LUSS, and its graduate offspring, the Society of Lancaster University Graduate Speleologists (SLUGS), was based on campus in Lancaster, within very easy reach of the Yorkshire Dales. Hence it became one of the more active clubs over the years, with young cavers trained on weekends in Yorkshire travelling further afield each summer. Best known for major explorations in the Picos de Europa of Northern Spain, it has a reputation for high quality (if infrequent) publication.
LUSS unfortunately became defunct in the early 2000s, possibly a victim of the university union changes which finished off quite a few student caving clubs around then and caused CHECC (Council of Higher Education Caving Clubs) to form.
LUSS has now been reborn: LUSS on Facebook.
Lancaster University Speleological Society worked in an area out to the north of CUCC's home turf, between Wildensee, Hohes Augst-Eck and Gr. Scheibling Kogel, on three expeditions in 1987, 1988 and 1989. Some of the caves they explored lie within the 1623 area.
The descriptions included in our pages are taken (with permission, for which our thanks) directly from their reports, published in the UK:
CTS 88.1467 Austria
Reconnaissance Expedition 1987, Lancaster University
Speleological Society (No longer available online)
CTS 89.1866 Dead Mountains Expedition 1988,
L.U.S.S. 24pp illus.
I only have an incomplete pre-publication report from 1989 (the full report was never published), which means that there is no description of the 1989 extensions to LA11 in these pages.
As they are no longer available we will try and put copies on this website, to supplement the descriptions of caves in 1623, and the more significant ones in 1626.
Other reports of the LUSS work appear in:
CTS 87.1514 LUSS Austria Reconnaissance
Expedition
BCRA Caves & Caving 38 (Winter 1987), pp 27-30
CTS 88.1468 LUSS The Dead Mountains Expedition
BCRA Caves & Caving 42 (Winter 1988), pp 20-21
CTS 89.1844 The Dead Mountains Expedition 1988, P
Ibberson
Expeditions Yearbook 1988, pp 91-92 (obtainable from the
Expeditions Advisory Centre, London.)
CTS 90.1298 The Dead Mountains Expedition 1989, P
Ibberson
BCRA Caves & Caving 47 (Spring 1990), pp 25-28