mirror of
https://expo.survex.com/repositories/expoweb/.git/
synced 2024-11-22 15:21:55 +00:00
305 lines
17 KiB
HTML
305 lines
17 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
|
||
<html lang="en">
|
||
<head>
|
||
<title>1992: Cambridge Underground report</title>
|
||
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../../css/main2.css" />
|
||
</head>
|
||
<body>
|
||
<center><p><font size=-1>Cambridge Underground 1994 pp 31-34</font>
|
||
|
||
<h1>Austria 1992</h1>
|
||
|
||
<blockquote><i>"They set off from Cambridge with cars full of shit,<br>
|
||
All wondering how possibly they'd made it all fit"</i></blockquote></center>
|
||
|
||
<p>The first car to leave was the Battlewagon, with the rear suspension on
|
||
it's bumpstops. Within ten yards of setting off, the towbar had attacked
|
||
the kerb during a 3 point turn. The reckless occupants were MarkM and Ali,
|
||
who planned to do some climbing in the Alps first. Their high point was Mark
|
||
waking up from a dream and yanking the handbrake on. Fortunately it
|
||
didn't work.
|
||
|
||
<p>Next off was Wookey's van, with a trailer which was extracted from a
|
||
dung heap twelve hours before the ferry was due to leave. MarkF was so
|
||
scared by the huge piles of gear lying in Spalding Way (in the front garden,
|
||
living room, kitchen and back garden) that he helped repair the rotten
|
||
boards. The poor idiots who had to drive this combination were JulianS and
|
||
Clive. The towbar was bolted onto the bumper, and only grounded getting on
|
||
and off the ferry. Their high point was trying to repeat last year's
|
||
van rolling events.
|
||
|
||
<p>And so once more the expo began.
|
||
|
||
<p>It had been raining in the Alps so Mark, Ali, and JulianH (who had joined
|
||
them by train) were the first to arrive, followed five days later by Matt,
|
||
and they set to with ungodly vigour. Mark had already been busy in
|
||
Cambridge, and had built a tent ("The Portable Palace") which
|
||
could sleep four in comfort, and a drill battery ("Small Paul")
|
||
which could drill at least forty holes but weighed more than a full
|
||
Goldflash tacklesack.
|
||
|
||
<p><blockquote><i>"The plateau and caves were covered in snow<br>
|
||
They walked in ignorance of pitches below"</i></blockquote>
|
||
|
||
<p>Puffball was found to be blocked, and while looking for
|
||
Kaninchenhöhle, the three cavers wandered across a snow plug. After
|
||
crossing it they looked behind and found a hole they could lob rocks down.
|
||
Well, they found the cave, anyway.
|
||
|
||
<p>Matt then arrived, and the caving began. A ladder placed next to the
|
||
Puffball snow plug gave with some digging an entrance, and they went down to
|
||
Piezo. There the rigging joy began, with the choice of a wet pitch or a
|
||
hanging route off the far wall. With much use of skyhooks, power drills and
|
||
bolts placed then removed, the Crows nest and Piezo were rigged, with an
|
||
alternative, even drier route too! Maybe Julian's experience last year
|
||
had something to do with this...
|
||
|
||
<p>During these trips, the van arrived with the rest of the expo, and Glen
|
||
followed closely. He started his expo well, trying out his new extra huge
|
||
rucksack with an extra huge amount of gear, and staggered along regretting
|
||
this move. Eventually the second wave set off caving, but Clive set the tone
|
||
for the rest of the holiday by forgetting his welllies and hence being
|
||
unable to go underground. This was fortunate, really, since his bottom
|
||
exploded about an hour later. Expo food is so lovely. MarkS and Olly arrived
|
||
that evening, and the potato hut filled with computers (2½ of them).
|
||
|
||
<p>Puffball carried on until the hitchers arrived : first AndyA and Fran,
|
||
then DaveF and Henri, with tales of fast cars and loud lorries. The
|
||
exception was MarkM's trip down K-H to retrieve some co-ax for
|
||
Julian's new hi-tech aerials. This started a new trend of solo trips :
|
||
others were by Olly (surveying, too!), Tony, DaveF, MikeTA, JulianS and
|
||
Clive. Most of the participants seemed to enjoy these trips, doing what they
|
||
wanted to do and escaping the stresses of the expo. Mark's trip was an
|
||
exception, caving wearing dry grots in an oversize harness off single dodgy
|
||
spits not being his idea of fun.
|
||
|
||
<p>Then it stopped : a large boulder in the Puffball entrance moved while
|
||
MarkM and Julian climbed past it. This provided an opportunity for KH to be
|
||
started properly, and for lots of new arguments - about gear split between
|
||
the caves, and whether Puffball was actually safe. DaveF solved this latter
|
||
one by the simple expedient of trying to put a tape round the offending
|
||
boulder and sliding with it four feet down the slope, then gardening it for
|
||
a couple of hours.
|
||
|
||
<p>The next day, JulianH, Richie and Aggy decided it was time to carry on
|
||
with Puffball, so they sensibly laid 600 metres of cable for the radio, and
|
||
carried 200 metres of rope to the pushing front. This waited for a few days
|
||
until Ali, Clive, Fran and MarkM went on the next trip went down. They had
|
||
double clicker failure (now where did that happen before in pb?), with
|
||
'Kiss of Light' rift named due to the strange sight of two cavers
|
||
nuzzling together, then found a small sump in the middle of a muddy rift -
|
||
'Waste of Effort', with a small way on that Wookey-the-Stupid
|
||
subsequently found to be another sump. It was a strange feeling -
|
||
satisfaction at finding the end of the cave, disappointment at it not going
|
||
that deep, and fear at the sight of lots of mud next to the sump - I've
|
||
never seen MarkM prussik so fast as he came out of the last pitch! To
|
||
commemorate the end, '<a href="182.htm">The twelve pitches of Puffball</a>'
|
||
was written.
|
||
|
||
<p>That was it, with the exception of a few surveying, derigging and general
|
||
tidying up trips. Next cave, please.
|
||
|
||
<p>Ah yes - Elchfalle/Moosehöhle. This was investigated since it was
|
||
close enough to Puffball so you didn't need to move gear, and only so many
|
||
people could go down Puffball. JulianH, Matt and Aggy started it, gardening
|
||
and pitching as you do. The boulder slightly blocking the entrance was moved
|
||
next with a huge pulley system, and the way was clear for the cave to go!
|
||
Which, after a few pitches, it didn't. The crawl in the fault at the bottom
|
||
was looked at by several people, the furthest being Clive on one of his solo
|
||
trips, and was declared crap. While derigging Olly and Clive heard the sound
|
||
of rushing water, and memories of Puffball tales came flooding back. Quick,
|
||
brace yourselves ... here it comes ... ... trickle. What an anticlimax. The
|
||
pitches were rigged well out of the water too - it wasn't even awful.
|
||
|
||
<p>Wait! This is supposed to be a holiday, remember. Surely the club
|
||
aren't as odd as the Austrians spotted wandering past the crapper at
|
||
8am in pouring rain clutching umbrellas? Obviously there was some festering
|
||
to be done...
|
||
|
||
<p>Firstly there were bicycles to be played on. Some people cycled up the
|
||
toll road, Justin being the fastest at 1¼hr. Others preferred to cycle
|
||
down it, AndyA getting to 55 mph before the speedo went funny and Clive
|
||
doing the 5¼ miles in ten minutes, including hairpins.
|
||
|
||
<p>Then there were the Austrian cavers. They invited us to the festival at
|
||
Bad Mittendorf, where the freshly geartaped van driven with a pair of
|
||
Wookey's shreddies hanging off the waving windscreen wiper seemed to
|
||
cause amusement to the locals, and the commentator said our presence made
|
||
it a truly international festival!
|
||
|
||
<p>Once more their portable mountain with a seemingly endless supply of beer
|
||
inside provided amusement and lubrication for the subsequent gear and survey
|
||
inspection in their hut. They then inspected our singing and tried to teach
|
||
us to clap at the expo dinner, where Henri as best german speaker was
|
||
volunteered to get us an invitation to their caves.
|
||
|
||
<p>The day before this invitation was due to be honoured it was Clive's 21st
|
||
birthday, and after the nice food we ate, as a change from the relentless
|
||
veggie slop, and the nice beer we drank anyway, we went to sleep under the
|
||
stars, having duly ignored the repeated warnings about what was to happen
|
||
next. Which was being awoken by Henri who must have felt subconsciously
|
||
guilty about arranging it all to begin at 6am in Bad Mittendorf. Half an hour
|
||
later Richie was driving at 90mph, coffee and cigarette in two hands and
|
||
steering wheel in the other, and we made it, closely followed by Wookey
|
||
sliding into the car park. There then followed a long day of, for one party,
|
||
walking lots, caving a little and walking back. This led to an awful scree
|
||
slope with rocks being thrown by goats, an unlikely flat football field sized
|
||
piece of grass on top which was their campsite and we were told they had to
|
||
carry all their camping and caving gear including the over-the-top stainless
|
||
steel entrance fixed ladder, and a helicopter brought them cakes and a barrel
|
||
of beer. On the way back over the plateau we were shown lots of huge holes,
|
||
including one with a huge memorial cross on the wromg side of the hole from
|
||
the path, and the one which the others had gone down, so we stole their
|
||
shorts (apart from Wookey's because there didn't seem any point). Their cave
|
||
went quickly to -368m via 20,93,10,53,88,57 metre pitches, and at the bottom
|
||
they went pushing, found 300m more of cave (Cambridge Corner) which they
|
||
didn't even have to survey - oh happy cavers.
|
||
|
||
<p>Around all these frolics, the slogan on the T-Shirt (Kaninchenhöhle
|
||
V The Final Frontier) was busy being unfulfilled. The initial rig to Knossos
|
||
prompted major ranting about the amount of rope in Puffball, but fortunately
|
||
this was finished, just in time for France to go deep after Tony started it
|
||
with a solo rig that he enjoyed so much he ran back from the cave. AndyA and
|
||
DaveF started the silly pushing at Repton, finding Pipeless and Satan<61>s
|
||
Sitting Room. MikeTA and Tina preferred to begin closer to the surface at
|
||
an old question mark of theirs at the end of Gnome. Mike continued Deep
|
||
Sleep on a solo trip and was really surprised when it stopped - this is
|
||
supposed to be 161 and hence infinite!
|
||
|
||
<p>Having learned from their previous experience of the distance to Pipeless,
|
||
and being encumbered by the newly released drill battery AndyA and DaveF,
|
||
accompanied by Henri and Tony, went down Garden Party and swiftly discovered
|
||
it led to Niflheim. Sam worked the other way round, first being on two
|
||
Dungeon trips, then deciding that since he was only in Austria for a week he
|
||
had better go and do something silly, went off to stop AndyA and Wookey
|
||
rigging a tyrolean across Hyper Gamma Spaces by stealing the gear, and
|
||
accidentally found Mostly Mud with MikeTA. After this his next trip was a
|
||
photo trip in Big Sainsburys, with tea, so maybe he'd had enough of being
|
||
hard. He did find a zoom (Dokertees from '88?) in Dungeon, so maybe he was
|
||
trying to be lucky again.
|
||
|
||
<p>Meanwhile the club was producing its normal level of casualties. The vomit
|
||
tally was started by the normal means of people drinking too much, but Wookey
|
||
doesn't drink beer so he was forced to chuck all over Puffball due to
|
||
dehydration. Jerry eventually won, and also helped Richie on the way. Gill
|
||
tried to string herself up on Snot while fetching a drill battery for
|
||
Dungeon, and her ensuing whistle call was swiftly answered, so no damage was
|
||
done. Matt's whistle call while failing to find top camp from a couple of
|
||
hundred yards away was however ignored.
|
||
|
||
<p>Down France Tony tried to kill AndyA. "Below" he cried, so Andy
|
||
tensed up to receive a blow. Which arrived on his head just after he
|
||
relaxed. There goes one carbon fibre helmet, and one Andy down the pitch.
|
||
"Aha", he went, "If I let go of the handle my stop will
|
||
work". STOP. Throw up. Carry on caving. Push a bit. Oops, falling
|
||
again, where has that 6ft by 1 ft shelf gone. Put a bolt in using 3 spits.
|
||
Better leave. A tad psyched then!
|
||
|
||
<p>Slightly more serious were Glen and JulianS. Glen fell down a shakehole
|
||
and dislocated his shoulder, to which Olly's comment was "Does it
|
||
go?". The injury was aggravated by getting washed down the river at the
|
||
back of Hilde's. Julian was slightly more cunning - he waited until
|
||
derigging had just begun, and fell off a small cliff on the way back from
|
||
the cave, bruising his back. Oops - better fester and watch all these big
|
||
strong men carry gear.
|
||
|
||
<p>JulianH had appointed himself radio man, and spent several hundred pounds
|
||
on CB gear, including a portable to go caving inside an ammo box. His amazing
|
||
triple inverted-v aerials (3 big posts with lots of wire and guys) were a
|
||
sight to behold, his repeaters were so complicated he had to change the
|
||
design while on expo to make them work and the portable was completely
|
||
reengineered. After 3 weeks fettling, the portable didn't work even slightly,
|
||
but top camp to base camp did, which meant he could escape to the French Alps
|
||
for a proper holiday without getting too much strife. Unfortunately, just
|
||
after he had gone, a huge thunderstorm came and blew the aerials down (and
|
||
some of base camp), and nobody knew which direction to put them up in. Oh
|
||
well, maybe next time...
|
||
|
||
<p>Time to do something else again, isn't it. The Austrians were still
|
||
around (not surprisingly). Robert the Wonder Caver came and gave us an
|
||
excellent slideshow, with much oohing at the tight bits of cave, and
|
||
jealousy at the amazing lightning photographs. (A few days later we had the
|
||
privilege of watching a thunderstorm from base camp for half an hour before
|
||
it started raining.) Robert then invited us to go to a beer festival, at
|
||
which the term "Schnappered" was coined, meaning having drunk far
|
||
too much of the different sorts of nice schnapps they served there. Richie,
|
||
while trying his best to avoid it, nearly started a fight, and we eventually
|
||
found him asleep under a fairground lorry. After this Jerry generously stuck
|
||
his fingers down Richie's throat and ensured his place on the vomit tally.
|
||
Meanwhile Aggy Finn (his real name) was consolidating his place on the
|
||
sharking tally, but Robert TWC spoke Austrian better so he did better that
|
||
night.
|
||
|
||
<p>Team lag turned up to catch the embers of the expo, but left before
|
||
derigging. Jeremy, Chris and MarkF arrived, drank some beer and declared
|
||
their intention of climbing the Trisselwand. Roping in one of DaveH's
|
||
festering women, off they set, ridiculously early (according to Mark's
|
||
writeup). After eventually finding the correct starting point, four hours
|
||
later (11am), off they climbed. Climb they went, with some more getting lost,
|
||
until 5pm when Jeremy decided he had sunstroke, and that they ought to go
|
||
down again. So they did, and got to the 2nd pitch without problem.
|
||
Unfortunately, a thunderstorm decided to happen, at the same time as people
|
||
were having problems going down. All this led to rope tangle, which delayed
|
||
their crossing of the small gulley sufficiently that by then it was full of
|
||
water with rocks and ice in it. This was epic, and Jeremy has subsequently
|
||
claimed it was the most scared he has ever been. Eventually they all reached
|
||
the bottom with only minor injuries (a badly bruised shoulder was the worst)
|
||
logbook etc etc.
|
||
|
||
<p>Of course the expo would not be complete without its quota of car
|
||
failures. However they were remarkably good this year. The Wookvan waited
|
||
till Slovakia to break properly, the only minor damage being a pissed and fat
|
||
JulianH pulling the roofrack apart. Even the battle wagon survived with only
|
||
a few improvements, a bit of oil system fettling, and new rear brake shoes.
|
||
These were so tight the van had to tow the wagon out of the campsite (a four
|
||
wheel drive princess) and Ali had to sit in the boot for a while to give the
|
||
rear wheels enough grip to stop sliding.
|
||
|
||
<p>So back they went to caving. DaveF, after avoiding the end with Garden
|
||
Party, decided it was time to go solo caving and went down The Hole Below
|
||
The Pitch Below The Squeeze (hooray for descriptive names), now called
|
||
Bladerunner. Everyone else (well, those sufficiently hard/stupid) went to
|
||
the end. Aggy was sent to climb round a pitch, while Wookey, AndyA and Jerry
|
||
stood around making helpful comments like "Put your cowstails in and
|
||
get on with it", hence the 3 Wise Men. So he did, but unfortunately
|
||
went too far and had to be destrung by Andy. This made him all scared, so he
|
||
left Wookey and Andy to find Far Too Far, via phreatic passage with jet
|
||
black floor they didn't want to put footprints in, and the question marks
|
||
multiplied. On the next trip, Wookey and Andy surveyed their finds, and it
|
||
was time to derig.
|
||
|
||
<p>Yawn derig carry they went. Ruth and Jane (DaveH's friends) were impressed
|
||
with the amount of shit we all carried, but DaveH was the star, carrying far
|
||
too much inside and outside the cave. It didn't even rain too much, only
|
||
thunderstorming at night. Time to go away - Slovakia for some, trains and
|
||
cars for others, and poor DaveF left to cycle home (900 miles in 9 days - not
|
||
bad)
|
||
|
||
<p>The End
|
||
<hr>
|
||
<!-- LINKS -->
|
||
<img alt=">" src="../../../icons/lists/0.png">
|
||
<a href="../../../jnl/1994/index.htm">Table of Contents</a>
|
||
for Cambridge Underground 1994<br>
|
||
<img alt=">" src="../../../icons/lists/0.png">
|
||
1992 Expedition info:<br>
|
||
<img alt="--->" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
|
||
<a href="index.htm">Index</a> (more detail than in this list)<br>
|
||
<img alt="--->" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
|
||
<a href="log.htm">Logbook</a><br>
|
||
<img alt="--->" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
|
||
<a href="bcracc.htm">BCRA Caves & Caving Report</a><br>
|
||
<img alt="--->" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
|
||
<a href="182.htm">"The Twelve Pitches of Puffball"</a> (expedition song).<br>
|
||
<img alt="--->" src="../../../icons/lists/1.png">
|
||
<a href="sponsr.htm">This year's</a> sponsors<br><hr>
|
||
<img alt=">" src="../../../icons/lists/0.png">
|
||
<a href="../../pubs.htm#1992">Index</a> to all publications<br>
|
||
<img alt=">" src="../../../icons/lists/0.png">
|
||
<a href="../../index.htm">Back to Expeditions intro page</a><br>
|
||
<img alt=">" src="../../../icons/lists/0.png">
|
||
<a href="../../../index.htm">CUCC Home Page</a>
|
||
|
||
</body>
|
||
</html>
|