Too Bold for This Spit
Jenny
Yet again back into sleepless and heading ever closer to KH. Took
more rope, and the last of our hangers and the last drill battery to the
pushing front. Rigged 2 short pitches with one longer rope and headed
on. The passage is now much riftier and less obvious what level to be
at. We stay at the level of the bottom of the pitch, not the floor
trench and traverse along until we have to drop down a bit. A bit
further on the passage widens and we rig a short rope to get to a lower
level. A pitch drops deeper but we continue along with the draft. We
stay either at the base of the rift or <4m above mostly and work our way
along. Sadly we then get to another pitch in the way.
Olly rigged round, it took him a while as each time he hammered to dress
the rock, flake fell and boomed down the pitch. I kept telling myself it
was a really short pitch that echoed a lot... There was nowhere to wait
out of the draft and I started to wonder why I had used up nearly a
whole years worth of annual leave to sit and shiver in Austria.
Fortunately Olly got to the other side with 1 hanger left to rig there.
I followed across the traverse and was very scared - the foot holds kept
falling down the pitch, each bolt was lower than the one before and half
of them needed tightening before I loaded them. Then I got my hand
jammer too far away from me to undo with cold fingers and I got
increasingly unhappy.
I finally made it to the other side where I told Olly this was the worse
thing he had ever rigged and that we might die when we have to return to
get out the cave. Fortunately he took it as a compliment...
We continued on with the draft (which might be a bit weaker), until we
got to another pitch. It looked like it would be tight to make our call
out but we were keen to survey back before we went down the hill.
As luck would have it we didn't die on the way out but I still whimpered
quite a lot despite trying to be brave. This is called Too Bold for this
Spit as Olly lifted a Hilti out on the way back. We got the Makita drill
and batteries out of the cave, and surveyed back to the previous day,
Also we made our call out and nearly got to the car park in time, where
Julian was patiently waiting to take us down the hill.