CUCC Expeditions to Austria: 1976 - 2024

My adopt-a-cave for this year was GMH (Guten Morgon Höhle), having failed to sort it out last time I was here in 2022. And this was the last day available to get it done, so research was done down at base to make sure I had the necessary info - email threads, purported locations, cave descriptions, lobbook entries, GPX tracks, and Martin's 'mappapp' local copy (ish) of the website. And I went shopping for stainless screws and HSS bits so we could put in tags, and had drills, and instruments. We tried hard not to forget anything important so this would actually work.

The weather was a rare case of a bit overcast, but not actually raining, which is perfect for this work. It warmed up later in the day but was relatively gentle on us, which is good because we walked for bloody miles!

Tromped past Balkony following vague line of cairns, checking the points on our map. Checkout 2023-ASH-10 and 2023-ASH-11 which defo look worth investigating. Then got to 2012-OK-01 which is of course one of mine, from the fabled 'Wook and Olaf walk to Appelhaus' trip of 2012. There were a couple of obvious shafts which we photoed, but they didn't fit my recollection of OK-01 which was a smaller shaft under an alcove. Soon we found the right hole just 6m away, but not obvious due to being 'tucked under' a small cliff.

We put in a new concrete-screw tag for "2012 OK 01", only to find it already tagged just round the corner as 2017-NR-02. So in fact it has been explored, tagged, located, photoed and sketch-surveyed for 7 years, so we can kataster this one.

Next we passed 2012-OK-02 which still needs descending so far as we can tell. Easy job. We put our cave-blinkers back on in an attempt to actually get the job we intended to do done. Wook had carefully put the alleged GPS of GMH on his phone (neither it nor shagged-spit was in the 2024 entrances list). The back-up plan was that Anthony had been there before a mere decade ago so could hopefully re-find them. Fortunately the GPS was spot-on for the GMH entrance, which had a nice tag saying "2015 DL 02" so one wonders quite how "Chossy Death Slope Höhle" got renamed and no-record of this correspondence made it into a logbook. A short wander up-cliff found the also-tagged 2015 DL 01 (Shagged Spit Höhle). We GPSed (GPS on the eponymous shagged spit for about 40 mins) and photoed that location whilst also doing a 'from-the-surface' SAP6 survey.

So now both 2015-DL-01 and 2015-DL-02 are explored, located, photoed, tagged and surveyed sufficiently to get katastered. Result. Job done.

Time was moving on and we had a dinner to get back to this evg so we headed back, looking for 2012-dd-04 on the way back. Despite our best efforts we stumbled onto an entrance too fine to ignore and so spent 40 mins GPSing, tagging and surveying (from the surface) 2024-JC-01. (See how the wiley old lags carefully made this one Jacob's responsibility :-) It's quite a big hading shaft entrance about 12m x 2m with a 4m cliff behind and at least 17m deep. There was a nice boulder for a survey station but it looked a bit dodgy and a shove sent it crashing down the hole so we were wise not to use that one. Tag is to LH end of the hole. GPS point and intermediate point are red nail-varnish marked.

dd-04 was a tiny bit elusive, although Anthony's GPS took him nearly straight there whilst Wookey's took him 20m away just the wrong side of a ridge and then he was marooned by bunde for a while, but eventually re-found the others. jacob had shoved himself into the hole but it was about 1.5 cavers long and thus not big enough to be katasterable. We tagged it anyway.

Now it really was time to hot-foot it home so we headed back, passing the (tagged) caves 277, 272 and 2012-FT-02. There really are quite a lot of holes round here.

Anthony and I collected the rest of our shit and we all headed briskly down the hill for the final time this year, which was good because I really did have quite sore feet by the end of the day after more than 7km of that ridiculous pointy terrain. We even arrived in good time for Tess to rescue us and take us to a fine dinner