-after vindication when they tasted the icy goodness of his drink on this 30 degree day.
Joel was soon prussiking up the pitch with the ice bottles, where he reached the super short deviation, made of 2 carabiners, that Jonty had helpfully suggested he use when the sling he had had been going to use was too long. Unfortunately, Jonty's suggestion had made the deviation too deviating and very difficult to pass, causing an ensuing kerfuffle. There were various suggestions and gear sent down to Joel over the next 10 minutes, but he eventually unstuck himself with a cordelette 3:1, a microtraxion and a knife. Becka commented that she had never seen anyone quite as strung up as he had been. 2 hours after initiation, this quick and dirty operation had certainly succeeded in achieving one of those criteria, but Becka who had previously been getting very impatient had been cheered up by watching Joel try to escape his fate. This also meant the walk home would now be less hot and sunny than it would have been before the extra project.
The group decided that they would take the 'brave and direct' route back, which they decided would probably exist. There was an early, failed pincer movement, which resulted in a somewhat one-sided pincer when Joel had to solo backtrack his route which the other 3 had decided didn't look as promising. The group then discovered some promising looking holes that, when passed in previous years, had been snow-plugged, and may warrant further investigation. The route finally appeared from above top camp, with a last bit of bunde bashing before they emerged and finally could rest.
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!
Mike suggested preemptively scouting out the route to KH as a group would be returning the next day, so I happily agreed to help out. Heading south east we plodded along, missing the Grike (as we were instructed to follow), arriving at a bunda forest. With no obvious way around we plowed though, popping out and carrying on following a path along the right edge of the plateau. After a considerable amount of time we realised we had messed up and headed far too south east. To remedy we turned sharply and followed straight in the direction of KH, which caused us to wade though a sea of bunda, do a fair amount of scrambling and scale the side of a cliff like mountain goats. To our annoyance the GPS coordinates were about 10m off the actual location of the cave, which cost us a lot of time waking and climbing in all directions trying to find the damn entrance. I found a window into the main entrance which allowed me to clap like a mad person whilst Mark searched for the actual entrance.
Eventually it was found, and we headed back with more or less the same difficulties that we had on the way here.
After some hard nerding, I packed up and headed to top camp with the drone for some more drone flights.
I returned to top camp and picked up the final surface node and the drone and headed toward Balkon. On the high points between Stone Bridge and Balkon, after some faffing around contemplating line of sight an things, the last node was placed by the path.
At this point I transitioned into drone pilot.
I tried descending to the prospecting party, but ended up cliffed out in bunda. I returned to top camp via the way I came.
A slightly ungraceful survey performed by Buck and Ella followed; including a minor mishap involving a rock, Ella above a loose climb, and Buck’s poor knee. The cave started off as a 5m walk, and then a 3 meter climb down into a crawl going back on itself for another 3 meters before it chokes.
Meanwhile, Lara and Joel began an abseil into a more exciting looking hole nearby [33T 411454 5283151] ‘Ghast Hohle’, another wide hole with a promising looking section after the obvious bottom. Great frustration followed after Joel sighted evidence of previous bolting, yet no evidence has yet been found referencing this online.
And so our journey continued. A ‘pincer’ approach was adopted for dropping into the next valley, where the team of Joel and Buck followed the left, and Ella, Lara, Hamish traversed towards the right. We met in a valley below, exchanging many tales of immensely draughty holes that lead nowhere found en route. Three came of note. A snow plugged shaft of about 2 by 2 meters, with an obvious natural above [33T 411166 5283242]. Another Joel found: a strongly outwards drafting shaft with an overhang above, at least 5m deep but snow plug obscures continuation, but does not block the whole shaft [33T 4111605283056]. ‘Ella’s draughty hole’ [33T 411159 5283234], a small almost human sized hole with a howling draught, with notable depth determined by dropping rocks.
Now reassembled, the prospecting prophets continued up sweltering hot terrain. Formidably, the plateau didn’t have much mercy on either Ella nor Joel’s shorts. After much-a Bunda bashing, Ella’s resembled something more of denim thongs. Joel’s had also developed a tear, which for-sighted a similar trajectory.
Thankfully, the materialisation of holes returned to being in rock, when we stumbled upon yet another possible cave, ‘Clockwork Orange’ [33T 410756 5282937]. This one had 4 different entrances, congregating in a 6 meter shaft which was dropped but choked.
With an ominous overlooking of dark cloud, the final prospect of the day was prompt. We arrived at a long and thin slice, 1m wide and 6 across. This had been found previously but not dropped, named Blitz Baum Schacht [33T 410634 5283186]. Ella descended to the bottom of a 20m rope, another 5m is yet to be dropped with promising draught and possible continuation at the bottom.
The delightful promise of gnocci with custard powder powered our plateau plod back to top camp. The end.
[Photo showing hamish taking a photo of ellas arse through her ripped shorts while lara looks on in bemusement]
We set off in the morning after a reasonable amount of faff. And Chris forgetting to put Jonty on the callout. Chris went ahead to "get his things ready", really it was probably to get some peace. When the other three arrived, Zen Chris quickly became Disturbed Chris. Unfortunately, his trusty peruvian rice bag had failed him, resulting in a quite damp oversuit. He used this reason to sit up above the balcony in the sun while the others went down to the balcony to get dressed. There was a reasonable amount of faffing that then ensued, including some cutting of chest harnesses, before Chris reappeared muttering about Peru and rice bags again.
The group began the journey into the cave, Musky Hannah in the lead with her Wonderboom blasting tunes. The trip to Mongol rally was reasonably uneventful other than a couple of notes made about single-bolt hangs and some excesses of rope. Some of these pitches will probably need a bolt or two adding in the future. Upon reaching the crawl to Mongol Rally, the group dutifuly each crowbarred some of the crawl out, as per Lara's request. There is now reasonable room to crawl through with a tacklebag in tow, although Lara will likely be happy with a bit more digging. The first three had a bit of a cuddle while waiting for Chris, who gracefully declined to join the puddle upon arriving. Some more faff then commenced before Musky Hannah and Chris, who it had been agreed would do the first bolting shift, were ready to go. After they were off, Alice and Jonty ate a rather large amount of flapbuck before looking for a nice comfortable corner to hunker down and wait. There were a few different attempts before they ended up fetching a couple of the sleeping mats that Alice and Ella had recently brought down to the top of Mongol Rally ready for a camp. They then managed to set up an excellent lying-down spot where they could spoon for warmth under the group shelter.
It was agreed by both Jonty and Alice that this was both the warmest and most comfortable Austrian cave wait they had ever done. There were a couple of trips through the crawl to take care of some important personal admin at the bottom of Hangman's pitch, and a visit to break into one of the bags of Suzie snakes, which was quickly consumed in its entirety. All in all though, they were camped out here for about 4 hours before Hannah and Chris returned, having run out of drill battery after placing 6 bolts. They offered to swap out, which Jonty and Alice were eager to do after the long wait. They then introduced the first bolting team to the spooning spot they had constructed, giving excellent reviews. After a bit of faff at the pitch head preparing the bolting gear they would need, Jonty realised he'd left his personal tackle bag at the mini-camp and returned to find the others already enjoying the spot.
Alice and Jonty were very soon at the bolting front and began taking things in and bouncing some ideas about. Alice was the first to bolt, with Jonty's advice. She put in an initial bolt to make the second half of an existing Y-hang, after meeting a lot of resistance installing a spit into the already-present hole. The rope was then to drop down a bit of rift, where there was an existing hilti on the right wall. Due to the narrowness of the rift though and the layout below, they elected to drill a thread into a nicely-located flake on the opposite wall and equalise the deviation between them, keeping the rope central in the rift. They dropped to the next ledge, where Jonty took a turn bolting and installed a lowkey magnificent Y-hang, which now leads into an almost immediate deviation on the opposite wall. It now sits flush on the fall after a fair amount of post-hole hammering. They were just reaching the next ledge when Hannah and Chris turned up, having spooned enough by this point and wanting to come have a look. Chris made a lot of hmming and haaing noises as he descended the pitch, with a couple of "interesting"s thrown in. In the end he admitted it was good after editing one piece of rigging on his way down.
The group had then reached the "big ledge", where a couple of hiltis existed, and had a bit of a think. The existing setup wasn't bad but was a single bolt hang and was woefully ungardened. Jonty took this as a personal challenge, and proceeded to chuck some rocks off the top of the pitch, while taking the time to save a few nice ones, which have now been left on the big ledge as a nice feature (which may get washed away in the coming rain). Jonty put in a final bolt to make a Y-hang for the top of this pitch, and rigged the rope into it, having to join the next rope on just below the belay (definitely not trimming off the last meter of the previous one in the process). Chris had already started on his way back up and the others followed behind. Upon reaching the bottom of Hangman, they briefly reconglomerated before Chris took the lead again. Jonty, now crossing the traverse for the 4th time and getting annoyed at how inefficiently it was rigged, made a few adjustments (with Alice's help) in order to avoid the unnecessary rising and falling of the traverse and loosely rigged line. This did involve a little bit of gardening of the lower part of the ledge, which he'd shouted up to Chris he'd be doing so as not to surprise him. Unfortunately, Hannah, who had still been there at the time, had not heard this and shouted down to see if everybody was ok after the loud banging began. The traverse is now in an easier, safer state but still needs an additional bolt to tension it into the optimal position. This wasn't possible at the time due to lack of drill battery and through bolts, but will be done on the next visit.
Alice and Jonty started their ascent, Chris and Hannah having both disappeared about 15 minutes previously. Alice kindly offered to carry the drill bag for the first stint, after which Jonty picked it up at a rebelay a few pitches up. Just after passing Honeycomb, Jonty's left contact lense began quite badly misbehaving. He managed to make it up another couple of small pitches with some discomfort, after which point it became untenable and he had to unglove a hand and remove it entirely - leaving him with a good right eye and a quite blurry left eye. The caused a bit of bother with seeing things. To great relief the pair soon reached the watering hole, where Jonty made the freeclimb traverse across, with Alice worriedly holding the back of his harness - some quite wacky depth perception making things quite tricky. Alice took the lead for the rest of the way up, pointing out every little and big hole to Jonty, who was stumbling around a bit like a fresher. They emerged from the cave at about midnight to find Chris and Hannah waiting on the balcony, having just finished getting changed. Chris started off ahead, eager to get his hands on a curry, while Jonty got changed and packed his kit for the walk back - which was a somewhat similar exercise of relying on Alice and Hannah to point out holes and footholds. They arrived back at top camp at 1am, where Chris had the curries ready, and tried to be very quiet as most everyone else had already gone to bed.
I have set the basecamp fixed node to connect to an mqtt server run by a friend in America. While on the plateau, I set my node to proxy mqtt via my phone and showed we could bridge meshes at top camp, base camp and America. More work is needed for a reliable plateau connection. Base camp uses a fixed node with wifi capability. Anthony Day has proposed a cellular internet solution for top camp, this should be investigated harder now. Bridging the plateau mesh to base camp would be brilliant!
Operationally, the text part of meshtastic works nicely, covering all parts of the plateau to date. (Or at least what people have tried) Position mapping seems a bit wonkey. More study is needed here. Is this phone related, app settings etc . Iphone app is crashing, apparently due to gps polling settings.
The final problem is working out why people say leaving their phones on kills their battery. I am hopeful using airplane mode with only bluetooth on resolves this issue.
Having woken up, eaten and checked the coming forecast at topcamp, Dan and I decided on an afternoon of prospecting.
Setting off at midday after a fair bit of faff, we headed along the path to KH towards a cave with a QM which I have been pestering people about. Along the way we passed a fat hole which Russel and I had dropped a rock down, taking 8 seconds to reach the bottom. Since we only had 60 odd meters of rope, we decided to sack off dropping the hole, opting to look around the same area for any other holes to drop, saving the other one for a different day.
Nearby, a (smaller) promising hole was found by Dan. I started rigging it, first, around a couple naturals to a bolt, then a Y hang. Looking for a place to pop the Y-hang proved difficult as anything suitable ended up with a significant amount of rope rub, so I decided to tackle it form a different angle. This time from 2 naturals, 2 rebelays down to a Y-hang which dropped straight into the shaft.
Descending the cave, I encountered a fair amount of rock-littered snow, which I had to kick through so as to have a drippy-free descent to the bottom. I ended up on a ledge, which I bolted with another rebelay as the shaft had transformed into a spiral shape, and to avoid a boulder which I had failed to jiggle out of place. After descending down snow slopes, I had reached the end, which had unfortunately bottomed out.
After I had ascended out, it was Dan’s turn to drop the cave whilst I fiddled with my SAP to calibrate it. Soon after he had descended the Y-hang, the tell-tale fog rolled over and it started chucking it down, to which I promptly packed away my belongings. I was content sitting at the top donned with my full waterproofs, until the sound of thunder and the crack of a (concerningly) nearby bolt of lightning knocked me off my feet. I scuttled into a nearby hole, as standing next to a pile of metalwork was probably not the smartest idea, waiting for the storm to pass.
Once Dan had emerged from the cave, it had cleared up significantly and we took a surface survey once my SAP was calibrated (I told you I would Becka ;)). Noticing the dark-coloured clouds overhead, I ushered Dan to start moving quickly as I did NOT want to endure another storm. Walking away from the newly-named
RainbowBargainsHöhle
, we could see the twilight fog starting to roll in, so we started bolting it back. Alas, we hadn’t escaped it fast enough as we were soon in the middle of the storm, which made us scamper back faster, in the process causing Dan to fall and injure his shin.
Eventually we made it to topcamp! Arriving to the sounds of clapping and cheering as the group dropping kit off at KH had already made the round trip and were eagerly awaiting our return (we hadn’t died yay!).