Walked up to top camp in the evening ready for trip down Balkonhoehle to get Mongol Raly rigged with Jono. I was somewhat perplexed to find no sign of Jono, and still not as it went dark. He eventually turned up about 10am the next morning. We had our gear to carry over so it wasn't a particularly early start.

I had forgotten a load of the upper passages, but did at least remember the obscure left turn for Honeycomb/Mongol Rally. Soon enough we arrived at the end of the rigging part-way down hangmans, complete with a rigging diag, some rope and a drill. Jono did this one, complaining at the bottom that the bolts didn't match the diagram, rigging a 2-bolt rebelay as a rather peculiar deviation. We realised that we were starting part-way down the rigging diagram, not the top, so he went back up to put it right whilst I continued to start Mongol Rally. Dragging the gear through was the usual faff (someone should just take a spade and make that crawl bigger).

So now it was my turn and I suited up with Anthony's nice new drill and 125m of rope. The 25m didn't quite reach across the traverse with a big thread round a boulder, so I put a bolt in the roof to improve the rigging (another one just over the hole in the floor would make the traverse line a lot more useful, I later realised). The rock was impressively cheesy, with about 20mm of goo to remove before getting to actual rock.

The rigging diagram suggested another bolt near the top so I added one about 6m down on a nose to the right, only to realise that one had probably already been done some previous year. I also realised at this point that the tape on Anthony's drill bit was set rather too short for reliable bolt-setting so adjusted it to give an extra 10mm of hole. I then added another bolt on the left, replacing one in the maximum rub-spot just under a lip (very odd placement). This finally removed all the rubs on this top slope and actually made the changeovers nicer, so I think it's an improvement.

Next dilemma was whether to use the bolt on a nose (with hanger left behind) or the reflectored bolt on the well-used muddy route. The nose was harder to get to but gave a nicer hang (and was suggested on the rigging diagram). With a sling to help the changeover it actually worked quite well, although maybe the obvious route would also work fine - there is no way of knowing without trying both and I had faffed enough by now. Continued down for another hour or so rigging rebelays. The rigging guide is accurate. Hummed and hawed some more at the odder bits of rigging trying to work out what 'better' might look like. Left one bit (with a nearly horizontal deviation) some extra rope to come back to and add a bolt if time allowed but pressed on until the rope ran out, just on the same ledge that had had a knot pass in 2022. Looks like that is where 100m gets you to.

We were out of time so called it a day and headed off out, only realising on the way out that the rope bag we had left contained a note 'top of mongol rally' in it so we had used the wrong one (misled by the '25m' rope in the top matching the '25m' rope marked on the topo for the traverse. Oh well.

Got out around 11:30, having had a very satisfying trip, Jono had finally got underground and enjoyed himself. It was a chill trip with almost zero stress, and we'd done enough to make a camping trip feasible next time.

My adopt-a-cave for this year was GMH (Guten Morgon Höhle), having failed to sort it out last time I was here in 2022. And this was the last day available to get it done, so research was done down at base to make sure I had the necessary info - email threads, purported locations, cave descriptions, lobbook entries, GPX tracks, and Martin's 'mappapp' local copy (ish) of the website. And I went shopping for stainless screws and HSS bits so we could put in tags, and had drills, and instruments. We tried hard not to forget anything important so this would actually work.

The weather was a rare case of a bit overcast, but not actually raining, which is perfect for this work. It warmed up later in the day but was relatively gentle on us, which is good because we walked for bloody miles!

Tromped past Balkony following vague line of cairns, checking the points on our map. Checkout 2023-ASH-10 and 2023-ASH-11 which defo look worth investigating. Then got to 2012-OK-01 which is of course one of mine, from the fabled 'Wook and Olaf walk to Appelhaus' trip of 2012. There were a couple of obvious shafts which we photoed, but they didn't fit my recollection of OK-01 which was a smaller shaft under an alcove. Soon we found the right hole just 6m away, but not obvious due to being 'tucked under' a small cliff.

We put in a new concrete-screw tag for "2012 OK 01", only to find it already tagged just round the corner as 2017-NR-02. So in fact it has been explored, tagged, located, photoed and sketch-surveyed for 7 years, so we can kataster this one.

Next we passed 2012-OK-02 which still needs descending so far as we can tell. Easy job. We put our cave-blinkers back on in an attempt to actually get the job we intended to do done. Wook had carefully put the alleged GPS of GMH on his phone (neither it nor shagged-spit was in the 2024 entrances list). The back-up plan was that Anthony had been there before a mere decade ago so could hopefully re-find them. Fortunately the GPS was spot-on for the GMH entrance, which had a nice tag saying "2015 DL 02" so one wonders quite how "Chossy Death Slope Höhle" got renamed and no-record of this correspondence made it into a logbook. A short wander up-cliff found the also-tagged 2015 DL 01 (Shagged Spit Höhle). We GPSed (GPS on the eponymous shagged spit for about 40 mins) and photoed that location whilst also doing a 'from-the-surface' SAP6 survey.

So now both 2015-DL-01 and 2015-DL-02 are explored, located, photoed, tagged and surveyed sufficiently to get katastered. Result. Job done.

Time was moving on and we had a dinner to get back to this evg so we headed back, looking for 2012-dd-04 on the way back. Despite our best efforts we stumbled onto an entrance too fine to ignore and so spent 40 mins GPSing, tagging and surveying (from the surface) 2024-JC-01. (See how the wiley old lags carefully made this one Jacob's responsibility :-) It's quite a big hading shaft entrance about 12m x 2m with a 4m cliff behind and at least 17m deep. There was a nice boulder for a survey station but it looked a bit dodgy and shove sent it crashing down the hole so we were wise not to use that one. Tag is to LH end of the hole. GPS point and intermediate point are red nail-varnish marked.

dd-04 was a tiny bit elusive, although Anthony's GPS took him nearly straight there whilst Wookey's took him 20m away jus tthe wrong side of a ridge and then he was marooned by bunde for a while, but eventually re-found the others. jacob had shoved himself into the hole but it was about 1.5 cavers long and thus not big enough to be katasterable. We tagged it anyway.

Now it really was time to hot-foot it home so we headed back, passing the (tagged) caves 277, 272 and 2012-FT-02. There really are quite a lot of holes round here.

Anthony and I collected the rest of our shit and we all headed briskly down the hill for the final time this year, which was good because I really did have quite sore feet by the end of the day after more than 7km of that ridiculous pointy terrain. We even arrived in good time for Tess to rescue us and take us to a fine dinner

A canyonning trip was suggested, and as I'd done it a couple of times before and thus knew where it was, and what to look out for, it was easy to blag my way on. We had this idea a bit later in the day than was ideal, because Strubklamm is miles away (most of the way back to Salzburg), but it also meant that I was able to collect Tess from the station before buggering off like a very naughty husband. I had brought my new wetsuit and was eager to find out if it made Strubklamm into a much less cold-and-miserable experience than previous attempts. I was also able to borrow a (kayaking) helmet and neoprene booties from Julia, which, combined with some sandals and spare caving gloves, was enough kit to canyon (as this one doesn't actually need a harness if you can manage an 8m jump).

We were going to take my van and Charlotte's car but Tess wanted the Van, and it's a long way to take two cars, so when PhilB appeared we pounced on him and made him drive all 5 of us there (Charlote in the boot). This was very kind as it's about 1hr40 mins each way, and he doesn't even get to do the canyon. Having a driver avoids all the shuttle-faff too, which is great, especialy as it turned out the huttle-road was closed for works, so there was quite a long drive-around which would have made us even later.

This was Isaac and Charlotte's 1st ever canyonning trip, and Marie's 2nd (after the disastrously cold 'Haute Borne' in the Ardeche), but we were a crack team of potholers with two harnesses between us so what could possibly go wrong?

In fact the descent was very smooth with everyone having fun, at least to start with. The water was quite a pleasant temperature, although every inlet was much colder so we got a chilly bit every so often as they came in. However it is longer than I remember and there is a _lot_ of swimming, with a long section in the middle starting with a canyon, and then a couple more long swims. Clearly the local canyonning school uses it a lot so there were lots of in-situ ropes for getting to good takeoffs and dealing with any slippery bits, or just abseiling if you didn't like the bigger jumps. (Marie skipped the biggest one).

Much jumping fun was had, with Charlotte of course taking to the game with gusto, although neither of us was any good at keeping the water out of our noses on impact, and I managed to bite my tongue on one jump, which was dim. Everyone avoided broken ankles or being impaled on trees, just some coughing and spluttering.

I hardly recognised any of the 2nd half as obviously my brain had shut down with the chilly misery on the previous two attempts after the 1st long swim. This time it was all rather lovely - it is a _very_ pretty canyon. Marie found herself a bit short of stoke after the 1st half, partly due to the baggy 2mm wetsuit and partly not having evtirely recovered from the great chunder trip. 1.4km of canyonning (with ~400m of swimming) over 3 hours feels like quite a long way, and it was a relief to swim round a corner and finally see a slackline being rigged and a footbridge with a beach which marks the escape.

Phil was even there to rescue us, so that all worked out nicely. Good trip, and it's a lot nicer with 5 than 10 but still takes a solid 3 hours. We got back about 7pm.