mirror of
https://expo.survex.com/repositories/expoweb/.git/
synced 2024-12-25 01:42:21 +00:00
284 lines
16 KiB
HTML
284 lines
16 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
|
|
<html>
|
|
<head>
|
|
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8" />
|
|
<title>1996: BCRA Caves & Caving report</title>
|
|
<LINK rel="alternate" lang="de" href="bcra-d.htm"
|
|
title="CUCC in Österreich 1996">
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../../css/main2.css" />
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
<font size=-1>BCRA Caves & Caving 75, Spring 1997, pp 19-23 [ISSN 0142-1832]</font>
|
|
|
|
<center><h1>CUCC IN AUSTRIA, 1996</h1>
|
|
<h3>by Anthony Day</h3>
|
|
|
|
<h2>Introduction</h2></center>
|
|
|
|
<p>July 1996 saw the twentieth Cambridge University Caving Club expedition to
|
|
the Austrian Totes Gebirge. Since 1988 these expeditions have concentrated on
|
|
the increasingly complicated Kaninchenhöhle system, whose length stood
|
|
at 14.3km at the start of the expedition. The latter half of the 1995
|
|
expedition had seen many important breakthroughs. There was the surprise
|
|
discovery of major horizontal development ("Triassic Park") with over fifty
|
|
leads and a new, lower entrance, found from the inside. The other important
|
|
leads were at the southern end of the cave where all south going passages
|
|
appeared to be stopped by a fault, which was irritating since the 970m deep
|
|
Stellerweghöhle system was thought to be less than 1km away to the
|
|
south. This southern boundary had been passed in 1995 via a dire boulder
|
|
choke ("Stairway to Hell") to find large passage beyond ("Forbidden Land")
|
|
but the dangerous nature of the choke meant that all concerned were
|
|
determined never to go there again. Finding a bypass for the choke was a
|
|
priority for the 1996 expedition.
|
|
|
|
<p>With these exciting prospects, enthusiasm was running higher than for
|
|
several years and forty people made their way to Austria at one time or
|
|
another making 1996 the largest ever CUCC expedition. When the first arrivals
|
|
presented themselves at the Gasthof Staud'nwirt near Bad Aussee on 28th June,
|
|
their first objective was to find a good route to the new 161d entrance
|
|
("Scarface") which had the advantage of offering easy access to most of the
|
|
leads but the disadvantage of being situated in the middle of a cliff. This
|
|
was surprisingly easily achieved, and with the aid of a couple of handlines,
|
|
an acceptable route was soon established and the caving got under way.
|
|
|
|
<center><h2>Knossos Connection and Bugger</h2></center>
|
|
|
|
At its northern end, Triassic Park divides into two main branches at
|
|
"Trifurcation". One of these branches was explored as far as a 10m climb up -
|
|
"Bugger" - in 1995, which required gear. This was one of the most promising
|
|
leads in the cave, and it was successfully scaled at the second attempt. Our
|
|
hopes of finding miles of train tunnel passageway were dashed however as the
|
|
passage quickly becomes quite small. There is an 80m pitch however, which was
|
|
duly descended and named "Henri's Cat". It was found to lead to further
|
|
pitches of 36m and 60m before ending in a pile of rocks. The bottom of this
|
|
series is very close to the bottom of the Flat Battery series, found in 1990.
|
|
|
|
<p>The other main branch ended in a short pitch - "Minoan Surprise" - which
|
|
was found to be very close to Knossos, the largest chamber in
|
|
Kaninchenhöhle. This connection was eventually confirmed, and would
|
|
potentially provide a much easier route to the many leads in the northern
|
|
extremities of the cave which have not been visited since 1993. However,
|
|
with all the easy leads in Triassic Park, the connection was not used in
|
|
this way in 1996.
|
|
|
|
<center><h2>Puerile Humour Series</h2></center>
|
|
|
|
The start of this series was found on the first day of caving by a party
|
|
who had failed to scale Bugger. They went to look at a horizontal lead to
|
|
the east of Triassic Park near Ring Piece Junction, and found and surveyed
|
|
around 300m of cave with a few moderate leads. A later party went in with
|
|
instructions to complete the survey ("It'll only need a couple of legs") and
|
|
walked into 2km of horizontal cave.
|
|
|
|
<p>The Puerile Humour series appears to be a complex network of smaller
|
|
phreatics (typically 3m round) which fed the main trunk route of Triassic
|
|
Park. The main route divides into two, 500m from Triassic Park. The western
|
|
branch - "Where The Wind Blows" - ends in a draughting choke after 170m.
|
|
Significantly, this end of the passage is only about 100m east and 40m north
|
|
of what was previously the north eastern extremity of the cave. There are not
|
|
many high quality leads in Where The Wind Blows but all those that there are
|
|
will be worth thorough investigation in 1997 since this would potentially
|
|
provide an even easier route to the northern end of the cave than the new
|
|
route into Knossos.
|
|
|
|
<p>The eastern branch quickly became very complicated. A chamber with five
|
|
ways out, given the inspired title of "Five Ways Chamber" is the key. The
|
|
northern route leads to "Bounce Rift", a 6m deep rift running perpendicular
|
|
to the main passage, whilst east from Five Ways leads to "Completely Loopy",
|
|
a rabbit warren of interconnecting passages. There are significant draughts
|
|
in many places around here. On one day, a party went to explore beyond Bounce
|
|
Rift whilst a second party went to explore and survey in Completely Loopy.
|
|
The first party found a 3m round draughting phreatic which frustratingly
|
|
ended at a strongly draughting choke after 80m. This was thought to be
|
|
promising enough to warrant a quick dig, and after 45 minutes of toil they
|
|
emerged onto the hillside. 161e became the "Yorkshire Pudding" entrance since
|
|
the author of this piece didn't fit through until some more rocks had been
|
|
removed. Ten minutes later, the second party emerged from the second new
|
|
entrance of the day (161f) 100m around the hill, having followed a similarly
|
|
strong draught from Completely Loopy. 161e and 161f are about 25m higher than
|
|
161d and 500m to the north. Neither will be particularly useful for access to
|
|
anywhere other than leads in their immediate vicinity as they suffer from the
|
|
same surface accessibility problems as 161d.
|
|
|
|
<p>To the north of 161e is "Iceland" which is similarly draughty and
|
|
contains a number of ice formations, the first that have been found in
|
|
Kaninchenhöhle, and most welcome in a cave which generally lacks
|
|
aesthetic beauty. There are around 40 unexplored leads in the Puerile Humour
|
|
series and Iceland, many of which are very promising.
|
|
|
|
<center><h2>Interview Blues Series</h2></center>
|
|
|
|
There is a fourth, smaller way on from Trifurcation which leads to the
|
|
Interview Blues Series, so called because one of the initial explorers had to
|
|
return to England after just one trip to attend a job interview. A 25m
|
|
entrance pitch quickly leads to two more shorter pitches, all dropping down
|
|
the same rift. With the cynicism born of several years of pushing similar
|
|
leads only to find that ultimately the rift becomes too small, nobody really
|
|
expected it to go very far. However, by the time we left Austria it had
|
|
descended 250m from Triassic Park via ten pitches and is the third deepest
|
|
point in the cave.
|
|
|
|
<p>At the foot of the fourth pitch is a choice of routes: Continuing down the
|
|
impressive 55m fifth pitch, "Application for Life", or heading south down a
|
|
rift passage which opens out onto a large pitch with an aven above. Whilst
|
|
bolting this pitch, a caver was spotted at the top of the aven, and it turns
|
|
out that this was the foot of an undescended pitch in Minoan Surprise.
|
|
Traversing round the pitch leads to a second connected pitch, "Spatial
|
|
Awareness" which was descended. This pitch lands in the same chamber as
|
|
another pitch from Minoan Surprise which had been descended earlier in the
|
|
expedition, the lovingly named "Bottomless Pit of Eternal Chaos" (79m).
|
|
|
|
<p>Whilst the pitches are mostly spacious and dry, the same cannot be said of
|
|
the sections of horizontal cave which connect them, which are mostly about
|
|
50cm wide and covered in mud, which makes a trip to the bottom of Interview
|
|
Blues a strenuous affair. However, the caving improves towards the bottom of
|
|
the main route, and the splendid 40m tenth pitch lands in a sizeable chamber
|
|
with half a dozen possible leads. Although many of these were quite wet and
|
|
miserable on the one occasion this area was visited (during a period of
|
|
unsettled weather), there is the prospect of adding more depth to Interview
|
|
Blues, and this exciting prospect means that this area is likely to be
|
|
revisited in 1997.
|
|
|
|
<center><h2>Forbidden Land</h2></center>
|
|
|
|
Whilst all this cave was being found in the vicinity of Triassic Park,
|
|
various attempts were made to find an alternative route into the Forbidden
|
|
Land by systematically pushing every south going lead in the area. Thus a
|
|
steep climb in the corner of Staud'nwirt Palace was pushed further than it
|
|
otherwise would have before becoming blocked, some people pushed a promising
|
|
lead in Zombie Slime, backing off at a too tight pitch, only to find their
|
|
rope hanging out of the roof back in Zombie Slime, and various other unlikely
|
|
crawls were pushed, all becoming choked or too tight. Eventually there was
|
|
only one lead left in this area, and that was Stairway to Hell, so all the
|
|
people who had vowed never to go there again prepared for another trip, this
|
|
time taking some survey gear.
|
|
|
|
<p>In 1995 the passage beyond the choke had been described as having one
|
|
solid wall and one shattered wall, but this turned out to be a big pile of
|
|
boulders in the middle of a huge hading rift chamber, 90m by 30m, named "Hall
|
|
of the Mounting Choss". A phreatic tube - "Pump House" - heads south from
|
|
here, which is of similar dimensions and orientation to the phreatics found
|
|
in France in 1994 but considerably higher up, and is thus thought to have
|
|
been offset by our hypothetical fault. The large passage bears southwest into
|
|
"Elin Algor", ending in a large undescended pitch with aven above, and
|
|
"Tirolia Werke", a westerly trending passage containing a number of phreatic
|
|
ramps. (Incidentally, the grand names of these passages result from a total
|
|
lack of inspiration on the part of the surveyors: Elin Algor is the name of
|
|
the fridge in our base camp hut, and Tirolia Werke is the name of the oven.)
|
|
|
|
<p>The usefulness of having a computer and a copy of Survex present in
|
|
Austria was once again demonstrated, as when the survey for this part of the
|
|
cave was included, it was found to be very close to a known CUCC cave,
|
|
Steinschlagschacht, explored in 1983 and 84. Although the details are
|
|
sketchy, it seems that this cave is essentially a 250m deep pitch series in
|
|
which the existence of a number of phreatic ramps has been recorded, similar
|
|
to those found in Tirolia Werke. It also appears to be very loose in places
|
|
and contains an active streamway, so although plans were made to descend
|
|
Steinschlagschacht in the final week of the expedition, it didn't take very
|
|
much rain for those plans to be abandoned. Making the connection will be a
|
|
priority at the beginning of the 1997 expedition.
|
|
|
|
<center><h2>Other Finds in Kaninchenhöhle</h2></center>
|
|
|
|
Many other leads in Triassic Park were pushed to a conclusion, and a brief
|
|
description of these follows. "Alternative Universe" leads from an undercut
|
|
in the western wall of Triassic Park beyond Shortage of Walls and proceeds
|
|
north as a 7m round passage paralleling Triassic Park for 280m, before ending
|
|
at a short pitch with a tiny rift exiting. This rift is tantalisingly close
|
|
to a larger rift near Ring Piece Junction which was descended in 1996 via two
|
|
pitches - "Tapeworm" (27m) and "Hammeroids" (45m) - before ending in a small
|
|
choked rift. "Dr Snuggles" heads west towards Alternative Universe, past an
|
|
enormous aven before ending at a 6m climb up with black space visible beyond.
|
|
Having failed in an attempt to climb this, one pair ignored all the train
|
|
tunnel leads elsewhere in Triassic Park in favour of hammering out a 10cm
|
|
round hole in the wall until it was passable. Initially it appeared that
|
|
their efforts had been worthwhile as a 100m long body sized crawl emerged
|
|
into huge cave, until they realised they were back at the start of
|
|
Alternative Universe.
|
|
|
|
<p>Going the other way from Shortage of Walls, leads to the large "Teapot"
|
|
chamber, visible from Salt Lake City. Two pitches in the far corner of this
|
|
chamber landed in "Rich Tea", a 1994 find in France, thus providing another
|
|
connection from Triassic Park to the older parts of the cave.
|
|
|
|
<center><h2>Other Work</h2></center>
|
|
|
|
In recent years, much time and effort has been put into collating all the
|
|
available information about CUCC finds in Austria over the last twenty years.
|
|
This work, performed principally by Andy Waddington, revealed many gaps in
|
|
our knowledge. During the 1996 expedition a concerted effort was made to put
|
|
this right, and much time was spent relocating earlier finds and making
|
|
surface surveys to their entrances. To aid this work, for the first time we
|
|
had the use of a GPS which provided reasonably accurate locational
|
|
information for cave entrances that are a long way from a surface survey.
|
|
|
|
<p>The steady improvement in the standard of CUCC's underground surveying was
|
|
maintained this year. Even the novices produced high quality work with the
|
|
result that the full survey was completed several months earlier than usual.
|
|
Julian Haines continuing battle to build a reliable radio system for
|
|
communication between our two campsites was more successful than previous
|
|
attempts. We obtained two weeks of reliable communication, and they served an
|
|
important purpose in reassuring base camp that the Stairway to Hell team had
|
|
emerged safely. The photo trip was less successful with five cavers spending
|
|
a very cold five hours standing around while flashguns failed to work. Our
|
|
photographic record of the 1996 finds is thus somewhat sparse, and this will
|
|
need to be rectified in 1997.
|
|
|
|
<p>There is still a large backlog of entrance finding and surface surveying
|
|
work to be done, but there is a new spirit of trying to take a more
|
|
systematic approach to prospecting and surveying, which has been achieved
|
|
without compromising the relaxed atmosphere of the expedition. This new found
|
|
efficiency was not much in evidence however when the aforementioned GPS was
|
|
left on top of the mountain at the end of the expedition. Disaster was
|
|
averted when one of our members returned from Slovenia via Austria two weeks
|
|
later and retrieved it.
|
|
|
|
<center><h2>Summary</h2></center>
|
|
|
|
In terms of the amount of new passage found, 1996 was CUCC's most successful
|
|
Austrian expedition with another 5.5km of passage surveyed taking the total
|
|
length of Kaninchenhöhle to 19.7km. These finds include around 80 new
|
|
leads meaning that once again there are more leads at the end of the
|
|
expedition than there were at the start. Although the depth of the system has
|
|
remained stuck at 498m for a number of years, there is the very real
|
|
possibility that next year the system will get deeper, either by pushing some
|
|
of the leads at the bottom of Interview Blues, or by connecting to
|
|
Steinschlagschacht (which seems extremely likely) whose entrance is a
|
|
princely 11m higher than the highest known entrance to Kaninchenhöhle.
|
|
Enthusiasm is still running high, and the 1997 expedition has much to look
|
|
forward to.
|
|
|
|
<p>Most exciting of all however are the possibilities at the southern end of
|
|
Forbidden Land. The northern end of the Schwarzmooskogel Eishöhle is
|
|
believed to be between 200 and 500m away from the new southern extremity of
|
|
Kaninchenhöhle. The Eishöhle is already connected to the Stellerweg
|
|
system, and the major horizontal development in all the systems in the area
|
|
are known to be at similar altitudes, so a connection looks more likely than
|
|
ever. The combined length of the systems would be over 40km, the majority of
|
|
which has been found by CUCC, and the overall depth would exceed 1000m.
|
|
However, such a connection may take a number of years to find given the
|
|
dangerous nature of access to the Forbidden Land, which means it is not the
|
|
sort of the place to send lots of people, especially not people new to
|
|
expedition caving. With over 100 leads remaining in the nicer parts of
|
|
Kaninchenhöhle, this doesn't seem likely to be a problem.
|
|
|
|
<hr />
|
|
<!-- LINKS -->
|
|
<ul id="links">
|
|
<li>1996 Expedition info:
|
|
<ul>
|
|
<li><a href="index.htm">Index</a> (more detail than in this list)</li>
|
|
<li>This <a href="bcra-d.htm">report translated into German</a> (as published in VfHO report)</li>
|
|
<li><a href="log.htm">Logbook</a></li>
|
|
<li><a href="excsrp.htm">Preliminary report</a> (exCS newsletter)</li>
|
|
<li><a href="report.htm">Cambridge Underground report</a></li>
|
|
<li>Wookey's Compass Points <a href="gps.htm">article on GPS usage</a></li>
|
|
<li>This year's <a href="sponsr.htm">Sponsors</a></li>
|
|
</ul></li>
|
|
<li><a href="../../pubs.htm#pubs1996">Published accounts</a></li>
|
|
<li><a href="../../index.htm">Back to Expedition intro page</a></li>
|
|
<li><A href="../../../index.htm">CUCC Home page</a></li>
|
|
</ul>
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|