CUCC Expeditions to Austria: 1976 - 2023

We intended to descend one of the holes in Arrow Chamber (either Baker or Candlestickmaker, whichever proved more convenient.) The descent was done via an epic traverse, a spaghetti junction-like tangle of ropes at the pitch-head, and a wonderfully tight hanging rebelay, all of which were rerigged on the way out by Nick to make the pitch more caver-friendly. The holes in the chamber turned out not to be holes at all, but part of a deep elliptical chamber, thirty-ish metres across and about fifteen metres wide, of which much of Arrow Chamber seems to be a rather dubious false floor. We went down thirty metres of what we thought was the floor of the chamber, a large flat debris strewn area with two large holes at either end. A little bit of poking around soon showed up the "floor" to be a lot of rocks kept in place by a lot more rocks - a metre deep false floor precariously suspended thirty metres above what might be the real floor of the chamber. We had neither time nor rope to descend further, so we headed out, connecting the survey of Chunder trip pitch with Arrow Chamber on the way.

It was dry when we got out of the cave ! Something is going horribly right with the weather !