CUCC Expeditions to Austria: 1976 - 2023

Becka had been demanding a resurvey of the entrance series (as the notes were allegedly lost, original survey was of poor quality and in too many small sections, etc. etc. Don't argue with the cartographer). I wanted to warm up my sketching in metric, and warm up my caving after spending a week drinking at base camp with COVID; I was dying to get underground, and had hiked up that day. Paul wanted to play with SexyTopo. Armed with 2 distox2s (his and mine), we hiked down to Fishface, dumpped gear, and proceded to faff about for half an hour before getting into the cave. In this process, we determined SexyTopo would not allow 2-disto frontsight and backsight survey (if we were going to resurvey, there'd better not be a question of accuracy!), so we just did paper survey.

It's worth noting that Paul and I do way more resurvey than we should in the States, so this was a bit of a gag trip for us; we were on vacation and trying to enjoy it. We set a surface station, got a good GPS fix (that I still haven't gotten off Paul's phone), and then proceeded to use the existing stations to the top of the first pitch. From there, we were setting new stations all the way down to the jumping-off point on the 3rd pitch: this included following the new 2nd pitch route and noting all the silly unmarked leads in the entrance. Much of the survey was Paul reminding me "you've got to sketch faster, or you'll freeze the Brits! You're the only one here sketching to scale in the cave".

Survey length was approximately 145m, Only about 30m should be new length added to the cave. We entered at 16:00 and hiked back to the Stone Bridge in the dark.