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The day started slightly sadly after a night at Garlic: Harry had consumed ice cream illadvisably (and maybe was ill on top of that). So his stomach and his fever meant it was decided it was unwise for him to join us. Colin was stolen from Todd and Aila to become an extra mule for the many many metres of rope we expected to carry out. The plan was simple: Watershed ended in a sketchy duck and the lack of enthusiasm for pushing it meant we should really remove all the rope up to Strained by Gravity. It was going to be around 300 to 400m and probably some strenuous prusiking. Chi and Harry had also realised the disto was in calibration mode on their last pushing trip so our extra task was surveying the lead they had slightly killed.
We went in down Aidan's new Welsh Engineering route, guided by Colin. Though it was very pretty (cool 60 meter freehanging pitch down a tube) it was deemed probably not safe for a main route. The main pitch was in a noticeably drippy and it was a bit snaggy. This was a bit of a shame because as much as Wallace and Grommit have grown on me against my will Welsh Engineering was definitely more efficient. Let it also be noted that the water was very low at this point and the streamway peaceful and quiet below Grommit.
I took over the tour guiding at this point and showed Colin down Watershed, Chi and Liam nattering about something technical at the back. At the bottom of Strained by Gravity I instructed him to walk quickly through the section Chi calls 'The Gauntlet'. Colin looked at me like I was being silly: 'Its not even that drippy'.
After a fair bit of Caving we reached Chi's new traverses at around 3:30 and were pretty chuffed at our expediency. Chi and Colin arrived soon behind us in time for me to begin apologising as doing book was so slow. This theme continued but it was fun to see the new passage and seeing the duck at the end was a nice reward for finally getting down all the data. It was more promising than expected; a nice draft coming out of it and quite a few B leads which looked promising for bypasses.
Our turnaround time of 7 had crept up on us so we had to leave the very bottom of watershed and contemplate the long derig out. This is where things stopped going to plan.
Chi began on the bits he and Harry had bolted, while I zoomed to the bottom of My Favourite things to wait for the bags to be passed out. Colin took a full bag and went on ahead. During this time feeling slightly guilty I decided I would offer to do the next section, up to the top of Alpine Showers. A slightly daunting task as I hadn't done any derigging on bolts and was pretty green at derigging in general. Ah well, I'd give it a go.
Eventually Chi and Liam turned up, went up the pitch and I began. The first pitch was fine, but the second bolt at the top started spinning as I undid the bolt. I abandoned the hanger and continued along the traverse, aware I was being pretty slow. Somewhere along the traverse, undoing a Maillon I noticed the roaring of the waterfall - I always get paranoid at water noise. Better just check though: 'Chi! Is that getting louder'. He surprised me with a matter of fact: 'Yes, it is'. Oh fuck.
Having read Becca's trip report I checked my watch: 8:20. Apparently 40 mil of rain started on the surface at 7. At this point I should have abandoned the derigging and got the hell out of dodge but my decision making wasn't working perfectly. I sped up, shoving maillons and knots into the bag and not being as careful with points of attachments as I should have been. Chi shouts round the corner something about the waterfall getting bigger. He was going to get up it and out of there. I kept derigging, pretty frantically, one more bolt started spinning on the traverse and another at the top of the tiny pitch after the bottom of Alpine Showers, this time almost as I'd taken the hanger off. I cursed as I fumbled and dropped the nut on the next bolt. Chi was shouting something at me down the pitch, so was Liam but I couldn't hear a thing. The waterfall at the bottom pitch was an absolute torrent and at this point I was pretty goddamn scared. At least I had my layers in the bag with me, I could get through this.
At some point before expo I had a vague memory that Kai had made me promise not to ascend a pitch in a flood pulse. I knew what the middle pitch was like, pretty splashy at the best of times, it needed a deviation we'd never put in and I'm bad at avoiding water. Maybe I shouldn't so something stupid here. I finally gave up on the derigging, Chi was shouting at me something. Maybe: come up? I shouted 'IT'S TOO WET' a lot of times and heard clearly 'I KNOW!!'. Great.
At this point I'd resigned myself to at least a few hours alone at the bottom waiting out a flood pulse, no group shelter but I had warm clothes and I wasn't wet yet. The bottom of the rope I'd just derigged landed on a nice dry ledge: that's where I wanted to be. As I reached to put the maillon back in and rig it again I realised I couldn't use a spinning bolt with the nut almost off it. I was just contemplating the rope rub by rigging of the previous bolt and quietly singing My Favourite Things top myself when I saw Chi's light at the top of the pitch. He really wanted me to come up. Okay, plan change.
I ditched all the rope onto the ledge, knots with maillons and hangers in the pile with everything else. After a glance to check my layers were there I got going. Chi shouted something about not swinging into the water: okey dokey. I half prussiked half clung to the wall, relieved this pitch wasn't as wet as it looked. The waterfall was roaring right next to me but I was fine. I reached Chi, very very relieved to no longer be alone.
Chi leaned in to be heard, he was wet from the waist down but impressively calm. Right, we were going to get through this. I de-weighted the traverse so he could rerig is looser so it didn't pull you taught into the waterfall. He told me to watch what he did. In essence: climb up the right ledge as far as possible swing round the waterfall, now gushing like a split pipe out the right hand wall around three metres up the pitch. After that, prussik like hell. The ideal was to only get soaked legs. Chi swung but ended up in the waterfall, he was soaked but got to the top of the pitch. 'Not like that', okay I shouted, 'I'll do it my way'. My way wasn't better.
Steps one and two went well but my pantin and footloop popped off just under the waterfall, exactly as they had the last time I'd got dripped on on this pitch. This time it was a lot more than the splashback spray. Chi was shouting GO GO GO, and I wasn't moving up the rope. At this point I decided there was nothing for it and reached down to put back on my footloop. The waterfall was pounding on my helmet - I had to get out. I frogged like hell fresher-style and got up the pitch, completely soaked but not drowned.
Chi and I came to the same conclusion, abandon the derig, cave fast and get the hell out. Liam had also got soaked below the waist and this was dangerous. I met Colin along the rift and he greeted me with a cheery 'I'm completely dry!'. Despite the look I gave him he and Liam were brilliant: cajoling me up pitches where my SRT was shaky with adrenaline. There was a lot of checking everyone else was okay.
Up flowstone canyon I was a lot calmer but worried. I was properly exerted but only lukewarm and I knew Chi got hypothermia at the drop of a hat. At the junction I raided my layer bag to the dregs: Chi got my pufferjackets, I got spare thermals and a waterproof and in surprisingly high spirits we kept going.
The way out was shivery but cheerful. Moral was pretty high and we even stopped for noodles. Poor Liam and Colin were roasting at the pace we needed so there was a lot of sitting very close at pitchheads and transferring warmth. Still we laughed at the clusterfuck that had happened and kept caving out making not terrible time.
Chi's D and B was brilliant as always up Wallace and Grommit and for once I was looking forward to long pitches where: rather than the normal experience of sweating in no layers, this time I got back to a nice temperature. The final push and walk back to Garlic was very welcome, where we reassured Harry we hadn't died.
It sounds crazy but it was a brilliant trip, fun in adversity becomes more fun and we all got out safe. Still, I'm avoiding waterfalls for a little bit.
Post script James, Charlotte and Jacob found top camp with minimal snow around. Route from carpark onto hill is blocked by large concrete block. Route can be found going round the right hand side but maybe not possible with building work happening. Otherwise route up hill on left of carpark at bottom end takes you up the hill and then a right turn by the big building on the left takes you back to original route. Cairned route up from col to top camp. Broke into storage cave and removed bits and bobs for an hour or so and stored them in stony . Got cooker running and cooked some pasta. Found a mouldy container of tortellini (act with care) . Walked down and placed some reflectors on the walk back. Got to carpark at 18:30 . A very damp day out.
Karin and Hilde came and said hello.
Tarp is partly up at side of hut as there was a caravan parked there yesterday.
Best, Isaac
Sieds calmly checked the online documentation, did the three-fingered salute to reset the firmware on the scanner, and it worked.
With major Faff we set off from top camp towards Fishface to collect rope that had been left there last year. Our bags were very heavy with lots of ropes, hangers and all our caving kit to get to the store of ropes at the bottom of the 4th pitch. James and Jacob found the cave with minimal snow and cleared and flattened it whilst Charlotte kitted up to go in and rig.Jacob hadn't brought a chest harness to expo so some macguyvering of a sling was in order. Rigging went smoothly past the chossy death pitch and tasteful noods until we got to the icy tube pitch. Charlotte rigged the wrong way here as the topo from Jonty had confused hiltis for expansions. Cue an hour of going down the wrong pitch and then back up and fruitful searching for hiltis (unreflectored). Charlotte found the nright bolts and eventually the rest of us got into a group shelter and started singing, hugging, shivering and eating flapjack to stay warm. We even wrote a new verse of Hard Caver.
The plateau is perfect for caving they say
as long as you find them and don't lose your way
we went down to fishface to collect all the rope
but missed half the bolts and we lost all our hope
.....
Eventually we heard rope free and quickly made our way down to the rope store at the bottom. As I passed the deviation at the bottom my light decided it didn't want to work anymore meaning i had to use my spare which fortunatly was around my neck! Large tacklebags were filled up with large quantities of rope which then were prussiced out by this years expos first and keenest cavers. we emerged after much fighting with bags (charlotte really likes having three bags whilst derigging) to a lovely evening with the sun just having set, and enjoyed a relaxing walk back to top with the milky way looking over us. (The walk was much less relaxing for me as the spade handle kept getting caught on things and tried to kill me multiple times).
With an afternoon of festering well on the way after arriving back from our FF rope retrieving trip yesterday, it was decided that I should try my hand at bread making. Holding a degree in International Relations from Aberystwyth University, I was deemed the perfect candidate for checking if the instructions were indeed 'idiot proof'. Holding a Masters degree in International Relations from Aberystwyth University I was of course delighted to find the 'Numpty Dumpty makes a loaf of bread' edition of the instructions.
After initial faff with finding and setting up the equipment an opportunity was identified to time how long it would in fact take for me to wrap my head around the guide, and get a loaf of bread started in the machine. A stopwatch was started and I continued.
Regrettably the faff continued. Notable moments include setting 20ml of water out in the sun to warm enough to activate the yeast, and indeed going down an internet forum rabbit hole to try to decipher how much water to add to about a third of a packet of yeast in the first place. A heated debate also arose from the instructions regarding the stirring implement for the bread mixer. In absence of a wooden or plastic spoon I elected to use the *cleaned* plastic handle of a sharp knife. Before I could enact my plan however I was hurriedly halted by Phil, insisting I used the special tool which apparently exists to stir the bread. This tool takes the form of a plastic knife. A plastic knife is of course not the wooden or plastic spoon noted in the specification for the bread making machine, and despite my pleas that between the two they are so similar that stirring potential would not differ, I eventually yielded, trusting in the experienced guidance that the knife would produce the best results.
On to the results though, the bit you are all interested in. After dutifully waiting the three and a half hours, the bread was extracted. Slicing it up, samples were distributed. I'll leave it to the quotes to put together the picture of how it went.
Trying the bread first, Phil came out with "It's not mixed very well, there are dense lumps of salt in it". Under usual circumstances this would not be too bad, however the quote was accompanied with a deliberate journey to the door of the tatty hut and beyond. The bread's final resting place we can only guess at, but it is alluded to being the bush outside.
Upon Mr. Waite trying the bread second he ended up lying on the floor, claiming the bread was "so dense I had to lie down". When I made a move to pretend to kick James on the way past he responded "please don't make it come up, I don't want to taste it twice!" It was at this point when Jacob chimed in with the tactful comment "I couldn't even finish mine", adding "I feel nauseous" for good measure.
I do not know how it says more about (my bread, the others or Charlotte) but her comment was "I thought it was actually quite nice". So there you go, idiosyncratic taste buds or an unwavering commitment to politeness? I'll let you decide.
In the end I took this episode as an omen, deciding to call off my trip up the plateau
early tomorrow morning. I was on the edge and this certainly seemed like the universe
sending me a message. There is a silver lining though, and that is that I'll certainly
never be asked to make bread again. Another afternoon drinking beer for me!
Yours to the final Sump,
Isaac.
We were tasked by Antony to rig the entrance series of Balkonhöhle so that he could go and rig Mongol Rally (presumably a more interesting rig).
Obedient as we are, we agreed to the task and decided to make it a rigging learning expereince as well.
As we were the first people going to Balkonhöhle we had to add refelctors to the path, which we found by using the GPX track from essentials.
At the entrance of the cave, I rigged the handline onto the balcony. We then got changed and prepared to go underground. As it was supposed to be learning experience, Sieds and Marie had priority on the rigging, supervised by Lara and me.
As Sieds was geared up first, I took him to rig the first pitch. Midaway down the entrance series, Marie took over. She got to rig the large drippy pitch, which I was a bit jealous of.
Around this time, Lara was getting a bit worried because of the storm that was forecast and the perceived increase in drip. For the sake of expediency, I rigged the last bit. At the bottom, we decided that it would be irresponsible to keep going and rig the traverse we were meant to.
So we slowly made our way out of the cave, which wasn't very far, since we rigged a total a of 139m of rope.
The walk accross the plateau back to top camp was uneventful, except for the storm that was rapidly approaching. Luckily we made it back to camp 5 minutes before it started pouring.
It turns out that Garlic Camp is a really good idea. 1h58 from the car park, under 20 minutes from Homecoming, so I'll be spending more time there.
In order to make that happen, Jono organised our small group to set up Garlic Camp. Before that could happen, some gear needed carrying to Balkonhöhle, which Becka tried to organise. Seeing that I was sceptical of the plan, she tried to appeal to my male ego by saying that she tought I the next big thing on expo. Marie was a bit easier to convince.
At top camp, I edited the water collection system, hoping to make a system that is more robust and easier to replicate next year.
Once Becka, Jono and Marie were back, we slowly made our way towards Homecoming via Fishface. At Homeconing we bumped into Charlotte, Lara, Wookey and James, who were just starting with the rigging of the Homecoming entrance series.
From there, the walk to Garlic Camp was rather short, Jono claiming it was only 12 minutes, excluding the breaks taken.
At Carlic Camp, we set up a water collection system, solar panels, and a tarp to protect the sleeping area. Further, we did some terraforming to make the space more livable.
At around 17, Marie and Becka decided to make their way back to Top Camp. Shortly afterwars, Jono and me left for the car park. On the way to Homecoming, we caught up with Marie and Becka. Sadly, we had to say our goodbyes for the second time after we reached Homecoming.
Image of the path to the car park from Homecoming
Image of the path to top camp from Homecoming
The walk from Homecoming to the col was actually surprisingly pleasant and easier than the one from top camp. It could definitely become a trade route in the future.
I failed: the GPS position (fairly close to the Stoger Weg) is (2024) in completely impenetrable pine scrub. So either ArGE are incredibly hard, or the path has healed up since 2000, or they have recorded the wrong GPS position. I suspect that it is really the same as 114 and that they have the wrong GPS.
It was horrid: lower altitude and lots of curious cows meant lots of flies, cow flies, horse flies, humid scratchy larchen. Nasty. So I went on to the next target which was to check out some entrances lacking photos on the near part of the plateau.
I can say categorically that a GPS position is not sufficient to disambiguate entrances when there are 5 pits all within a few meters. One would need good photos and very clear descriptions. This is the case for 1623-81, 81b and 1623-82b. 1623-82 82 and 85 was easily identified because the paint and tag were in place. Ditto 148, but I failed with 289 too.
OK so lots of frustratingly similar photographs were take (with GPS coordinates in the EXIF data at least). My phone battery died with all the GPS work, and even with a spare battery pack it died again. So I took decided to get my exercise by walking up to top camp, having a coffee (nobody there). I left at about 14:00 and walked back.
The Berg Restaurant was not serving food, but beer was extremely welcome. As was the Austrian trio of double-base, accordion and base guitar which was serenading the just-off-work seilbahn station workers, who were tucking into roast pig, sauerkraut and potatoes. Very, very Austrian.
Got a lift back down the toll road to Alt Aussee with a multigenerational German family in a very small car: the granddaughter had to sit across Granny and my laps. This was a bit uncomfortable for all concerned s she was about 18.
Walked back to Bad Aussee. Had coffee having missed last bus.
Walked back to Gasthof. At which point I discovered Jono had driven down and if I had just stayed drinking beer I would have got a lift. Ho Hum.
These ropes had been left in a diabolical, abhorrent and disgusting state. They were left vaguely piled around the passage with knots still tied and with tangled ends and random extra knots, twists and fucked bits. Lara spat on the knots to try and untie one of them. We spent an hour untangling, untying, unfucking and coiling ropes. The clean ones were left daisychained whilst the fucked ones were coiled. The longest 4 fucked ropes were dragged out without tackle sacks! grrrrrrrrrrrrr
new verse of hard caver
the rope in homecoming was left in a tip
i think it caused charlotte to finally flip.
we hauled out the rope and were missing a bag
charlotte was the bull and this was the red rag!
TU is a guess - two hours less for me
Soon enough we were at the head of Honeycomb. Ruaridh and Marie immediately settled into their bothy and I was left to start rigging. Two minutes later, at 13.22 I heard the taps turn on. "It's a flood pulse, Ruaridh". This meant there'd be no point trying to get out in the next few hours. I headed down, past the 2nd Y-hang to the first single bolt Hilti spit rebelay. Such things are usually hidden by a nice, big hanger. Seen naked, it's smashed-in, cratered surround looked disconcertingly bad. And the air rushing from the roaring waterfall immediately below had me shivering. I turned tail and prussiked back up to add a thermal in the toasty bothy bag and collected the drill. This was Anthony's brand new drill, and a thing of beauty. Hammer and drill tethers with delightful, dinky screwgates plus baby snaplinks to clip them up. Drill bits carefully taped up to the right length. A blowing tube and even a spare spanner in case you were numpty enough to drop your first. The drill itself was nestled in foam padding then a dry bag that had, get this, no holes. It felt mean to him to be christening it.
Having added a bolt to the first single bolt rebelay it seemed sensible to add another to the next single bolt rebelay then I headed on down. Marie followed me with the Hangman's rope bag but said that Ruaridh was sick with stomach pains and was staying at the top. She had been keen to rig but the next pitch and hand-line turned out to be still in situ. Instead, she put in a new through bolt for a traverse line to the initial short pitch leading to Hangman's.
Having rigged down to the start of Hangman's we ferried our bags down then, unexpectedly, Ruaridh arrived. Despite a hacking cough and some strange smells he had managed to bring down one of the Mongol Rally bags which was impressive. I was, though, a bit less impressed that neither he or Marie had brought down any food, water, the stove, bothy or first aid kit so it seemed sensible to call the trip and head on out.
Ruaridh was suffering on the exit but we plodded out a reasonable pace, Marie and I had noodles at the base of the entrance to give the water more time to recede then I offered to head up first, being the only one who'd brought a kagoule.
The bottom third of the long drop (2nd one up) was the wettest where spray filled the shaft but it wasn't too bad so I whistled for the others then rigged the single bolt rebelay above the long drop Y-hang to remove the rub. We were all out by 10 so T/U 11 hours. Beautiful, moonlit and clear walk back to an empty Top Camp.
As we walked along, Jono and I chatted back and forth confirming the radios worked on the plateau and had the range to be useful. Finally, I arrived at Garlic Cave and dropped a fixed node above the cave and descended to look over the solar system. Meanwhile Jono setup a surface node at Stone Bridge. From inside each location, we were able to chat back and forth. No more need to leave the comfort of a sleeping bag to plan the day!
The Garlic solar system seems OK, pressing the green button enable the voltmeter and it showed about 14.5 volts.The USB A chargers are odd, the 1A ones seem to charge my phone, the 2.5A ones didn't. My cigarette adapter USB A charger worked OK, but it felt a bit fiddly in the socket. At this point I headed for the Col, hoping to find the radio we thought James lost, since we saw it reporting a position on the Col-Garlic path. After a while James emerged from Homecoming and started chatting. We learned the radio was at homecoming and was reporting its location wrong. A mystery for another day. I was at the Car park by around 2130 and Jono and Isaac mode it back a little while later.
Having allocated half an hour at top camp we naturally faffed for an hour and a half before beginning the hopefully-not-too-painful walk to homecoming, bags heavily laden with rope, metalwork and caving gear galore.
We arrived at the cave a little past one, Wassil went to gather more equipment from Garlic while we began packing rope at the entrance. We continued to faff till our hearts were content and weren't underground till gone three. The whole cave was rigged to the bottom of Gromit so, besides some futile arguing with our heavy tackle sacks on the traverses(oh and passing Charlotte, James and Lara on their way out), the descent went fairly quickly.
Stopping for a quick snack break at the end of the Gromit traverse, it became clear that Marie was quite worn out from all the awkward SRT and so it was decided that we should turn around after ten more minutes.
We stopped a short ways into "second coming"(just before the first traveres) and while I got the stove out to cook some noodles, Marie got a lesson in bolting. As the drill whirred away in the background I eagerly unpacked the cooking equipment: pan, lid, noodles, stove top and lighters what else would I need ... hmm ... the gas must just be hiding somewhere in this tackle bag ... hmmm ... must be a very small cylinder. Well, it turns out that EXPO hadn't invested in microscopic gas cans but rather I couldn't see it because it was still sitting comfortably somewhere at top camp, forgotten. This news hit Marie particularly badly who immediately began feeling nauseous and requested we leave the cave sooner rather than later.
The plan put into action was that Marie and I would begin prusiking out while Wassil finished bolting the traverse Marie that had started. I packed up to leave of course taking just the essentials: first aid kit, snacks, water and the spare drill batteries ... oops. By the time Wassil caught up to inform us that we had run of with his much needed spare batteries, Marie had taken a turn for the worse.
She had stopped at the top of Wallace to begin emptying the contents of her stomach onto the traverse below(luckily not directly onto Wassil's head) and was feeling very apprehensive about some of the pitches to come. We waited until she was finished retching to offer water and discuss plans, but with options limited the only thing left to do was to start the long arduous journey back to the surface.
Several more chunder stops were required on the way out, during which I also began to take a turn for the worse, but we eventually made it to the surface around 11pm. Outside a thick mist had enveloped the plateau casting doubt onto our ability to find our way across it. We got changed as fast as we could and at midnight made the admittedly dubious decision to set off for stoney bridge instead of the currently-max-capacity-but-much-(much!)-closer garlic cave.
After around ten minutes of walking it became glaringly obvious we were not going to make it back to top camp. Marie was still throwing up and her balance had gotten worse with her state. Since Wassil was still feeling ok we decided on the very unappealing option that he would walk back to top camp, alone, and return with our sleeping gear so that we could wait out the night on the plateau.
Marie and I sat uncomfortably inside the bothy we had with us for around 2 hours, Marie regularly purging her stomach contents into a nearby grike, after which I grew worried that Wassil had not yet returned. Stumbling round the location of our camping spot(which I lovingly name "patient's retreat") I finally found a spot where my phone had signal. Chatting with Jono, We learned that Wassil had made it to top camp but was too worn out from the day to return to us so instead Wookey was on his way with food and bags.
around three in the morning we were greeted by the very welcome sight of a surprisingly cheery(considering the circumstances) Wookey strolling down the plateau towards us. He dropped off what we needed for the night, made sure we were ok and then headed back up to top camp. We each found relatively less spiky bits of rock to lie down on and tried to get some rest.
In the morning, the warmth of the sun forced us out of from the dozy comfort of our sleeping bags and back into the reality of getting off this horrible lump of angry rocks. I dumped my sleeping bag in my bivvy outside homecoming and we began to make our way back to the Col at quarter to ten in the morning.
The Usually 1 hour Homecoming to Col walk was inflated to over 2 by the requirement for regular breaks, general sluggishness expected from two considerably unwell people and difficult nav on the currently un-reflectored route.
We eventually made it back to the Col and then dragged ourselves down to the carpark arriving promtly at half one to be met by a relieved looking Jono and Phil B, who supplied us with energy tablets and chocolate.
Moral of the story - EXPO should invest in microscopic gas cylinder technology, there's some smart people here I'm sure they could figure something out. I'm going to bed now, good night. Jacob
A bit of a disturbance last night as Marie was a bit ill after coming out of a cave and could not make the walk back to camp and had to bivvy on the plateau with Jacob. Wookey took her a sleeping bag.
In the evening Phil B and Jono went up to play with radios and to find Isaac (who apparently had been taking more than 5 hours to get to Garlic with Sieds), Anthony & Ruairidh went up to stay at top camp. All in PB's car.
While we were faffing at the entrance we ran into Wassil. The plan had been to use some of the rope we'd taken out of the cave from last year's leads and Wassil and co. had washed and brought back out the hill. Wassil told Charlotte they needed all the rope for second coming which put a bit of a dampener on the trip as we were pretty sure we didn't have enough to reach the watershed pushing front. Ah well, might as well get as far as we could.
Nothing very eventful happened in the entrance series; I shat myself mildly less on the traverse at the bottom of Grommit that the two previous times (progress!) and rewarded myself with a piss in the streamway. It was to be the first of many.
We sadly continued on past the nice pile of rope and up the dodgy muddy rope that led to watershed. The best event in this section was that James refound my breaking-crab which I was extremely happy -and vaguely sentimental- about. James rebolted a scary corner traverse which made it 10% less scary. It went sandy crawl, sandy crawl, muddy crawl, muddy puddles interspersed with a few pitches till the top of Strained by Gravity.
Here Isaac, Charlotte and I waited for James to rig what we haden't got to two days before. James made some strange grunts and groans which we elected to ignore. In the meantime Charlotte read another chapter of our bedtime story (Into Thin Air) and Isaac told us about the trials and tribulations of his job. We eventually got the all clear and descended to find James annoyed as the pitch lengths and rope lengths aligned unsatisfactorily and he'd had to turn back for several missed deviations. His mood was not improved by having missed a chapter of story-time.
After another piss for bravery we continued to the many many metres of traverses. I was pleasantly surprised by how not scary it was, the mud was slippy but they weren't very exposed and sliding over on my knees eventually became fun. Many slidy sandy bits through flow-stone canyon led to the top of The Sound of Water which Isaac offered to re-bolt and rig. James and I took a group piss then cuddled to keep warm and made up verses to Hard Caver:
We rigged in Homecoming for many a day
pirates stole our rope and for that they will pay
we slid down traverses, got covered in sand
then ran out of rope so the pushing got canned
At this point we decided to turn around. Isaac produced the first iconic quote of the day, not three metres into prussicing: 'I want to kill myself'. I took another piss (at this point questioning how much water i must have drunk) and we let him get a head start out the traverses. We spent a faffy time surverying a side lead (a traverse leading off flowstone canyon). James got sketched out after 4 or so points and we headed off.
I realised i still had my jacket and hat on half way up Strained by Gravity and nearly expired of heat. At the top we met up with Isaac, collected the brew kit and headed on to the top of Sump Bypass where we ate some moderately sandy noodles with a spanner. I took a piss to celebrate. Isaac really seemed like he needed them and produced iconic quote no. 2: 'I feel like fried chicken before it's fried; covered in mud then breaded in sand'.
Isaac and Charlotte headed out whilst James and I took a detour to survey Heifer. We had to drain a bit of a static sump and tried not to contemplate falling in. the actual aven through the wet bit was extremely cool and James excitedly took disto points while I stood on a rock and tried to keep up on book. It seemed like it went up 40 metres! We christened it Cow-Lick (as it was drippy) and as a few hours had now past we headed out. I had one final piss, by this point even James was concerned. the entrance series dragged on a bit, especially as James had to isolate a shagged section on Grommit and the Wallace rope was still 2013 (agh). By Radagast I was dreaming of Gosser, Chips and my book so the final pitch to the surface was very welcome.
Outside Homecoming we met Charlotte and Issac who made one final iconic quote: 'being out of the cave feels better than loosing my virginity'. We headed back very tiredly to the sweet damp embrace of Garlic Camp. Great trip.
The cycle path along the south side of the lake is now stopped after half way, and bicycles have to trog up the hill and go along the track, which is
Anyway I parked the bike at the "No Cycling" notice at the bottom of the track up (where going left would go to Stummern Alm) and walked up 3km (+400m) to Oberwasseralm.
It is mostrously dramatic: not only are you right underneath the Trisselwand but the Loser massif (Vor.SMK) Weisse Wand is huge and very steep.
I did spot, I think, (on the opposite slope of the Loser above/beside the Weisse Wand) the steep grassy field with an entrance at the top end which Chas and Planc found in 1983 and which I revisited in 2017.
GPS track is uploaded using expo.survex.com/gpxupload/.
The objective for today was to head over towards the Griesskogel camp used by ARGE some years ago to find a few of their caves that are in interesting places given what we have recently found in deep Balkonhöhle. We also planned to swing by a few caves that were lacking entrance photos to rectify the shortfall. Ruairidh was also keen to drop an undescended pitch in 2012-ns-07 (aka 2016#01), so we took drill, rope SRT kit etc.
In the course of our wanderings, we came across an interesting rusty artefact. The base camp brains trust reckons this to be a reserve fuel tank likely jettisoned from a second world war era plane.
Our first target was to find the entrance to 1623/261. This is a fairly insignificant cave: <100m long, <50m deep. The interesting feature is that the cave is aligned with development in deep Balkonhöhle, specifically Charon, so I was interested to discover if there were any obvious similarly aligned surface features. Sure enough, the 1623/261 entrance was found to be in the side of a chossy gully. We didn't have a compass, so cannot confirm the alignment, but it seems highly probable that this surface feature is related to development of 1623/261 and deep Balkonhöhle. (There is another similarly aligned ARGE cave - Haldenloch (appears not to have a number) - that is further away to the northeast that we didn't visit.)
We also found the campsite used by ARGE some years ago, identified as the flat area of limestone complete with hangers that they used to fasten their tents to. Immediately above this campsite, we found the entrance to Griesskogelschacht (1623/232).
On our way home, we stopped off at 2012-ns-07 (tagged as 2016#01). Ruairidh headed down in dry grots while I sat in the sun offering advice on thrubolt placement technique and rock quality from a vantage point 15m away where I couldn't actually see what was going on. Two bolts later, Ruairidh made it to the bottom which appears to be choked with boulders (though someone in an oversuit may prove more willing to absolutely confirm that). There is also an upgoing unexplored passage (QM B). Not super promising, but probably worth a return visit. If the cave goes anywhere, it is likely to connect to the upper levels of Balkonhöhle.
In the course of our wanderings we took photos of the following entrances:
All photos have been added to the relevant cave page (except where an existing entrance photo could be resurrected). With the exception of 2012-dd-01, all other caves should now have sufficient information to be added to the Kataster. There is a 2022 survey of 2012-ns-05 and 2012-ns-06 that is not in the dataset; the survex file is very sparse and contains no clues as to where the connecting points should be.
T/U applies to Ruairidh only.
Lessons learnt: 1) Bring spare underwear for a multi-day trip. 2) Find time to change underwear on said multi-day trip.
Actions carried forward: Null.
Isaac
James was shown how to scan survey notes, put them in a plastic wallet, and create the corresponding online wallet.
Lara was shown how to type up a logbook entry online, but she (sensibly) bailed on typing up the survey data when faced with the full complexity of the survex system in troggle..
Future work: Rename channels so we can pass telemetry over an expo specific channel, test bridging the plateau to the potato hut via mqtt. Setup Anthony's cellular wifi at top camp to help support bridging. Figure out why the GPS is a pain on some units. And figure out why Meshtastic won't run on wookey's phone.
The tofu curries were consumed when a prospecting trip returned. I was sad.
Created new folder as expofiles/datalogger/ where I have put the data, exported data (xls, txt) a .db3 file which was lurking and the 88MB Windows control software. There is also Apple s/w.
You can extract the PDF file without software by just plugging the device into a USB port, where it appears as a disc drive containing just the pdf.
I had cleverly left my undersuit and thermals down the hill (where i had tried and failed to wash them) so before we left I had an emergency call with Issac, who was on Plateau Porter duties. For the actual trip I borrowed Marie's oversuit, conveniently left outside and Charlotte's leggings. Thanks everyone. The undersuit was very thick which although I was boiling all the way to Radagast was very welcome later in the day.
After a pretty slow descent (fixing lights, faffing with ropes e.t.c) we got to the split off to watershed where James and I continued ahead while Charlotte waited for Jacob. We headed all the way to the end of the sandy traverses and the beginning of flowstone canyon, noting on the way at the water-filling-drip that the water levels must be very low. I also reflected on how much bigger Strained by Gravity was than I remembered, 70 metres back up didn't sound so fun.
The mood was a little down at this point because both James and I had realised that the late start and faff meant we were in for a very long trip if we wanted to reach the pushing front which slightly scrapped the plan of two days in a row down homecoming. Still, we poked around the top of Flowstone canyon to pass the time; into the rift we'd surveyed a few days before (still not traversable without bolts) and up to the higher level passage. Jacob and Charlotte showed up around 4:30 so we offered to survey this higher level passage in the rift to see where it went while they rigged Sound of Water.
We had a pretty fun time doing this, and got some nice 10 metre legs. It felt entertainingly sketchy because the floor had a changing rift in it with piles of sand, gravel and dust on top of it so wherever you stepped seemed to send avalanches of floor onto the passage below. James declared it was like murder holes in castles so it was promptly named 'portcullis passage'. After passing some nice helictites, James, who was ahead with the disto shouted back that it ended in a wet chamber with a tackle sack in it. Very strange. We realised pretty much simultaneously that we were actually looking down onto the chamber we had sat in (and pissed in) the last trip while waiting for the pitch to be rebolted and Charlotte had left the bag in it this time as well. I dashed round the long way into the chamber and James shot a leg down from the window he had emerged in 5 metres above me, closing the loop.
After this entertainment was over we sat pretty cosily in a bothy bag, had a cuddle, listened to James' music and waited for the all clear. This also gave us plenty of time to come up with another half Hard Caver verse, this time:
When caving with Charlotte it's prussic galore
You won't leave the cave till it's gone half past four
the second half would be written later during noodles:
We dropped a few pitches and surveyed the lot
By the time we get out we will wish we'd be shot
When the pitch was rigged we zoomed down it, did a bit of spikey rift waling/traversing, rigged Alpine Showers and finally reached the pushing front. Unfortunately the mood was a little down. Charlotte was very cold and we all were aware it was 8, the time we'd agreed to turn around. I was also trying not to think about the fact my whole leg had got splashed descending Alpine Showers which meant I really should turn around rather than get hypothermia.
James declared he would put in a few traverse bolts along a ledge while we began turning round. Surprise, surprise that's not what happened. We chatted and made the executive decision it would be stupid late anyway so we might as well push the cave and make it an even later trip. The next day's caving would be sacked off unless we fancied an evening all night trip (that did not happen). Charlotte had also put on her spare layers so we all got up and got excited again.
The water shot off from where we were standing down a rift in the floor but it was easy to walk round the side for 4 or 5 metres. James put in a traverse line and then much discussion was had at the best place for a y-hang, as all the rock was a bit shit. Eventually he put one on the same wall and a deviation on a lovely huge flake that went from the left wall to the centre of the rift. we descended and added in another traverse following above the stream where it kept dropping. All the time I was swearing at the waterproof paper but getting very excited at how big the passage was and the general concept of treading on ground that had never been stepped on before.
James dropped another pitch and, having run out of bolts, drilled a thread for the deviation: very Yorkshire. The stream became very lovely and shallow here at a very gently angle so we walked along the bottom. This nice passage led to me later naming it 'My Favourite Things' following the Sound of Music theme. (James added that it was also a good name because he was caving with his favourite people: awww).
The roof of the rift dropped till it was right above us and the stream plummeted into the floor. It we felt like we were in the Gods, dropping rocks 25 metres into the stream below. Here, having ran out of bolts and rope we sadly had to turn back, with the slightly alarming realisation it was already 11.
The way out was a little hellish. Starting off well, I dropped an apple sized rock directly on Charlotte's helmet. Earlier I'd realised that Jacob's leg loop was not only not doubled over but was about 2mm from coming out. Excellent safety practices all round.
Flowstone canyon with a big bag, caving alone was I'm pretty sure somewhere close to a lot of peoples idea of torture. I had to repeatedly toss the bag up squeezy climbs then do them myself with shot legs. Charlotte caught up with me and cajoled me over the traverses, with chocolate and patience. She also offered to carry the bag up Strained by Gravity and the other small pitches. What a legend. The scent of noodles and promise of water pushed me on to the bottom of Sump Bypass where James and Jacob waited. Here the second half of the Hard Caver verse was written.
It now being 1am we were a bit delirious. Jacob went the wrong way and took a detour down Heiffer and Charlotte and James decided to try rerigging and rebolting Wallace and Grommit. It seriously needed doing but you could not have paid me. After a long slow prussic I emerged at 4:30, Jacob before 5. James looked shattered but pulled himself out 20 minutes later and Charlotte a bit after that around 6.
The sun shone off the mountain and through the wild flowers as we walked up the hill to Garlic Camp. Despite how my legs felt, at that moment I was extremely happy.
There is also a completely new OPENED Black cartridge under the bench in a box.
There were several old cartridges in opened boxes and bags, but were unlabeled as to which were good (unused) and which were bad and empty. Sieds has sorted it all out.
So we are probably good with this printer and have enough toner for expo 2025.
On the trip back from Garlic, Isaac and I visited the shaft with actual vertical gear and some Petzl Pulses. While Isaac nipped down to Homecoming to find a drill bit, I scouted the rigging. The rock at the top was a bit funky due to frost etc. After a bit of beating, I identified places to set some pulses. Isaac returned with the drill and I quickly drilled a few holes and placed the pulses.
I expected to drop into a large chamber, but instead found myself in 2.5 meter diameter shaft that went down at 15 meters. The result was very disappointing, but my rigging and the pulses exceeded expectations, so we called it a win for the day.
Isaac went to drop the drill and rope back at Garlic while I did a quick survey of the cave. I tied to the dm04 tag, but that leg is a bit estimated since it was too bright to use the disto effectively.
The tag for p2018-dm-04 is in the foreground, the tackle sack is near the beginning of the rift and the actual shaft is under the darker area after the tackle sack and before the Bunde.
I feel I speak for all when I say we are flabbergasted, dismayed and in some cases angered by the decision to bar cheese from further expedition shopping...
The simple coagulated dairy product has been a mainstay of our expedition goers diet since we first arrived. The morale boost acquired by placing a luscious, creamy strip of Gouda into one's mouth cannot be overstated.
By relegating cheese to being a so-called "personal item" it forces expedition goers to balance their own need for a morale boost with their personal financial circumstances, creating potentially, a delicate class divide between those on the frontier. It also calls into question if the expedition command truly have the attendees best interests at heart.
An army marches on it's stomach. Expedition caving is no different. Happy cavers are effective cavers and by removing access to our most favorite food I believe the expedition command has actively damaged the lengths and depth prospects for exploration going forward.
I implore expedition command to reconsider their decision. I sympathize that it may be awkward in the short term, however I hope they would agree with me that it is better to loose face than to loose life.
In the event of inaction on this issue, I am afraid we will be forced to consider further action.
Signed: The people of the plateau.
We were already commenting on the ridiculous amount of gear we had to lug through the entrance series but a couple more parcels of tackle sack joy awaited us on the way and Wookey would eventually have to give me and Anthony his bags since Mongol Rally still hadn't finished being rigged. An epic train of tackle sacks had to be ferried through the crawl at the top of Mongol Rally. I was tasked with scurrying up the muddy slope so that Wookey could hook his foot around the straps. The largest bag only just barely fit through.
Anthony and I gave Wookey a head start to rig and rebolt and as I heard his woohoos as he abseiled into the abyss, I tried to absorb his gleeful energy and not think about the fourth tackle bag waiting for me at one of the rebelays. We briefly considered doing multiple trips to carry the bags down but in the end decided against the idea given how late it was getting. I started off a bit shaky after accidentally clipping my hand jammer into the rope I was leaving rather than the rope I was on and then descending out of reach of it, but soon I was on my way, my efficiency gradually improving. I had to constantly fight to maintain my balance as the bags got snagged and swung about and I thought I was winning until one of the hanging rebelays towards the end claimed victory over me. I just could not physically unweight my cowstails there was so much weight pulling at my harness. Once again, my despair was lifted by a cry of glee from Wookey as he had just finished rigging the final swing to the pit stop after much swinging about and offered to come relinquish me of a couple bags. Wookey came to my rescue and soon we were all down, Anthony not having the same problems I did but probably carrying more weight. When I got to the pit stop though I was alone, Wookey having gotten a head start on the bag ferrying. In a moment of rare navigational confidence and with a vague memory of Wookey saying the way to camp was a short very obvious walk, I headed off in what seemed to me the obvious direction, only to hear Wookey’s shouts from behind me after a while. Wookey commented that he didn’t even realise there was another option. With my navigational confidence crushed, we headed back to camp where, after a couple hours of set up and some food, we got to bed at the ripe hour of 3am.
A wake up time of 10:30am had been determined by an 8 hour timer that Wookey had accidentally set instead of an 8 minute timer for our rehydrated meals although it may as well have been 8 minutes, I had a such a cold and restless night. Luckily the thrill of undiscovered passageways motivated me out the relative warmth of my sleeping bed and helped clear my groggy head. It felt luxurious that the pushing front was only about an hour of relatively chill caving away but the tricky dance of remaining relatively mud free, warm and well fed in such an inhospitable environment meant we were on our way a couple hours later.
Once we arrived at Medusa’s Maze and identified some of the A-leads we were planning on pursuing, Anthony wandered into a chamber that he though might be connected to a B-lead we had just passed. Scrambling back up and spotting his light was exciting since it meant the cave exploration had officially begun. Wookey and I set to work surveying whilst Anthony busied himself with some re-bolting. I explored some possible other leads in the chamber, which we later named Gorgons’ Lair to continue with the mythological theme. One ended in a small muddy chamber but another led to a short pitch with a medium draft. I was thrilled to have discovered this new lead which Anthony described, and I quote, as “very interesting” however once we were finally surveying it, Wookey realised that most of the data from the digital survey he had been drawing was lost. And thus I experienced a high and low of cave exploration. I lay around unhelpfully, nail polish and disto in hand, whilst Wookey fiddled with the app and we gradually got quite cold from the draft. Once we begrudgingly restarted the process of resurveying, technology continued to conspire against us since the disto seemed to unexpectedly die and so we returned to our tackle sacks to replace the batteries, spirits dampened. As it turned out, the disto had merely faked its death but as we were shoving our coats back into our bags for the millionth time, we realised that if we just put them on our problem of being too cold would be solved.
We smashed out the survey in record time and connected it back the main system (Wookey promised to do the bulk of the drawing later). This time I noticed I was much more dextrous in my splaying and station pointing, at least I’d like to think. Anthony joined us to follow the A lead that was our original goal, but it quickly ended in a very unappealing looking wet boulder choke, although it did have a slight draft. After Wookey connected up a few more C lead rifts, we decided to call it a day to get to bed at a more reasonable hour.
Although facilities diminish from top camps to underground camps, this camp had its advantages for me. It’s mice and snail free. (I was sure I had something else to add here but I think that’s it. Its very strong advantage though in my opinion. Mice terrify me. Also I am pretty sure snails are out to get me.)
That night in an attempt to get more sleep I made the strategic decision to transfer one of my two caving socks over to join my single pair of sleeping socks. That, along with some hand warmers, the discovery of the shoulder toggle in the sleeping bag and perhaps just sheer exhaustion led to a much deeper sleep.
I can say with the utmost sincerity that I enjoyed prussiking out the next day with one medium sized tackle sack more than I did abseiling down with many of various sizes. It was slightly depressing though that Wookey who was doing some rigging fettling and was missing his pantin was hot of my heels most of the way up, not that my pantin was very useful for most of mongol rally, it was so caked in mud. I was very happy to see the many ridges that had ensnared my tackle sacks disappearing into the darkness below although perhaps the bug of caving exploration will beckon me once again.
I had no awareness of the passage of time until I was struck by hunger pains at the bottom of Honeycomb, it just was rope, rope and more rope. As it turns out, we were well into the afternoon at this point.
We were greeted by a few rays of sunshine when we finally exited around 5pm before the rain started to fall on our walk back to top camp where Becka, James and Colin were waiting for us expectantly to begin their own journey. We gave them the inventory of the camp whilst they updated us on base camp happenings and world politics (Biden had dropped out of the presidential race!) I had remarked to Wookey and Anthony somewhat jokingly underground that the apocalypse could happen and we wouldn’t be aware of a it until a couple days later but was not expecting such big news. It was nice to have escaped worldly problems for a 48 hours and replaced them with underground ones.
Got a paynefully early start up the hill with Charlotte and team, then she set a blistering pace for a payneful trog up to the col, arriving at 09:25, where I thankfully left the party and headed off leftwards behind the Braüning wall at a more reasonable pace.
My aim was to explore the possibilities of the Geschwandalm area as a potential forward base for bringing gear up to the plateau in case the new cable car system proves difficult, and longer term as a possible partial replacement for the Gasthof campsite when property values eventually force our squalid encampment further away from the gentile tourist areas.
The path along the bottom of the Braüning wall is not well marked at all at the col end, but mostly is well cairned and the cuts through the pine scrub are well maintained. It could be a useful route for a stretcher party if that was needed in this area. I lost the path again around the Geshwandalm huts (alt. ~1540m) in the multitude of cow tracks but found it again at the stream just below the main grassy area.
The path from there to where it intersects the driveable track is narrow and not motorable (unless on a scrambler bike). It is an easy gradient and was a 50 minute easy amble to the track.
At the track there is a wider area a hundred metres or so away (southwards) which could be a gear trans-shipment area and campsite if necessary (alt. ~1380m). There is a busy stream (~ 0.5 litres a second) a couple of hundred metres away. It is clearly a forestry road (blocked by cut trunks in places) and we would need to talk to the forestry people. The track joins the ski-lift tracks below the Löser Hütte and then into the toll road. The other way along the track connects to Bla Alm (signposted, and confirmed by Mark Shinwell) so could be an alternative if we can't use the toll road.
Track online at /expofiles/gpslogs/2024/PhilipSargent/2024-07-21_geschwandalm.gpx.
ADDENDUM 26th July:
Bing aerial photos show the forestry track and much of the path from Geschwandalm, it shows that the track does not go to Bla Alm at all, but apparently ends only about 150m beyond where the path joins it.
Harry and Charlotte entered early to rerig and apparently faffed for an ungodly amount of time. Chi and I got underground at 12:40 collecting Charlotte's Pantin, which she had ironically managed to forget after it had been used as a model for the Frankenpantin. Much faff followed this as well: we raced down to the top of Wallace where we met Harry coming up the pitch. He had somehow managed some mess involving a dropped drill bag, a random pitch and disgustingly twisty rope. All was retrieved and the rope was replaced.
Chi zoomed down to join Charlotte and de-rig Heifer for rope while I coiled the old shit 2013 11mil (it was not a pretty job). Harry and I sat kindly waiting for each other to finish 5 minutes after both of us had, without saying anything.
On the way to the pushing front only one eventful thing happened. Harry got entertainingly stuck on a pitch-head after descending into the traverse line. He attempted to climb over it at the risk of falling backwards, again, much to my entertainment, before giving up.
We decided to push the QMA aven at the start of Flowstone Canyon. Chi and I pushed a lovely big rock down it first. Nice stuff. EDITORIAL NOTE it was at the end of Watershed, the aven isn't in Flowstone Canyon . Chi spent 20 slow minutes putting in bolts while we layered up. He was frustrated at how slow the drill was until it was pointed out to him that it was in reverse. Chi blamed DeWalt. He then claimed that some strange mineral vein had fucked his drill bit, which turned out to be entirely flat at the tip. With the drill bit swapped, he tried to put it in the same hole and fucked the second bit a little too. We eventually dropped the pitch.
The bottom had a potential camping place (whooo). It was drippy on the pitch side of the pot but dry on the other with a flat rocky area you could potentially fit four sleepers in. Chi also realised I had left his down jacket at the top of the pitch thinking it was the emergency shelter. In my defence they were in identical orange bags.
After lots and lots of discussion Chi called the chamber 'Peculiar Pot' after the strange large boulders surrounding the camp. I surveyed, Harry drilled and we dropped a pitch down the rift on the other side. What followed was a lot of wiggly rift with a pitch at the end. Due to the strange pitch/traverse Harry rigged which you had to stand in it was dubbed Perverse Pitch which proved itself accurate.
We agreed to finally turn around once it was dropped, it already being 9pm. Annoyingly, (or not) at the bottom we found the side of the Sound of Water pitch. Loop closure! This of course meant closing the survey loop and derigging what we'd just dropped, making the whole exercise interesting but a little pointless.
I forgot that Harry's water bottle was in the bottom of my bag, and may have slightly convinced them they were wrong. Harry, desperate for a drink took a sip from a streamway before realising it was a little frothy a few feet upstream. Chi and I had indeed pissed there five minutes before. The dehydration continued as all the other water was used for noodles and Harry had never found his, how mysterious. I was in trouble when I emptied my tackle sack on the surface but on the plus side denying Harry basic human necessities slowed him down behind me on the entrance series.
Harry and Charlotte slowed themselves down by doing some more Wallace fettling. Chi and I got out at the lovely hour of 3am and napped for the 15 minutes before they caught up. I got deja vu as we headed up to Garlic and immediately passed out. A very long, very fun day.
We went to Second Coming and, at the first traverse, wondered why it was rigged 5m above the obvious floor so Sieds scrambled down and checked it was OK to walk down. I derigged the first traverse, releasing four short ropes and plenty of metalware and we put in a short handline to the floor to replace it. We then checked out other lower sections and went to the third traverse. This was, mysteriously, rigged on the right wall, wandering up and down it. Sieds began to rig a more straightforward and easy traverse along the left wall but he ran out of time to complete it.
We got out of the cave at midnight and Sieds walked to Garlic camp and I walked to Top Camp with a full moon and no wind. I could see and hear Sieds as he approached Garlic when I was almost at Top Camp, it was so still and silent. It was nearly 2am before I got to Top Camp and I crept around making food trying not to disturb anyone - I didn't realise until the next morning that there was nobody else there.
After a rather eventful walk up the plateau summiting a mountain on my travels. I arrived to a concerned Becka and James about to come looking for me. On a side note would not recommend carrying caving kit and camping kit in one go it sucks. The next few hours were spent waiting for the previous camping trip to exit the cave so we knew what to take and do once underground. The other group - Wookey, Marie and Anthony - arrived at top camp at around 18:30 where we discussed their progress. Apparently it involved lots of swearing at far too many tackle bags on the way down the various pitches. Opting to eat dinner at top camp we continued to faff, getting underground for 20:00. This would be our last daylight for 65 hours.
Due to James and I not knowing the way to camp we had a guided tour of Balkonhoehle by Becka which slightly slowed progress taking 4hrs to reach camp. I was using my rack much to James's entertainment. I proceeded to drink half a litre of very cold water causing me to shiver. This would be the coldest I was all trip. When in our sleeping bags I apparently fell asleep far too quickly in comparison to a jealous Becka who was still cold. I was very warm and had a great nights sleep.
The tour of Balkonhoehle continued on the first day after a slow start. We found a couple of draughty A leads near camp which would be good for another team to look at if they're down for a short day. Once at Northern Powerhouse we dropped the big pitch as someone had to do it, resulting in a lovely 50m pitch which went nowhere. Becka nearly had a big rock land on her head when it fell out of the wall when James lent on it. Luckily the big rock went nowhere and only a little one went down. This would become a trend of our trip. Having used up all our thru-bolts to push the pitch and being a little late we decided to scope out our leads for the next day. This involved going to the lead in the chamber surveyed on the previous camping trip and digging a boulder choke to bypass a pitch. Once we realised it was going we left and James squashed his knee behind a rock. Becka was very concerned, thinking James had seriously either squashed or trapped his arm. I rammed myself into a very tight, horizontal, sharp and rifty squeeze where I bailed out due to rescue being impossible. We then looked at some other leads which needed killing. We went back to camp for an early night in preparation for a big pushing day the next day.
The gas stove required much love to actually work at cooking our dinner. On another side note the gas stove could do with being replaced with a stove with a pre-warming gas loop, otherwise you have no chance of cooking anything quickly.
An earlier start than the previous day left us with plenty of time to kill many leads. We set off to yesterday's dig to put in the pitch above as we now had bolts to bypass the sketchy boulder choke. Here I learnt to bolt under observation from James. Two more pitches were found and bolted. At the bottom of the second pitch I had to return to the top, while James and Becka surveyed our new found shafts, I was sent to collect the 50m rope for the 3rd pitch and some more flapjack. On the way back to the others 2 false floors collapsed underneath me while on a traverse line resulting in a disgruntled Becka, appropriately so. The 3rd pitch had some slightly more inventive rigging due to a low amount of bolts left. Here I had a conversation while bolting which was not a good idea, resulting in unset bolts which I had to be reminded to set. The 3rd pitch finished at a muddy tube so it ended rather depressingly.
After having de-rigged we had no thru-bolts to rig anything so we pushed a couple of horizontal ramps on the way to Tartarus which all connected to themselves quite entertainingly. There seems to be a big, wet boulder choke where all the leads crap out. We then headed further in to a QMB, which was lovely wide passage until it again died while on top of a boulder false floor on top of a big drop. We all got scared and ran away.
On the way back to camp we replaced the old (2012) rope from the Northern Powerhouse up-pitch and also surveyed a short side passage. I ran away to camp to make a start on dinner while the surveying was done. An inventory was taken and an early night was had.
A very early morning and a relatively faff-less start was achieved. Mongol Rally was quickly started by Becka. I tried to make my life easier by abseiling out of the window on an Italian hitch with my jammers on the up rope. The plan failed when the carabiner failed to open, resulting in me having to untie the rope from the natural it was secured to in order to feed it through my carabinier to then try again. James was not impressed and made sure to hold onto the rope. Once this first obstacle was passed I was off, being chased by James and trying to keep up with Becka, which didn't happen. My pantin and croll weren't being helpful, making my life very unpleasant. Much suffering was gone through trying to exit, much to everyone else's entertainment. The exhaustion caught up at the bottom of the entrance series. Much flapjack was consumed, giving me a second wind. I exited to Becka going telling me that we were behind schedule and cracking the whip.
Isaac went for a swim in the lake, he will have to edit this post to share how that went but if this text remains we can oblly assume that he wishes for his experience to remain between him and the waters of grundlesee (should this be the case please respect his privacy and do not harass him for details of his experience).
I went for a a quick walk up the nearby Gallhofkogel, lovely views(which I would put here were I an expereinced enough nerd) and a good few benches to sit enjoy a packed lunch.
I need to go caving.
Lesson learnt: Be wary of Jono's ideas. Ask more questions.
One confusing problem was a corrupt entry elsewhere in 2023 which made it seem like a new entry was being edited, when it wasn't (which was only on the server and could not be reproduced on dev machine at base).
We now have a new expoadmin capability of easily deleting logbook entries online. Also troggle is not producing duplicate entries any more. Ridiculous amount of effort, sorry guys.
PS [later the same day]
Nope: the duplication problem is still happening on the server (but not on the dev system). bugger
[PPS fixed again, differently.]
Note that these notes have
I found the entrance series' rigging a bit needlessly hard but when it was explained to me about the usual state of the snow plug it made a lot more sense.
When we got down to the top of Radogast I got all my bolting kit together and abbed down on the fixed rope with the rope for the pitch in the bag on my hip. (You can probably guess what's coming up!) When about 7m down there was a lovely flat as anything wall of rock where I put a rebelay in, but not before using a wide range of climbing moves to pull myself in and get my skyhook on. Annoyingly, the skyhook popped as I was getting a bolt out the bag so I had to do that very physical part twice. It was about here that I discovered that alpine caves didn't feel as cold as I believed they would be - owing to quite how dry they are. I was positively cooking!
Once I got the bolts in I threw the end of my rope up to Lara to rig on the pitch-head so I could rig the rebelay and come back up - my legs were going a bit too tingly for my liking! At the top I learnt the others were quite cold but I needed a moment to regain use of my legs because they'd become quite painful. With renewed blood flow to my lower limbs I abbed back down, got embarrassingly stuck on my rebelay (small cowstail crab got pinned and wouldn't come out), abbed down, did some swinging back and forth and then left and right so I was swinging round in a circle so I could grab another bit of rock, hook it and pull myself in. Placed one bolt and then did a fairly scary traverse out on my cowstails trying not to whip into the void of Radogast as I clambered into the tube and placed my final bolt.
Once all that was finished being rigged Lara came down to see (the first bolt of the traverse line spun a bit (It was being pulled in every direction), she joined me, we left the rope and the bag behind and made our way out (Lara tightened the bolt to perfection - I think a forgot to clean all the clay off first time round). I have absolutely no idea how they got into here in 2018 except maybe running off the top of the pitchhead and doing a massive rope rub pendulum into it!
The others had already started their own way out, having got cold and bored - sorry! We followed out and there I caught up with Tom who had had a scary moment with his D-ring spinning and the harness trying to open the triact lock! We made our way out and by the end I was peeling off clothes like I was in Spain!
A very cool bit of SRT bolted for me & setup for the future, but unfortunately a very different trip experience for everyone else. (Tom's space blanket shelter is apparently quite amazing though!
Lara's Note: It was a very entertaining SRT day for me. I hung at the top of Radagast with a great view of Aidan bolting. This also meant I participated in some extended rope based ballet. Aidan and I balanced on one ledge, both connected to two ropes, trying not to topple the other person off. Aidan beautifully bolting a rebelay and then getting stuck on it was also good stuff.
Tom's Note: Whoever rigged the entrance series should be shot. Also rotating D-rings is not a fun thing to see.
Aidan's Note: Unfortunately there was a loop closure error of 13%. :( A week and a half later I have learnt the SAP 5's reference point is different to where I thought it was which explains that. (I thought it was a nail polished corner on the box. It is in fact the brass ring on the back for a keeper cord that kept unscrewing itself.)
I was a coherent but faffy start to the trip. The plan was that Lara and I would walk down from Garlic to Homecoming, meeting Harry and Chi who'd be walking up from base camp. It was 20 past 10 when we all met up. This sounds completely reasonable, and indeed it is if I neglect to mention that our planned meeting time was 9:30. It hadn't been the most pleasant walk up for poor Chi and Harry, the weather being exceptionally poor when they began their walk. It transpired that they had actually rang everyone in residence at Garlic, with the hope of requesting the trip be scrubbed. Unfortunately, Garlic being a cave, and none of us being awake at 10 to 8 in the morning their attempts were in vein.
Heavy faff then proceeded to follow for a while. I can't remember how long exactly but 2 hours sounds about right. Trying to get everything adequately into bags + work out what was going where and indeed what we actually had around us was a bit of a task and a half. We took so long in fact that Aiden and Rosa, setting off from garlic far later than Lara and I, managed to get into the cave before us.
Finally entering the cave with 10 minute intervals between us we had two dense bags each to manipulate through the entrance series. This was the start of my downfall. At the first rifty bit before Radogast I sunk down in the rift wedged by one bag on top of me squashing me down, but unable to lift myself up due to my hip being held taught by the hauling line on the second bag. Getting myself out (after a great deal of help from Lara and Harry) annoyed, slightly shaken, and questioning my abilities somewhat, we pressed on. My next obstacle was to come just moments later at the traverses approaching Wallace. Once again I had difficulties with the bags, never quite having the strength or dexterity to align them in a manner cohesive with good caving. This (and the exact causal relationship im still unaware of) managed to stir up many unpleasant memories of my childhood and teenage years. I then struggled rather too much lifting myself up on each re-belay. The cumulative effect of these events meant I reached the bottom of the pitches in a rather unsettled and uncomfortable state of mind.
Propane nightmares was up next and I fell well behind moving the, now one bag, along with me. If I may also take a tangent here, I'd like to announce my hatred for the Petzl Portage 30 liter bag. What an dismally stupid idea it was to place the attachment point for the donkey dick 3/4 of the way up the bag rather than at the top. The placement means that every attempt to move it,the bag ends up dragging at an angle, wedging itself on any outcrop that it happens to come by. Dragging the bag through propane nightmares made me feel like I had travelled back in time to 2021 and I was piloting the Ever Given through the Suez Canal.
By this point I had mentally checked out of the trip and wanted nothing more than to be in the daylight cradling a Gosser and floating around the lake. The thought of strained by gravity, and especially the traverses afterwards filled me with dread. It was also here where the noise from the water falling ahead was noticed, calling into question if a camp would be possible at all. After much deliberation it was decided the others would continue to the camp site, dump the equipment somewhere dry, meanwhile I would huddle at the top of Strained by Gravity in the group shelter, listening to a pod cast and feeling sorry for myself.
In the group shelter I listened to The Rest Is History podcast episode on the history of British Elections. Very interesting! Eventually the others returned and we started to make our way out of the cave. Chi had his bluetooth speaker with him, and holy fuck drum and bass approaching you at ever increasing volume is a terrifying motivator for getting up pitches quickly. At one of the re belays near the top of Grommit I did have to ask for the music to briefly be paused however, as I worked out how to un string up myself. In a brief lack of focus I forgot to remove the old rope before putting the new one in at the re-belay. It only took a couple of attempted prussics to realise that something had gone rather wrong.
There is a feature on the CT chest jammers which I have been aware of, and often talk about, but have never had to use in the wild.
"The metal ring on the cam catch" I tell freshers, "Is brilliant, as you can actually grip it properly to open it, and if you get jammed, you can clip your footloop through the loop to stamp the cam out if it all goes to shit!". After trying to open the cam by hand at the re belay I quickly realised what I had to do. It is with a great deal of excitement I can announce that the technique worked perfectly. In fact, lost in the relief and excitement of the moment I believe I yelled down the pitch "Fuck yeah, CT, I love you!". The journey out from that point on passed rather unproblematically. Lara had a brief uncomfortable moment when during reaching for a couple of mars bars that had fallen down a rift, she tilted forwards and slipped into said rift unconnected to any traverse line. I'll leave it to her to describe this episode in more detail as my description definitely did not do it justice.
We got out just gone 7pm, and made our way back down the plateau. I am aware that this is a controversial decision, and one that has no doubt been the subject of much discussion. This log book entry, being written by one member of the party, isolated from his former team mates and their thoughts, is not the place for this discussion. Not wishing to damage the discourse or my party by offering a reasoning, I will avoid giving one till they can consult.
Only a few more matters to discuss before the end of this entry. Firstly, Casualties. My descender (and footloop and ascender) I like to keep clipped to a side gear loop when not in use. I abhor a cluttered D-Ring. On traversing the rift just before Strained by Gravity on the way out (the one with the corner traverse line) my descender, which must have been inadequately clipped to my gear loop by my numb fingers pinged off and clattered to rest down a 20m unexplored rift. Rescue should be possible if one wanted to push the lead.
Secondly when shaking out a tackle bag at the gear dump, Chi and Harry noticed a mystery item fall out and likewise tumble down a rift. This was my first aid kit. The rift is not a lead and rescue is taken to be impossible.
We have been told it is important to note that the cave was still wet and drippy even 12 hours after the previous rain. I'm sure this will be typed up on the next set of survey notes.
This is only one small part of the story, and I'm sure some companion editions would be welcomed and are coming soon from the other members of the trip.
Finally to my companions I am sorry again. I owe you all a lot of beers.
Homecoming Camping Trip 24-07-2024
MIA: Petzl Simple under the command of I.Neale
KIA: Compact First Aid Kit under the command of I.Neale, on secondment to H.Kettle, C.Khulmann
First of all, I'd like to note that turning round was the right decision for the whole group and no blame should be put on anyone. It was too wet to push that day anyway and getting all the camping stuff where it needed to be was a successful effort in itself. Most importantly, if any member of any trip decides for whatever reason they don't want to continue caving the correct thing to do is turn round.
The actual trip was faffy and tiring, but pretty fun. Entertaining moments include: Chi's absolute horror at the amount of food we brought (half a noodle pack per person is apparently not enough) and the absolute levels of rage we achieved at the ever increasing number of bags. Chi and I capped out at 3 for Strained by Gravity, and Harry at 4.
The morale was pretty good when we'd had a final snack with Issac but I got a bit unhappy at the watershed traverses, finding the idea of turning round pretty demoralising. Some kind words from Harry and a little helpful bullying from Chi sorted me out. The other two planned to zoom out to see if we could get a lift down the hill before drinking happened at base camp but Harry decided that it was unwise to leave me and Issac at the back alone so waited for me at the top of strained by gravity. Probably a good decision.
We all zoomed (read with scepticism) out the entrance series to Chi's pounding D and B: very motivating. In my slightly delirious state I tried to rescue a dropped chocolate bar from a slanted rift after Wallace. I would like to state I succeeded in rescuing it, but then my foot loop betrayed me and I ended up stuck head first laughing at myself. Chi rescued me in turn.
A good but chaotic trip
I have Arrived
[Ed. This action has the approval of the Troggle software maintenance board. :-) ]
Met Becka at about 14:00 at the cairn at 1623-80 on her way back to car park. I noodled a bit more and got back at 15:25 in time for a lift with Phil B and Sandy.
* Using GPSPrune Photos->Add photos
So, you may have noticed I have been eating, so I am slightly less of my normal Grump… The phrase 'type 2 fun' gets thrown around often when discussing caving, where an activity that is not enjoyable at the time becomes enjoyable in retrospect. As it stands today, I am desperately hoping that I will say the same after being your expedition leader.
I am joking, of course. This is my third year now on the CUCC expedition after first hearing about it many many years ago when I was a shy fresher in DUSA, and so it really has been an honor to be able to give something back to the cause that gave me so much over the years. I won’t lie, it has been tough at times though, especially when some of you seem allergic to opening your emails or turning up to meetings!
I sometimes think of Expo as some weird Tolkienesque Lord of the Rings marathon. We are all here for what normally is five weeks of some rather adventurous and testing environments but as he said, Roads go ever ever on, Over rock and under tree, By caves where never sun has shone, By streams that never find the sea.
I am merely one very small cog in the clockwork. I have often struggled to find a word to describe us, and I think 'dysfunctional family' is definitely the best one; though that would make me the Mummy, so maybe not.
To quote Isaac, “Are we like the Gemsa? Gracefully making their way across the plateau. They have adapted themselves to a hospitable environment, ensuring they prosper. They are hardy, agile. Or are we like the bunde? Steadfast and reliable. Yes, it can be prickly and rough if you force yourself against it, but also a valued handhold of support. An appreciated sight when traversing the airy segments of the plateau.”
In all seriousness, I am actually incredibly proud of what we have achieved this year. We have a brand-new tarp in a camp that is barely being used, we have a too-small tarp in a camp that’s being used too much and expanded above its capacity. We have a new communications system in its Alpha phase, with the possibilities of 24/7 communications and wifi! New drills that actually can do more than three holes, and of course a ridiculous amount of gear. 2024 has definitely had its challenges, from illness to a smaller team at the start rigging what are now two very deep caves, but we ever push forward to our main goal: to connect to the Dashstein.
We are all exploring one of the last final frontiers. We have seen and explored places no person has ever seen in the history of humanity, and we are building on what is nearly 50 years of experience and work of this expedition. Austria is not like the five caving regions of the UK: Wales, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Scotland, and Portland. So, I encourage everyone to tread carefully. Do not go gentle, however, into that good night, but check every crevice, A, B, and C lead and then come back for a Gosser.
I may not act like it or I hide it well, but I am genuinely proud of everyone here in front of me today and what we have achieved. Godspeed to you all in our endeavors, both here in Austria and in your lifes themselves.
Yours in Caving, Jono
Ar ddiwrnod cinio'r expo ymgasglodd grŵp tag rag o ogofa o dan darp y cwt tatty. Roedd yr ogofwyr hyn i gyd yma am y rhesymau anghywir i gyd. Yn gyntaf, roedd y goruchaf arweinydd a'r cynllunydd teithiau Marie wedi mechnïo ar ogofa yn hytrach na golchi ei danwisg. Nesaf mae gennym Wassil a oedd yn gohirio ei draethawd meistr ac yn teimlo trueni drosto'i hun am ladd ei dennyn ei hun. Yn olaf mae gennym Dickon a benderfynodd fynd ar alldaith ogofa er ei fod yn casáu ogofa, ac o ganlyniad yn cael ei ethol yn mynd canyoning. Wrth fwrw ymlaen â ffurfio'r triawd gogoneddus hwn, penderfynodd Chi ddangos ei wyneb yn dilyn taith wersylla anghysbell na arweiniodd at wersyll yn digwydd ac a oedd ar ben colled. Mae'n debyg bod Marie, Wassil, a Dickon yn edrych fel grŵp addas i fynd â'r ceunant gyda nhw a rhywsut fe benderfynon nhw y byddai Chi yn gyd-chwaraewr addas.
Er iddi ddeffro am naw am a gadael am ddeg, llwyddodd Marie rywsut i faffio am ddwy awr. O ganlyniad i'r rhuthr i baratoi, ni astudiwyd y disgrifiad llwybr o'r canyon a ddewiswyd y noson gynt (er efallai na ddylai fod wedi cael cyfrifoldeb llawn y sefydliad o ystyried mai hon oedd ei thrydedd daith canyon erioed). Ar ôl tri stop pwll ar gyfer hetiau, sbaneri a hwmws post-canyoning (nid yn y drefn honno - bydd y drefn a'r cyfuniad yn cael eu gadael fel ymarfer i'r darllenydd), nid oedd Marie bellach yn edrych fel y mwyaf garw ar y daith. Yn anffodus, symudodd y bai yn ôl i Marie pan fu'n rhaid i Dickon yrru am gyfnod heb ei ddatgelu i lawr y ffordd i gael rhyngrwyd i lawrlwytho'r disgrifiad o'r llwybr fel ein bod yn gwybod beth oedd ar y gweill.
Gan fod Dickon yn delio â llanast Marie, gwisgodd Chi ei siwt wlyb a'i sanau gwlyb. Yn anffodus, roedd yr archeb yn is-optimaidd, ac roedd angen ei haddasu. Byddai hyn yn gofyn am gyfnod hir o noethni, a fyddai'n amlygu celciau beicwyr i ddyndod Chi ei hun. Ar ben hynny, byddai fflachio Dickon wedi newid deinameg y grŵp fel y byddai Marie a minnau'n teimlo ein bod ni'n drydydd a phedwaredd olwyn.
Ar y daith gerdded i fyny, cyflawnwyd bondio grŵp wrth i Wassil rannu ei ofn dwfn o dyllau gwlyb bach, a cheisiodd ei wynebu trwy fynd i mewn i dwll o'r fath (pibell ddraenio dan rod). Ar wahân i t, ni ddigwyddodd dim o unrhyw ddiddordeb ar y daith gerdded i fyny. Cyraeddasom ben y canyon, pan benderfynasom ein bod yn glaf o gerdded wrth ymyl y streamweay a disgyn i mewn iddo.
O ganlyniad i anghofio popeth a ysgrifennwyd yn y canllaw (cawsom ychydig o sesiwn darllen grŵp), roedd y Canyon yn llif cyson o syrpreisys. Roedd y diffyg gwybodaeth hwn yn atal ein gallu i neidio, gan ein gorfodi i droi at abseilio yn lle hynny. Un rhaeadr arbennig, Wassil abseilio gyntaf (nid yw'n hoffi dŵr cymaint â hynny mewn gwirionedd). Yna holodd Chi ynghylch dyfnder y pwll, ac atebodd Wassil "dau fetr", mewn gwirionedd yn golygu "o leiaf dau fetr". Y gwir yw, mae ofn dŵr dwfn ar Wassil ac nid oedd wir eisiau plymio ymhellach nag 20cm.
Aeth y Canyon yn ei flaen gyda set o feysydd diddorol ond technegol gan gynnwys rhaeadr ddwbl gyda throbwll a achosir gan hypothrtmia a llinell groesi hynod o uchel a rwystrodd Marie rhag gadael y pwll a grybwyllwyd. Ar ôl cael ei llusgo allan o'r pwll, nid oedd Marie bellach yn marw o hypothermia. Roedd ail gam y rhaeadr ddwbl yn cynnwys yr hyn a oedd yn edrych fel naid ond a ystyriwyd yn rhy dwp i Chi hyd yn oed roi cynnig arni. Er mwyn llywio hyn yn ddiogel bu'n rhaid abseilio i tua 3m oddi ar y dŵr ac yna disgyn yn rhydd. Ni chafodd Wassil y neges, gan arwain at dorri ei benelin ar silff fechan. Roedd yn ymddangos yn eithaf trist am hyn ac roedd angen cyfres o sesiynau cwtsh gourp i atal hypothrtmia yn ei siwt wlyb fer (pam fyddech chi'n canyon mewn hosrt wetsuit? - mae Wassil yn dadlau bod undersuit a oversuit yn gwella hyn. Nid yw'n gwneud hynny.)
Roedd yr ychydig leiniau nesaf yn llawer symlach ac ni hawliodd unrhyw anafiadau pellach. Fe wnaethom bhowever, aros yn eithaf oer a dechrau awydd diwedd y daith. Ar y ffordd daethom o hyd i rannau amrywiol o gloddio wedi'u gwasgaru ar draws y ceunant ac yn y diwedd cyrhaeddwyd y brif afon. Ar ôl taith gerdded fer yn ôl i'r car, gwledd a ffaff hwmw, penderfynodd Dickon fod yr arwyddion llwybr ceffyl yn amlwg wedi'u bwriadu ar gyfer cerbydau modur, er mawr siom i bawb arall yn llythrennol. Gan gynnwys cerddwyr. Dangosodd tri beiciwr eu diolchgarwch ar ffurf ystumiau wyneb amrywiol ac yn ystod ein hantur aethom drwy dwnnel diddorol a phontydd lluosog nad oedd yn ymddangos yn addas ar gyfer car o bedwar. Er gwaethaf protestiadau'r teithwyr, ni wnaeth Dickon droi o gwmpas ac roedd yn bendant bod ei "l
wybr" yn gyflymach. Daeth i'r amlwg bod ei "lwybr" mewn gwirionedd 6 munud yn gyflymach ac fe gyrhaeddon ni gyd i'r pryd expo ar amser.
On the day of expo dinner a rag-tag group of cavers gathered under the tatty hut tarp. These cavers were all here for all the wrong reasons. Firstly, supreme leader and trip planner Marie had bailed on caving in preference of washing her undersuit. Next we have Wassil who was both procrastinating his masters thesis and feeling sorry for himself about killing his own lead. Finally we have Dickon who decied to go on a caving expedition despite hating caving, and as a result elected do go canyoning. Proceeding the formation of this glorious trio, Chi decided to show his face following a disasterous camping trip which did not result in a camp occurring and was at a lost end. Apparently Marie, Wassil, and Dickon looked like a suitable group to go canyoning with and somehow they decided Chi would be a suitable accomplice.
Despite waking up at nine at and leaving at ten, Marie somehow managed to faff for two hours. As a result of the "rush" to get ready, the route description of the canyon selected the night before was not studied (although perhaps she should not have been given full responsability of the organisation given it was her third ever canyoning trip). After three pit stops for hats, spanners and post-canyoning hummus (not respectively - the order and combination will be left as an exercise to the reader), Marie was no longer looking like the faffiest on the trip. Unfortunately, the blame shifted back to Marie when Dickon had to drive for an undisclosed period of time down the road to get signal to download the route description so that we knew what was in store.
As Dickon was dealing with Marie's mess, Chi put on his wetsuit and his wetsocks. Unfortunately, the ordering was sub-optimal and required modification. This would require an elongated period of nudity, which would expose the hoardes of cyclists to Chi's own manhood. Furthermore, flashing Dickon would have shifted the group dynamics such Marie and Wassil would feel like they were third and fourth wheeling.
On the walk up, group bonding was achieved by Wassil's sharing of his deep fear of small wet holes, which he tried to confront by entering such a hole (drainage pipe under rode). Apart from that, nothing of any interest happened on the walk up. We reached the top of the canyon when we decided that we were sick of walking next to the streamweay and dropped into it.
As a result of having forgotten everything written in the guide (we had a little group reading session), the canyon was a constant stream of surprises. This lack of knowledge inhibited our ability to jump, thus forcing us to resort to abseiling instead. At one particular waterfall, Wassil abseiled first (he does in fact not like water that much). Chi then inquired as to the depth the pool, to which Wassil answered "two meters", actually meaning "at least two meters". The truth is, Wassil is scared of deep water and did not really want want to dive further than 20cm.
The canyon proceeded with a set of interesting but technical pitches including a double-waterfall with a built in hypothermia-inducing whirlpool and enormously high traverse line which prevented Marie's exit from the aformentioned pool. Upon being being dragged out of the pool, Marie was no longer dying of hypothermia. The second stage of the double waterfall was comprised of what looked like a jump but was deemed too stupid for even Chi to attempt. In order to navigate this safely one had to abseil to about 3m off the water and then free-fall. Wassil did not get the message, resulting a in his elbow being smashed on a small ledge. He seemed quite sad about this and required a series of group cuddle sessions to stave off hypothermia in his short wetsuit (why would you canyon in a short wetsuit? - Wassil argues that an undersuit and oversuit remedies this. It does not.)
The next few pitches were far simpler and did not claim any further injuries. We did however, stay quite cold and began to desire the end of the trip. En-route we discovered various excavator parts strewn across the canyon and eventually reached the main river. After a brief walk back to the car, houmous feast and faff, Dickon decided that the bridleway signs were clearly intended for motorised vehicles, much to the dismay of literally everyone else, including pedestrians. Three cyclists showed their gratitude in the form of various facial expressions and during our adventure we passed through an interesting tunnel and multiple bridges which did not appear suited for a car of four. Despite the passengers' protests, Dickon did not turn around and was adamant that his "route" was faster. It would transpire that his "route" was in fact 6 minutes faster and we all made it to the expo meal on-time.
I am very proud of my loaf, and indeed Marie said that in her opinion it was "the best bread so far"! Jono reports however that Marie told him she hated it... So I guess the question that remains is:
How well do you trust the expedition leader?
The walk started off simply, and we soon found the bolt to mark the divergence from the official paths. The route description got us up to the Bunters Bulge, with the absence of any red markings mentioned. From here, the red markings were still not present, but there is a smattering of cairns to lead the way. A small amount of being lost later, and we were scrambling down to the original entrance, an impressively large entrance. The scramble towards Elephant entrance was helped by some stemples, and we soon found ourselves in the frigid draft, looking at a snow plug.
Kitted up with ice axes and crampons, we headed down the snow slope and into the Schneevulkanhalle. Wow, just Wow... The chamber itself would be impressive enough, but the ice formations were incredible. We wandered around and spent some time photographing the place. Some scrambling around, we found various pools of water in the glacier which we decided to not fall into. The far end of the chamber had an impressive false floor, which i walked over to to go underneath it, but was stopped by the ice under my feet sounding quite hollow, so I noped out of there. The next adventure was Harry and I climbing up the snow volcano, with Aila looking on disapprovingly at the Boys being Morons. I stopped half way up, deciding that it was quite steep. Harry, with less of a sense of self preservation, made it to the top, and some more photos were taken. Harry had a fun time coming down, the only time I've heard him admit to being scared.
After this, we headed back, creating a GPX track to make it easier for future expoers to find. We were told that sadly, impressive as it was, the formations were a shadow of their former selves. Go sooner rather than later.
The entrance series flew by, and I was having a great time reminiscing. Soon we headed up the small pitch into Propane Nightmares, and pressed on through the crawling (I had been promised minimal crawling), down and up some pitches and climbs, until we got to a patch of mud (I had also been promised no mud.) Not long after this, we got to Strained by Gravity.
At the bottom of this epic pitch series, I saw Harry and Ailas lights disappear down a passage, so I headed to it, finding a traverse that Aila would not have done without loud complaining, so I turned back. Chi told me that the way on was down below, so I opted to climb down an alternate way. Suddenly, my head was below my feet, and I tumbled 3m down a climb, landing on a bouldery floor. A distinct amount of swearing occurred whilst I tried to figure out what was broken. Chi rounded a corner at speed, highly concerned about my wellbeing. Rescue from here would not be fun. Although I was in a not insignificant amount of pain, nothing seemed to be broken, Chi fed me some sweets, and we pressed on.
The traverses were alright for my long legs, but Ailas short legs didn't enjoy them at all. We soon got to Camp, and set up the tent and sleeping bags. It was less than ideal, but we could squeeze in four. Then it was back up the pitch to start down Flowstone Canyon (thrutchy and awkward), Alpine Showers (traversy and awkward) and down some pitches (with awkward pitchheads) to the pushing front.
Chi set about bolting a traverse whilst Harry, Aila and I got the surveying kit out, finding a numbered station. The disto was produced, and I started to get ready to shoot the first leg, but noticed that the Disto was in calibration mode. Shit. We tried to get it into the proper mode but nothing we did worked. Double shit.
We deliberated on what to do, and finally settled on scooping and then coming back to survey at a later date. Aila was trained in surveying, with Harry showing her how to take notes, and me making up numbers, leading to a very odd cave. Chi dropped a pitch, which I followed him down, but the bottom led to more pitch, so Aila and I decided to head to camp. It was a long slog back to camp, and we arrived at 2330. Some pasta was had, and we turned in. Harry and Chi came back at 0100, and told us they'd dropped some more pitches and killed the lead. Arse. All that for nothing.
The next morning, we slowly got ready, dismantling camp. It was going to be a long slog up, and starting on the traverses was a tiring way to start. Strained by Gravity went by vaguely quickly, and soon we stopped to fill up bottles and have noodles. We got up the entrance series relatively quickly and exited finally around 1730 on the 28th. Not the best trip, but no one died. I'm sure there will be other trip reports for this trip.
Rosa placed the first bolt for the traverse line - her second ever bolt! - and I rebolted the pitch head (there were two spit there already but I couldn't find any nuts for them anywhere around HC or GC so lovely new fixe expansions it was! I dropped the 20m pitch down into a fair sized ledge with two ways on - I first opted to go the shorter dryer way with the hope it would connect round to the rest of the big aven, using less bolts and rope. One side of this pitchhead is a drilled thread, the other a lovely bolt. This got down to a perfect end of the 25m rope and lead to a 2m climb.This later turned out to be Snagged and Shagged. There wasn't any clear promising leads here so I left Rosa and James to make the rigging topo for me and explore the area while I went on to continue bolting the pot.
A perfect height pitchead was placed which felt a very reasonably distance from the ledge. Unfortunately, with the nature of the rock there was immediately some pretty shit rope rope. The next 15 minutes was spent trying to figure out how to ameliorate this. Lots of time was spent trying to create a deviation below and right, but nothing was far enough back to fix the hang without then making me abseil straight into a pool of water. While this faff was going on, a rock ((tatty hut little printer sized) which I previously been solidly heel hooking and holding decided to come loose, missing me but being very exciting when it hit the tacklebag and then hitting the deck. I abandoned hopes over here and decided to swing the other way into the drippy aven and found a nice fault for a ledge for my feet so placed a rebelay and then used that to help me swing across to a nice ledge in a dry area where I bolted a traverse across and then rigged a short pitch down to the streamway below.
It should be noted that while I'm doing this Rosa managed to almost climb down snagged and shagged into the bottom of the pot, except she got stuck and from the walls I could see her light and hear her shout for me to come and help her - not something I was in much position to do so James went to her aid. She also didn't sound like she was in any real peril, just mabe unable to get her way back out so I figured I could always head back up with the drill and rope if it were really necessary.
We named the pot Tiered Gerkin and the Streamway Bannaboat Streamway at the time, but since then and the time of writing this up we've renamed the pot Saruman. The streamway is unfortunately too short to be worth naming.
Turning up at expo on the night of The Dinner, I had expected a few days of festering, fettling, and carrying, but found myself agreeing to a 4 day camp with Nat D after he spotted me inspecting the Balcony map.
The next day we faffed and faffed some more, then set off well after noon in Sarah's car. The day was hot. I soaked myself in the waterfall to start the walk,carrying all of my camping and caving kit with trepidation. I loudly announced to the group that heat gives me diarrhoea- already feeling quite unsettled in the tummy. My previous walks in 2022 had left me dreading the length of the plateau walk. Fortunately the dread made the reality feel shorter than remembered. A breeze kept us cool as me Nat Sarah and Zak slowly trundled to top camp, nattering with Nat about all sorts of gossip.
We faffed some more at top camp, waiting for Jacob and Lara to join us from garlic camp, and I sat on the gryke hoping to shit as much as possible pre cave.
We set off for balcony in the early evening, and struggled under the heavy loads. We split into 2 teams: Nat Lara and I, Zac Jacob and Sarah (SEE ZAC'S REPORT OF HIS TRIP - FEATURING HAND JAMMERS AT HIGH VELOCITY). I said farewell to the light and was VERY happy to find the big balcony pitch rope thinner than 2022's - the Stop cramp only had to be relived every 40 seconds!
Then began the wiggling, sliding, slipping, and thrutching, descending and changing, clipping and crawling.
I had a mixed relationship with my 2 tackle bags, which I named The Toddler (small red) and The Teeneger (Becka's massive bag that matched my oversuit and apparently looked just like me - CAN I ADD A PICTURE HERE?). We had many disagreements in the crawls, and they enjoyed resting upsidedown on every ledge. NAt's 'purple juice' (meths) was resting at the very top of the teenager, and I've no idea what miracle kept it flying out onto Lara below. It defied gravity until it finally slipped out at rest at the very bottom of Mongol Rally.
We reached the camp sometime around midnight. I was shattered and provided very little help to Nat's attempt to bolt in 2 hammocks. The wind steamed down the passage and stole any remaining heat. By the time the other 3 turned up I was shivering strongly.
Then the first 'accident' was discovered. I had been putting off my urgent need for a poo for all evening. We looked around for the poo drum... kept looking... kept looking. And no one had it. We looked at our supplies. Resealable freezdried meal bags: perfect for shitting in. Porridge sashes: sort of papery. Deciding they made a decent 'glove' for wiping, we emptied all the porridge bags. Only after walking 10m up the passage did I discover the pile of biobags left there! Still the porridge sashes were required. I would not review them highly: more plastic than paper, but desperate times....
I woke in the night even more uncomforatble than before, with a feeling of dread. I visited the 'toilet' and found blood every where. O dear. I hadn't been due my period for 2 weeks but life has its ways of punishing you. Explains how awful I felt the day before, and then. 4am wasn't the time to deal with this fact, so I returned to me sleeping bag, shattered, and restless for everyone to get up.
Get up they did, and I brought up my inconvenient fact. I felt mixed feelings to learn that Nat, Sarah and the first aid kit had a handful of tampons between them. I had never used a tampon. I did not think I would learn to use them in a grubby cold cave 100s of meters under ground. It did not go very well.
Feeling exhausted, sick, pained and cramping, I dragged myself through the day. I followed Nat and Lara to push an A lead in the north of Southern Pitstop (SEE ZAC'S REPORT FOR THE OTHER TEAM'S DAY OF PUSHING). My attempt to do my bit was far more of a burden than a help, and I had tampon related disasters through the day, as well as the dreaded period poos, greatly exceeding the quota of 1.5 porridge sashes a day.
I did however bolt properly for the first time. I should probably have said no when Nat asked me to bolt a descent but I said alright. I suspended awkwardly over a large drop, struggling to find the arm strength to hold the drill out and install 3 bolts. I'm sure the others were very cold by the time I got to the bottom but it was, at least, a good learning experience.
I got changed for a piss by the waterfall - this would come back to haunt me later, then we ascended up the other side.
More slipping an thrutching. I was ready to turn around, but held on to the pushing front. We had some noddles and began to survey.
Despite sometimes hating caving, I do in fact love surveying. Although I probably failed to give the impression that day, I was very happy to take part in the surveying of 'Tampon turnaround' - aptly named for events there - with the honour of painting the red splodges. We turned an A lead into lots of Bs and Cs, but it kept going. I was very very close to my limit, and kept saying I would head back soon. After point 23 I pushed ahead a little bit, and a little bit more, and found the high passage narrowing to a puddle, and over the puddle to a toddler sized crawl. This final push ripped my PVC oversuit :,( and I was definitely beyond my limit, and decided to head out.
A rest at the snake stop, then I plodded back, struggling up the slopes under the weight of the drill. It crossed my mind that I normally find it hard to move with my stop on my D ring. I looked down. My stop was not on my D ring. Ah shit.
I trudged back to the snack stop - no sign yet of Lara and Nat, looked through all the bags. No stop. I headed back through the rifts, up the slopes. No stop. I looked again through the drill bag. No stop.
Ah well. Strongly suspecting (hoping) what had happened, there was nothing for it but to head to the rope and down prussick. Down prussicking was NOT fun. The rope was thick with mud, and every movement took an age to free my jammers. I had a small private cry halfway, for my period pain, but made it down. There was my stop, thanks be, at the point I had changed earlier.
Onwards, up the rope: stand, yank through the chest ascender, sit, repeat, with jammers refusing to grip. By this point Nat and Lara had caught up, so I waited and incredibly kindly they offered to take my bag.
I headed on as they derigged. This was my next mistake. 'Don't get lost' Nat said. I got lost. After the white aven there were many ways on. I follwed the muddy footsteps across and up, but grew suspicous. I decided it was safest to turn around. I turned around but did not find myslef back at the white aven. Two more tries and I was at a slope that looked familiar, so I headed up and reached two ways. I followed the muddy footsteps up, but grew suspicous. On your own it is very hard to trust yourself. I turned around, shattered, concerned. And, thank goodness, met Lara and Nat. I took back a tackle bag and we headed up the other junction, which we soon realised was wrong and returned up my way. Trudge, sigh, plod.
We reached the camp. The others were there already. Dinner. Jacob kindly said that, if no one else was willing, he would be happy to go out with me a day early. I was so grateful as there was no way I could stay longer. Shivering. Bed. (waking for toilet visits :,( )
Rising at 9:40, the plan was revised: Zac would also leave too, using a microtraction as a jammer (having lost both hand jammer and pantin). Porridge. Noodles. Packing. Washing our gear in the muddy puddle. We headed off. I somehow managed to get lost finding the bottom of mongol rally, but eventually did. I heard zac calling from above, in pain. It took an age to dig out the ibruprofen, and I was shocked how slow I could prussick. It was misreable. Pantin uterly useless. Rope refusing to feed. Stand. Drag thtough chest asecnder. Sit. Ascenders slip. Ascenders grip. Repeat. I haven't prussicked this slowly since my first time. My tackle bag tangled itself in the down rope at a rebelay and I had to down prussick, to some strong words. A shocking anount of time later I reached zac on his ledge and got him the ibruprofen. And he taught me how to properly frog, and drag the rope through with your feet. I'm an idiot for never having learnt to do that before. Mongol Rally was slighlty improved.
We headed up, and up, and up, and finally huddled in the bivvy at the top. Hangman's was impressive (and cold). Honeycomb was much longer than I remember. Debating the way, succesfully, I was rather shocked to realise we were at the junction with hilti a plenti. I hadn't thought to imagine reaching the end.
Sarah's weather report had predicted a thunder storm that evening. We were fully prepared to huddle at the bottom of the entrance. But, to happy suprise, the drips were slow. I went last (regretting this offer, and desperately uncomfortable). But I had lot of time to sing as Jacob and Zac ascended. The happiest feeling of all, to see the shadow of light from the penultimate pitch, to haul off the final rope, to crawl out into a blue sky.
The evening was utterly beautiful. The forecast was wrong. Pink light filled the horizon, silhouetting mountains. The evening air still warm. Why would you go underground from this? To appreciate it more I suppose.
I was dizzy trudging back, Jacob kindly, patiently accompanying my stumbling. We reached Stoney Bridge as the light faded and stars brightened. Big Tom and Becka in residence, and Tom a saint making us food. Unbelievably happy to bin the tampon I had been using for far too long (I will never use one again - awful things!) and have some proper toilet paper.
We slept out under the shooting stars and milky way. Every time I woke, relieved, to have escaped balcony, and see brightness in the night's dark, under starlight.
Lucy having already covered much of the trip in I will only fill in the gaps alluded to
Sarah, Jacob and I gave the other group a decent head start into Balkon which we soon extended by getting 'navigationally challenged' at the bottom on the entrance series. However, over-coming this we powered on towards the trident and honey-combe. There was a small incident just before the water refilling station where, due to our bags being so overly packed, a gas canister rolled out the top of Sarah's tackle sack. It stopped on it's own before I could grab it but still gave everyone involved a minor heart attack. There was some minor faffigating after the trident but we soon found the top of Honey-combe. From there it was a nylon highway. I struggled a little at the bottom of Honey combe and need Sarah to reel me in. We then extended the rope to make the next descent easier. It was at the bottom of hangmans that the trouble started. I had just done the traverse and was using my hand jammer to ascend to the crawl. I then unclipped it and moved it the next traverse line (as I had my hand jammer on my long cows). I then removed my long cows tail and watched in horror as my nice golden hand jammer plummeted onto the slop and slid down into the giant hole. There were a couple of seconds before I heard a loud 'chink'. Reconvening after the crawl (made fucking difficult by having to haul a giant over stuffed tackle sack) we agreed to keep going and possibly drop the hole tomorrow to look for my jammer. It was then a short stroll to the top of Mongol Rally, which starts quite nicely but soon becomes several large pitches over a titanic drop. It was at the last rebelay that I had my next incident. When unclipping my foot loop from my snap gate, I had forgotten that I had my pantin on the same snap and so watched, again, in horror as another of my ascenders plummeted into a giant hole. Absolutely furious at having lost over £100 (new) of kit I stormed into camp with the others to find Nat fettling with the hammocks. After some noodles and smash, I all but passed out into a fitful nights sleep.
Having arrived into camp at 1:30 the night before, needles to say it was a late start the next day, made even later by all the faffing. Me, Jacob and Sarah would push a more vertical lead while Nat, Lucy and Lara would push a more horizontal one. Kit assembled, the three of us headed out along the piss soaked Southern Pit-stop. Then was some Faffigating and a few wrong turns before we reached our lead. Jacob set the first two bolts leading to the pitch while I then took over and bolted and rigged the Y hang at the top of the pitch. It took ages to find two spots suitable amongst the cheese like rock. But once we had, and Sarah had re-tied my Y hang, I descended to the ledge bellow. Here I swiftly put in another bolt and fixed it with a fig-8 before clearing some space for Sarah to follow. Together we then looked for a suitable place for the next bolt to finish the Y hang and begin drop the next small pitch. The first bolt I tried set was fucked by virtue of the fact that the bolt it's self bent as I was hammering it in (probably because I was hammering at a different angle to the one I drilled). The bottom of this pitch didn't go anywhere save for a narrow horizontal rift. Surveying time. I had to ascend both legs to fulfil my role as dog and mark the first survey station. From there, I slowly re-descended with Jacob in tow operating the SAP. Once at the bottom again, I shimmied into the rift and was near frozen by the dramatic draft. The rift tightened after five meters into a sideways crawl which led into a narrow squeeze. I gardened some rubble out of the way to get this far. Beyond the squeeze was an even narrower (too narrow to pass) hole in the floor. This was the source of the draft. I dropped some rocks down and heard them clatter for ages. I even swear I heard one splosh. Once the survey was complete, we headed back up, Jacob de-rigging. Unfortunately, two of the bolts at the top of the pitch couldn't be loosened, even with a pair of pliers. This meant we lost two hangers. Surveying done, we headed back to camp where we were the first back. To occupy ourselves, me and Jacob looked for loose rocks we could use to cover the mud slopes around camp. Unfortunately, when the others returned our efforts did not receive the thanks we had anticipated.
It was another late start the following day. Having made the effort of getting down there (and scared to ascend) I wanted to try for another day, but Lara pointed out that I looked fucked, and, to be fair, I was. So I joined Lucy and Jacob on their early ascent. Using a Micro-traction I'd borrowed from Sarah as a hand jammer, we packed what we needed and set off to the wash spot. I led the way but after the first two pitches of Mongol Rally had to stop as my arms were killing me. I removed my Elbow pads as they were limiting my movement and then waited for Lucy to catch up so I could pinch some Painkillers. They worked wonders and it felt like no time at all before we reached the top of Mongol rally. All our cleaning work was undone by the small crawl to the base of Hangman. I also had a look down the hole that swallowed my hand-jammer only to find that it was far to deep to drop. We then made our way out mostly at my pace. The rigging on Honey combe being a particular bastard for passing up. It also seemed to go on much longer than I remembered. From there it felt like a quick jaunt to the entrance series, the second pitch of which was a right bastard after 50 hours underground. I was so happy to find that we had made it out in time to catch the sun and spent the night out sleeping on the plateau.
With not much to do - no desire to explore a drippy lead with a very uncertain forecast and it being too claggy to achieve much prospecting we resolved to landscape garlic when we realised we were potentially going to be short on sleeping sports when the Watershed camp emerged that evening. We managed to level and expand the two person annex, build out the main areas width so there's more space, battle two camp beds, and Dickon leveled a one bed space down in Gollum's Hole where he setup a bed, read some of my book on the Geology of Snowdonia, and did a lot of napping.
In the evening, when it finally brightened up a bit, James, Dickon and I summitted the Kleiner Wildkogel. Dickon enjoyed tumbling the big loose rocks down the slope for the hell of it and it gave us a very interesting view of the plateau and an insight into the comples nature of the folding in the rock. We tried to assess new prospecting areas and it looked like along and up from Balkon and don the plateau to the thick Bunde areas would be the most promising. This was with a view to help Dickon with his prospecting the next day.
Upon waking, the inevitable morning faff ensued, accompanied by the perpetual roar of the gas stove. Bags packed & plans made, we left camp just before 11:00 on the 30th.
We split into 2 teams, with Chris & Jono going to bolt a pitch near camp, and Ellie, Becka & myself heading for Tartarus, where the previous team had stashed the second drill, along with the promise of draughting leads.
Making good time through Northern Powerhouse & Medusa's Maze, we arrived at an unnamed 4 way junction, where Becka said "There's some QMBs around here, maybe we should take a look in case we don't fancy the Tartarus leads" It turned out we were in the wrong place, so after a bit of a mooch about, we continued down the passage, passing through the bottom of a big chamber and down a short handline to a very different passage type, interconnected parallel ramps with a Swiss-Cheesy nature. This was the location of the leads Becka had mentioned, and she & Ellie soon disappeared up a rift to the North to investigate a QMB. Whilst stood at this junction, I noticed some definite air movement, which was quickly attributed to an upwards ramp with a distinctive 'frog spawn' texture to the floor.
We followed the ramp, reaching a slippery step over an intersecting rift, with a climb down marked as a QMA on the left, and the ramp still continuing in front of us with a QMA marked at the top. The far side of a second, more precarious step-over brought the exciting sight of untrodden mud, at the foot of a large boulder choke with the draught still beckoning.
A careful shimmy to the edge and & bridge across put me in uncharted territory, and after ducking under an arch I was in much bigger passage, 2 huge blocks looming over me blocking the way on, with an enticing black void above. This presented an obvious barrier to further exploration, but after the echo coming back from a couple of shouts it was immediately clear we needed to investigate further.
I wriggled around under the choke for a while, finding a chimney narrow enough to bridge across, which I thrutched my way up, gaining the top of the first large block. The further into the chamber I got, the bigger it seemed to grow (along with my excitement), whilst Becka & Ellie watched proceedings somewhat apprehensively from the floor below.
A second, much safer climb onto another jammed boulder entered the chamber properly, where I began to take in the scale of the place, trying (failing) to light it up, and bouncing echos off the walls. I returned to the deck completely buzzing, trying to communicate what I'd just seen, and insisting we must return with a drill & rope asap!
This meant somewhat reluctantly slogging off to Tartarus, where we decided we'd make the most of the day checking out some leads in Ichthyes. We spent a while trying to work out the way to the pushing front, clambering up and down in the rift, before deciding we were liable to run out of time to do anything useful. We then returned to a QMB we had passed on the way, resulting in a very quick and satisfying loop closure between 2 leads, finding a hole down and the continuation of a draughting rift behind a pillar, before returning to camp.
A planned early start the next day was stalled slightly by Jono's alarm failing to go off, but we made up time with some much more direct route finding back to the foot of the boulder choke. Becka & Ellie started surveying the connection, whilst I climbed back onto the large boulder and set about bolting a route up for them to follow. I took my time with this, knowing I would be shortly marked on my work by Becka, arriving on the deck at the same time as Ellie came round the corner armed with the nail varnish.
We headed into the chamber, celebrating with snacks whilst deciding how to tackle the surveying. We chose convenient stations on top of the Tatty-Hut sized boulders, sending legs as far as the SAP could manage. A large downwards rift forms the Western continuation of the chamber, but the rock of both walls at the would-be pitch head is fairly crap, so this will require some thought.
Back at the entry point, heading East across more boulders revealed more promising leads; a "black hole" downwards spotted by Becka whilst surveying, and a mouth-like opening with a strong draught in the Northern corner which captured my attention as soon as I found it. Grabbing the drill & our last scraps of rope, I rigged and descended the awkward pitch head, sliding between the waterworn 'teeth' into the (horizontal!) passage below, naming this the Dental Floss pitch.
There were 2 ways on from here; the continuation of the main passage straight on , and a small hole choked with mud to the right, which I promptly dug out to reveal a short drop to a second pitch, and some audible water dripping somewhere ahead.
Heading along the main passage, we reached a junction with a pillar; left leading down a steep slope covered with a thick layer of virgin mud, & right upslope leading to another junction with a switchback connecting to the small hole with dripping water described earlier. Here there were some interesting mud formations which we duly protected with the scrap of conservation tape we had remaining, before turning left up a short scramble to another right hand bend.
Upon turning this corner, we were immediately hit with the strongest draught I have felt in any cave, setting the tone for the next few steps across a pristine white traverse, the passage rapidly enlarging as we went...
This spat us out on a ledge overlooking a hole which left me totally lost for words; a pitch plunging away below, and an aven towering above. Much whooping and revelling in the echos followed, before taking some photos and surveying as far as we could reach (very little!).
Underequipped and running out of time, we returned downslope, following the ramp back past the junction we'd entered from, for some very slippery surveying on the thick mud. Reaching the bottom, I spotted what looked like freshly gardened rocks, and Becka then noticed the climb up on the right, which was the QMA we'd left immediately before entering the boulder choke that morning! This resulted in a very satisfying loop closure to finish the day, at which point I deployed the tactical miniature cave whisky, which I'd been saving in my oversuit for exactly such a moment.
Returning to camp in good spirits, we passed the evening with many noodles and the remainder of the hot chocolate, setting an alarm for 6:30 for the trip out. In the morning, Becka & Jono raced ahead, whilst Chris, Ellie & I plodded up, arriving at the surface around 17:00, just in time to get stuck in a thunder storm at top camp.
Having vowed I was done with deep caving for this expo after the prussik up, it took all of 12 hours for the rose tinted glasses to go on, and back at base camp planning began for a return to the newly discovered shaft...
I am a very sad man with too much time on his hands...
James and I surveyed what we thought was the final pitch while Aidan added a deviation. I complained greatly while surveying much to Aidan's entertainment who had bolted it. Once in the stream way bolting kit was packed up as we prepared for an easy surveying waltz down a stream way.
Aidan found another pitch where I asked if I could bolt. Of I went expecting a short pitch nice and easy. I got to a re-belay and started yelling it keeps going as there was another hole below me little did we know how big it actually was. I got to the ledge and started to prepare to abseil into a rift bolted the pitch head and then went why am I doing this walked over to the edge of the ledge to set up a much nicer hang, very scary. I shouted at James and Aidan that its huge and keeps going and we don't have enough rope. Neither quite realised how big. I kept asking if Aidan wanted a look and he seemed uninterested until I pestered him enough where he promptly looked over the edge where he told us that we didn't realise how cool our find was as we had found a 80m hypo-genic tube. Our 30m rope got barely a 1/3 of the way down.
I was sent out of the cave to tell people of our find and collect food, water bolts, batteries and rope. With eguipment acquired I ran back to homecoming to see the others exiting. Bags were packed flapjack was eaten, cooling down was required and once everything was ready to go I had to try and get a call out. After much hair pulling and phoning round I got a call-out so we were good to go. James had decided he wanted to go back to base which was probably a sensible decision so me and Aidan pushed on.
Aidan added an extra bolt to the top of the eye of Sauron where he handed me all the heavy bolting kit in case he needed to prussik out. Our 40m rope which was now down the pitch was still very short so a 30m rope was taken down by Aidan. Much bullying was required to get Aidan to go down the pitch as he was being a wus his words not mine he thanked me alter so its all good. Once the rope was free it was my turn where I was equally terrified but couldn't back down after bullying Aidan down. Descending was relatively straightforward until the knot pass. Doing a knot pass 40m below a pitch head and 20m above the floor makes a simple manoeuvrer terrifying. At the bottom of the pitch Aidan asked me to swing over a boulder where I was like, what do you mean, as I'm hanging in free space. I descended onto solid floor which was a relief where we clambered onto the boulder to make another pitch down into another big chamber with a false floor.
The new pitch head was bolted with a combination of me and Aidan resulting in lightning bolting. This is where we decided to call the series Welsh Engineering due to all the people bar James, sorry James, were from a Welsh university. At the next pitch another deep hole opens out into nothing where we has high hopes of going deeper than the rest of the cave which was not to be. midway down the next pitch as I was looking for a re-belay. I spied a bolt in front of my face to much confusion and annoyance. I quickly realised I had been here before as I was at the bolt traverse I had pushed with Dickon 2 days before. I proceeded to have a 5 minute tantrum that our lead did a big loop collected myself and dropped to the bottom of the pitch to say I was at the bottom.
This bottom bit was bolted badly due to my frustration although it is still safe. We promptly called it a day and ran out of the cave trying to conserve energy. Exiting at 11:30. The eye of Sauron is pleasantly easy on the way out even with the knot pass. Resulting in an exit in less than 45 minutes. Once at garlic we clattered around trying to get to bed as quickly as possible waking Adam and disturbing Fiona sorry guys.
At the bottom of the streamway and along about 10m we found a small sledge with a 10m pitch down to another ledge and a seemingly bottomless space below. Colin bolted the way down while James and I surveyed. We joined Colin on a ledge with a prow of rock sticking out into a seemingly bottomless hole. My torch's light on boost mode couldn't make out the bottom! I was incredibly psyched about this find - we were in a massive vertical hypogenic phreatic tube!! This could surely only mean there was a massive lead waiting for us down at the bottom!
Unfortunately, when we lowered the rest of our 40m rope down from the pitchead we could see the end dangling in space, looking not even halfway down! It was very very scary looking down such a void from such a small prow of rock!
We decided that we certainly needed more drill battery, bolts, and rope to push this and that would require us leaving the cave. That and James wanted a lift down the hill that evening, which we'd already arranged. Colin set off first on the way out, with the goal of heading straight to GC to get the needed resources while James and I followed him out. We left all the bolts, rope and kit at the bottomless hole so speed our ascent out, but not before James and I tried to survey it - but we were thwarted by endless 'Laser Reading Failed' error messages when we fired down the hole.
James and I made our way out and within a few minutes of James surfacing, Colin had arrived with more kit and some more food!! I started packing the rope bags and bolts while James dekitted and Colin rekitted up. We check James knew what he was doing before we parted ways and he started to walk across the plateau and Colin and I descended back down. When we got back to what we would later name The Eye of Sauron, we re rigged the traverse into the pitchhead using the 11m rope, I placed a second bolt for the pitchhead (being quite nervous of the drop by me all the while) we rigged it and again hand over hand lowered the rope down to see how far it got. 38m of hanging rope and still no end in sight. I rechecked the rigging, armed with a 30m rope in a tacklebag, and after a lot of whimpering/complaining and some bullying from Colin I descended down. It should be noted I had no bolting kit on me because I knew for a certainty I couldn't reach a wall tom place a rebelay and I didn't want the extra weight on me if for whatever reason I had to changeover and head back up.
When I got close to the knots in the end, with a locked off simple and not much joy in what I was doing (only fear and trepidation) did I join the ropes together to form a knot pass and hand-over-hand lower the end of the 30m rope down to the bottom. It was hard to figure out if the rope touched the bottom. Committed to the pitch I abbed down to the bottom and called rope free. To my dismay I had landed on a rocky floor with only a tiny C-lead style rift ahead. Nevertheless I let Colin head down because if I had to reascend this, he had too!
As I was waiting I realised the big boulder I had spotted on the way down was only a few metres above me and I thought I had seen a big space beyond, so with some spotting from Colin as I made some moves up the snappy rock to the boulder and was relieved to see that there was large passage that continued on. We bolted as a team here - me with the hammer and bolts, Colin with the drill and tube and we got 3 bolts in 5 minutes ready for the short descent onto the boulder-y false floor below us. In the same style we placed a bolted for a descending traverse line to a pitchhead at a narrow rift with a clear load of space below. Since I had the honours of descending the big pitch we agreed Colin would do the next pitch.
To both our dismay, when Colin was roughly 20m down he shouted he could see bolts! and then had a small tantrum when he realised this was the bolt traverse he had belayed Dickon across the other day!!
A little disheartened we decided to keep dropping the canyon, using the bolts from the traverse to make a very wide rebelay, and to see where we ended up. This ended on a big old rock wedged in the canyon, forming a nice ledge. With it being late and our bags now significantly lighter with many less bolts and metres of rope, we made our way out. Colin being a trooper took out most of the bolting kit. I believe, being pretty lightweight, it took me only about half an hour from here to get to the surface.
Before I had left I'd told Colin I'd wait 45 mins for him at the surface before I got concerned. Well Cutting-it-close Colin lived up to the name and with 7 minutes to spare! We both dekitted and in silent, tired awe at what we had found that day walked up to GC where we stargazed and enjoyed some mobile data before disturbing Fiona and Adam in bed around midnight in the camp - we were too tired to manage being remotely quiet so we just tried to be loud for as little time as possible.
What. A. Day.
In packing my stuff, I discovered the dark chocolate caving snack in the barrels and by god after a taste I knew it would be one of my go-to snacks this expo, on the side of gorp.
We walked down to Homecoming, Fiona and I this time not taking our walking poles with us, and started our descent. The coolness of the cave, even at the entrance, was a great change from the stifling heat of the surface, especially in all of our caving gear.
I went through the cave system following the others, so did not take as much notice of the names of the pitches as I should have done, which would have made future descriptions of the cave far easier when trying to figure out routes. I believe the route we took in was called the Welsh Engineering Route. In any case, after the first few entrance pitches, we deviated from the main route by taking the a white rope instead of a green rope (upon checking the description now, a few days later, this pitch appears to be Radagast). Instead of going straight down, we followed a rebelay into a traverse into a small phreatic chamber, where we waited for the rest of our group. Here, I put my buff fully on, covering my head as well as my neck, anticipating the further cold. From here, we found a junction where we went right. We came across another downhill junction where we took the left. At the end of this I believe there was a very downhill pitch head with a short traverse section and a deviation rigged off a natural very early on. We popped down and immediately went down a small dusty crawl, taking the next left. A traverse bolt on the left of the wall and a Y-hang on the right, we came into the pitch head for Saruman (with all the pitch head names aside from Eye of Sauron, I'm just taking from the description now). A few more pitches followed this one, which I can't recall too clearly, but at some point there was an upstream pool where Aidan advised us to dip our descenders into to cool them down. We all did so.
After a traverse to another pitch, we came to the Eye of Sauron. In hindsight, it feels a lot like Mount Doom. There is a traverse and then a rope leading straight from one side of the wall to the pitch Y-hang. This rope hangs over a small walkway, the cave itself almost leading you to the great drop below. I should have brought my One Ring prop so I could re-enact one of the many endings of Return of the King! Alas, I didn't. So we went down, having little trouble with the knot pass most of the way down the rope. Descending to the very bottom of the Eye of Sauron isn't the way to go, as there's a big climb following. The goal would be to descend to the top of the climb and use the rope to pull yourself over, as the rope is bolted there too.
This is where we started our surveying. Luckily, there was a nice platform where I could sit and put my bag as I put my coat and balaclava on, as well as have some of that amazing dark chocolate. Definitely buying some for myself! I acted as the instrument for the surveying, with Fiona acting as book, Aidan as dog. Colin forged on ahead for some bolting work, to meet us at the bottom.
The surveying was cold work, but all straightforward. Sometimes the vertical readings didn't function at all, the SAP refusing to work. So we just put them as question marks. In addition, the SAP had a scrolling option that worked by tilting. You could tilt either way, but it would only scroll one way. A bit annoying, Every now and then I found myself in settings, at which point I just had to turn the thing off and on again. We got to a false floor, so on surveying we always were clipped in to a traverse line. At the end of this section, I tried getting a vertical distance down the pitch but the SAP wouldn't have it! So we called it there and just went straight down.
The wall was a bit muddy and had a few rebelays. In addition, there was a rope protector attached as otherwise the rope would be sliced on a particularly sharp section of rock. We got down to a large rock where Colin was waiting. It was a large chamber with a few leads and a nice streamway ahead. We named the rock Urinal Rock. Not the nicest name, but nature called.
I liked the look of the rift going off to the left, hoping to visit it again.
We headed back up, eventually getting to a rebelay named Rivendell. This had a green rope traversing to the left that lead to the main route. This had many awkward, horizontal passages. I remember shuffling on my butt to the left for a good while, trying to keep my position good whilst also not getting my bag stuck. At one point, we had to go down again to go up again! I should really know the names of the pitches here. Eventually we came back up Radagast and, being very tired, I was very happy to hear that we could see the other rope for the Welsh Engineering Route. We came out and saw off Colin and Aidan, who were heading down the hill. We updated our callout with basecamp and set off, getting to Garlic camp safe and sound, but still tired from the cave and the plateau walk. Curries never taste better than after a caving trip.
We left Garlic camp at around 9-10am-ish. Time can blur on these expeditions. I messaged Signal to give our plans for the day. These were to check Homecoming for any drill bits. If we couldn’t find any, we would prospect. If we could, we would go down Homecoming to bolt and rig the rift we’d taken a small look at the day before. After putting these plans into the signal chat, I received a very welcome message from Harry saying that he had drill bits outside of Homecoming that we could use. After the short walk to the cave entrance from Garlic, Fiona and I gathered our supplies and I set a callout at Basecamp for 10pm with Colin. Upon packing the rope into my tackle sack, Fiona made some concerns regarding how long it was and how much we'd be able to properly explore with it. I too was a bit worried, but given what we had available, it was the best option for the time. We entered the cave at approximately 11:30, going down the Welsh Engineering route, as Colin and Aidan had shown us.
On going down the Eye of Sauron, I told Fiona to wait and shine her headtorch down the great pitch after a minute of descent, at which point I leaned over the hole, attached to the traverse line of course, and took a picture with my own light off. All the while very worried I'd drop my phone. Fortunately this did not happen and we got a really good picture out of it, though I'm disappointed at the actual camera quality, but what can you do?
We arrived at Urinal Rock at around 1:30pm and we looked into the rift that we had seen the day before. I remembered on the journey down that the rebelay onto the rock had some coiled up rope at the end and so instead of starting our rigging at the rock, we simply extended the pitch down to the rift. We used the hammer on various sections of rock on our way down, but neither of us liked the sound of them. Eventually, I got to a small platform in the rift. I walked to the edge of the platform and tried the hammer on two opposing rock walls. Success! The rock sounded good! I got to work drilling the bolts and setting up a Y-hang. I made some small mistakes during this, such as not flattening the rock properly for the anchor and bolting at a slight angle. Simple and really annoying stuff. It ate much of our time as I used the sharper end of the hammer to correct my mistakes. After I rigged these, I descended from them to a further platform down below, wanting to be the very first to know if my Y-hang was insufficient. Fiona then followed me down and took the bolting gear to set up the traverse along the rift. At the first traverse bolt, the rope had ran out and we set to work using the short rope we'd brought down with us. As Fiona bolted, I ascended to Urinal Rock to grab some more gear. As I did so, I noticed a glaring problem: the rope rubbed. The thought of someone being on this rope I'd rigged and it snapping would haunt my dreams, so I knew a deviation was needed. We didn't have the gear for a deviation at this time, but I still tried to find a suitable natural. There was a sizeable flake that I liked the look of, but I wasn't sure. I tried climbing up to it to get a closer look and pulled on it.
The damned thing came off in my hands. About twice the size of my head, heavy and sharp. I sat back in the rift for a few seconds just in disbelief and then told Fiona to stand well back and that I was going to drop the flake. After she stood well out of harms way, I dropped it down the rift and it smashed into pieces into the streamway. We'd have to find something else for the deviation.
Fiona then continued bolting, eventually bolting three sections of the traverse. She used her jammer to look round a bend, finding a big chamber! I can't recall how large it was, but it certainly a surprise to me. My past experience with bolting traverses in expo has led to... well more rift. The fact that this one actually led somewhere was exciting. Unfortunately, the rope we had was not enough to set up another section of traverse and then descend into said chamber. The last bolt was already pushing our time and I did not want to be out after call out, so we resolved to come back and properly survey our findings at a later date. The day prior, however, I'd promised the SAP to Todd, so it would have to wait at least a few days.
For the name of the section, we came upon Brandywine Overpass.
As we prepared for our journey out of the cave, I noticed that I had left my pantin in my bag at the top. I was annoyed, but only a little. I'd survived the last expo without a pantin at all, it'd be fine.
The out journey without a pantin was no problem, but I did make some dumb mistakes, largely involving not looking where I was going. Twice I hit my shoulders on sharp rocks whilst prussiking and not looking, one time I prussiked up and hit my head very hard onto a flat ceiling. Annoyed at myself, I stopped to make sure I hadn't bitten my own tongue or cheeks in the process.
My ascent of Eye of Sauron before Fiona had given me a bit of headway, so I took a small break at the top of one of the later pitches to sing some Cavetown. None of his songs involve actual caves as far as I'm aware. After a few of these, Fiona caught up with me and we exited the cave at 6:45pm, 2 hours after we'd started to leave.
A good trip, we'd made progress though not nearly as much as I wanted to make, my main goals for the next trip were to survey it and to rig a deviation. Due to me giving the SAP away for the next day, the former would prove difficult.
i WILL NOPT BE DENIED
[Ed. date fixed using git commit records.]The day started slightly sadly after a night at Garlic: Harry had consumed ice cream illadvisably (and maybe was ill on top of that). So his stomach and his fever meant it was decided it was unwise for him to join us. Colin was stolen from Todd and Aila to become an extra mule for the many many metres of rope we expected to carry out. The plan was simple: Watershed ended in a sketchy duck and the lack of enthusiasm for pushing it meant we should really remove all the rope up to Strained by Gravity. It was going to be around 300 to 400m and probably some strenuous prusiking. Chi and Harry had also realised the disto was in calibration mode on their last pushing trip so our extra task was surveying the lead they had slightly killed.
We went in down Aidan's new Welsh Engineering route, guided by Colin. Though it was very pretty (cool 60 meter freehanging pitch down a tube) it was deemed probably not safe for a main route. The main pitch was in a noticeably drippy and it was a bit snaggy. This was a bit of a shame because as much as Wallace and Grommit have grown on me against my will Welsh Engineering was definitely more efficient. Let it also be noted that the water was very low at this point and the streamway peaceful and quiet below Grommit.
I took over the tour guiding at this point and showed Colin down Watershed, Chi and Liam nattering about something technical at the back. At the bottom of Strained by Gravity I instructed him to walk quickly through the section Chi calls 'The Gauntlet'. Colin looked at me like I was being silly: 'Its not even that drippy'.
After a fair bit of Caving we reached Chi's new traverses at around 3:30 and were pretty chuffed at our expediency. Chi and Liam arrived soon behind us in time for me to begin apologising as doing book was so slow. This theme continued but it was fun to see the new passage and seeing the duck at the end was a nice reward for finally getting down all the data. It was more promising than expected; a nice draft coming out of it and quite a few B leads which had potential for bypasses.
Our turnaround time of 7 had crept up on us so we had to leave the very bottom of watershed and contemplate the long derig out. This is where things stopped going to plan.
Chi began on the bits he and Harry had bolted, while I zoomed to the bottom of My Favourite things to wait for the bags to be passed out. Colin took a full bag and went on ahead. During this time feeling slightly guilty I decided I would offer to do the next section, up to the top of Alpine Showers. A slightly daunting task as I hadn't done any derigging on bolts and was pretty green at derigging in general. Ah well, I'd give it a go.
Eventually Chi and Liam turned up, went up the pitch and I began. The first pitch was fine, but the second bolt at the top started spinning as I undid the bolt. I abandoned the hanger and continued along the traverse, aware I was being pretty slow. Somewhere along the traverse, undoing a maillon I noticed the roaring of the waterfall - I always get paranoid at water noise. Better just check though: 'Chi! Is that getting louder'. He surprised me with a matter of fact: 'Yes, it is'. Oh fuck.
Having read Becca's trip report I checked my watch: 8:20. Apparently, as I learned later, 40 mil of rain started pouring on the surface at 7. At this point I should have abandoned the derigging and got the hell out of dodge but my decision making wasn't working perfectly. I sped up, shoving maillons and knots into the bag and not being as careful with points of attachments as I should have been. Chi shouts round the corner something about the waterfall getting bigger. He was going to get up it and out of there. I kept derigging, pretty frantically, one more bolt started spinning on the traverse and another at the top of the tiny pitch after the bottom of Alpine Showers, this time almost as I'd taken the hanger off. I cursed as I fumbled and dropped the nut on the next bolt. The noise of the water was deafening. Chi was shouting something at me down the pitch, so was Liam but I couldn't hear a thing. The waterfall down the bottom pitch was a torrent and at this point I was pretty goddamn scared. At least I had my layers in the bag with me, I could get through this.
At some point before expo I had a vague memory that Kai had made me promise not to ascend a pitch in a flood pulse. I knew what the middle pitch was like, pretty splashy at the best of times, it needed a deviation we'd never put in and I'm bad at avoiding water. Maybe I shouldn't so something stupid here. I finally gave up on the derigging, Chi was shouting at me something. Maybe: come up? I shouted 'IT'S TOO WET' a lot of times and heard clearly 'I KNOW!!'. Great.
At this point I'd resigned myself to at least a few hours alone at the bottom waiting out a flood pulse, no group shelter but I had warm clothes and I wasn't wet yet. The bottom of the rope I'd just derigged landed on a nice dry ledge: that's where I wanted to be. As I reached to put the maillon back in and rig it again I realised I couldn't use a spinning bolt with the nut almost off it. I was just contemplating the rope rub by rigging of the previous bolt and quietly singing My Favourite Things to myself when I saw Chi's light at the top of the pitch. He really wanted me to come up. Okay, plan change.
I ditched all the rope onto the ledge, knots with maillons and hangers in the pile with everything else. After a glance to check my layers were there I got going. Chi shouted something about not swinging into the water: okey dokey. I half prussiked half clung to the wall, relieved this pitch wasn't as wet as it looked. The waterfall was roaring right next to me but I was fine. I reached Chi, very very relieved to no longer be alone.
Chi leaned in to be heard, he was wet from the waist down but impressively calm. Right, we were going to get through this. I de-weighted the traverse so he could rerig is looser so it didn't pull you taught into the waterfall. He told me to watch what he did. In essence: climb up the right ledge as far as possible swing round the waterfall, now gushing like a split pipe out the right hand wall around three metres up the pitch. After that, prussik like hell. The ideal was to only get soaked legs. Chi swung but ended up in the waterfall, he was soaked but got to the top of the pitch. 'Not like that', okay I shouted, 'I'll do it my way'. My way wasn't better.
Steps one and two went well but my pantin and footloop popped off just under the waterfall, exactly as they had the last time I'd got dripped on on this pitch. This time it was a lot more than the splashback spray. Chi was shouting GO GO GO, and I wasn't moving up the rope. At this point I decided there was nothing for it and reached down to put back on my footloop. The waterfall was pounding on my helmet - I had to get out. I frogged like hell fresher-style and got up the pitch, completely soaked but not drowned.
Chi and I came to the same conclusion, abandon the derig, cave fast and get the hell out. Liam had also got soaked below the waist and this was dangerous. I met Colin along the rift and he greeted me with a cheery 'I'm completely dry!’*. Despite the look I gave him he and Liam were brilliant: cajoling me up pitches where my SRT was shaky with adrenaline. There was a lot of checking up on each other.
Up flowstone canyon I was a lot calmer but worried. I was properly exerted but only lukewarm and I knew Chi got hypothermia at the drop of a hat. At the junction I raided my layer bag to the dregs: Chi got my pufferjackets, I got spare thermals and a waterproof and in surprisingly high spirits we kept going.
The way out was shivery but cheerful. Moral was pretty high and we even stopped for noodles. Poor Liam and Colin were roasting at the pace we needed so there was a lot of sitting very close at pitchheads and transferring warmth. Still we laughed at the clusterfuck that had happened and kept caving out making not terrible time.
Chi's D and B was brilliant as always up Wallace and Grommit and for once I was looking forward to long pitches where: rather than the normal experience of sweating in no layers, this time I got back to a nice temperature. The final push and walk back to Garlic was very welcome. The first thing we did when there was reassure Harry we hadn't died. He knew that we’d headed into active streamway and watched the weather forecast change.
It sounds crazy but it was a brilliant trip, fun in adversity becomes more fun and we all got out safe. For one thing, Chi looked very funny in a green and purple jacket all the way round his head. Still, I'm definitely avoiding waterfalls for a little bit.
* addendum: Colin (fairly) pointed out that he was responding to me asking if he was okay and all irony was unintentional.
It was midday by the time faff and the walk to Homecoming passed, and we were off down the entrance series. It was a bit of time before we got to the corner traverse that we were going to drop down from. I scrambled down the rift to see if it could be climbed, but it ended at a 10m drop. We decided the best point was from the traverse, so Isaac set about bolting whilst Aila and I started to survey.
It didn’t take long to drop, and soon we were treated to the sound of Isaac whooping and saying “Hello my sweet prince!” Reunited with his descender, we set about looking at what was ahead, which was a few spacious chambers (including Cupids Cavern, which has lots of heart shaped formations), and a few rifts here and there. Around one corner was a phreatic tube, which we set about traversing into. Ahead it kept going at roof level, so we went a little way along, before deciding that the survey would have to take precedence.
Unfortunately and fortunately the SAP battery died, and we realised that we were at our turnaround time. So we headed out having surveyed ~100m of passage.
I woke up in Garlic to many new faces, these being Chi, Lara, Liam and Harry. They were going to go down the Welsh Engineering route in Homecoming, the same Their trip was going to be derigging Watershed, but they would be going down the Welsh Engineering route and then ascending into the Watershed through Rivendell. I was spending much of the morning trying to figure out the logistics of Fiona and I's trip to push and survey our lead, so we needed more rope and a disto/SAP. After seeing that all the rope that was at Garlic was there because it was not to be used, I was a bit despondent. Chi told us however of some rope that had been left in the Junction between the Watershed and Second Coming. We didn't know how to get there, so the other group volunteered to lead us. After some contemplation, I resolved that a proper survey simply wasn't possible. We'd promised the SAP away, it'd have to wait. We also had the added complication of wanting to head down to basecamp that night. We figured with what we planned to do and the
We headed to Homecoming, with Fiona and I walking ahead, veering off to the right, following the cairns and, at times, the spray paint. This was a mistake. We soon realised that we were not at all on the right track and that we were instead following the hunter's path. We saw Chi shouting to us from the actual Homecoming spot and for a bit we tried Bunda Bashing our way to them, but it was apparent that we should just walk back to where we were on track and carry on from there. Indeed, that's what we did. When we arrived at Homecoming my main goal was to figure out logistics, which involved setting up callout and getting the times sorted. I called basecamp and managed to secure an 11pm callout, having a similar time for getting to the Loser Alm for a pick up by Sarah. Isaac was apparently fine with this as well, which he confirmed when he arrived. If he was earlier than us, he'd try to get a ride with Jono. Else, he'd be with us.
I grabbed the relevant gear for the trip, cutting a good length of cord and getting a drill bit from Harry, who felt ill and was staying on the surface. Colin said he was doing a bounce trip and had gone in before anyone else. I took pictures of a Welsh Engineering description from Lara's phone to get a better idea of where to find the rope. After this, Lara and her group went in after Colin. We soon followed, wrapping our drill in my jacket as we didn't have a foam covering. The delay between Lara's group and Fiona and I was too, great, however. They would be going fast so they wouldn't be able to show us the way to the junction.
After Radagast, getting to the phreatic tube, I opened the description on my phone and began to read. I quickly realised it was useless to us for what we wanted. We want a way to get off the Welsh Underground route, whereas this was just a description of that route, plain and simple. Useful for that, but nowt else. I could therefore not tell where the junction would be. It was out of scope.
Fiona and I eventually descended onto a platform with two pitches. Facing the wall, the one on the left led to Welsh Engineering. Right? We went down to see what we'd fine. There was a climb followed by a very narrow squeeze which we quickly realised wasn't the way. As a result, we headed back. It became apparent to me that for our time constraint, we couldn't use the rope.
When we got to Urinal Rock, we started unpacking the bolting gear. It was at this point I realised another mistake: I'd left the drill bit at the top! We'd not be able to bolt a new deviation, though it did mean it was good we bailed on the rope. As such, I found a new natural to rig a deviation on. This time, it was a bridge of rock where I could pass a cord through. I stood at the bottom of the pitch with Fiona adjusting the knot to make the deviation more pronounced. When we were satisfied with how much it pulled the rope we tested it. First with my weight and me ascending, then with both of our weight. It held true! I was very pleased with this, but seeing as we needed to come back for a proper survey anyway, I was also keen to properly bolt it.
Fiona then drew a grade 1 survey of the Brandywine, including where we'd put the bolts. Worry not, this will be properly surveyed! After this, Fiona started to prussik out of the cave and I stayed behind to adjust the bolts of my Y-Hang. After I was satisfied, I followed.
The most frustrating part of the ascent was bashing my shoulder on the exact same spot on the exact same rock as the day before! That, I think, drove my frustration even more than the actual pain did.
But in any case, I got out in 2 hours at 5:30pm, popping out of the cave entrance a bit after Fiona did. We noticed the rainclouds appearing and quickly began packing out things away. As we did, I noticed a small hole in the bottom of my dry bag, not doubt a result of the metal ring breaking off my tackle sack. I made a mental note to contact Petzl about that. I put the drill into the dry bag alongside my caving clothes and put it in a further plastic bag under another waterproof cover, just to be safe. I took the battery back with me and found the drill bit on the ground where I had left it!
10 minutes after leaving, rain started to pour down. Even further into our hike, we saw flashes of light and the distant rumble of thunder, some of it being worryingly close. We knew, however, that it was faster to just walk back to the carpark from where we now were on the plateau. As the rain continued and we got more and more soaked, our spirits got more and more dour. We got a tad lost a few times, but these were trivial compared to our prior mistakes and we got off the plateau in only a few hours. After an hour of stoic walking against the wind and rain, we arrived at the Loser Alm at about the same time as Sarah, being very glad of the sight. The walks across the plateau had pained my knee greatly, the downhill track to the Loser Alm being agony. I was glad to be going down to Basecamp for a couple days rest. Hopefully the next journeys on the plateau would be less agonising and we'd be able to push our lead further! Next time, the callout would be 8am.