Fischgesicht Höhle - Find Wookey's lost data in Horrorbank and extend Mourning the Moths
Eric Landgraf
Chris and I entered the cave with Rob, Max, and Nathan; the group stayed
mostly togehter all the way down to Rob et al's camp from earlier in the week.
There, we picked up the spare bolting kit and drill and made a beeline to the
end of Mourning the Moths, where Chris and I were to start our survey. Then
Rob, Max, and Nathan peeled off to their lead.
The pitches for Horrorbank were still rigged; it was an easy task to
oversurvey and tie-in Wookey's survey for which he lost the first 2 shots. From
there, we continued down the rope, to determine that hangers going further down
had been pulled, and it was not where we wanted to go. So I got back on the
rope on ascenders, and used the 1 skyhook we had to superman up a crack to the
saddle seperating 2 adjacent wells, with a drill and bolts, and set a large
"deviation" so I could pull Chris over.
We proceded to rig very stupidly down the next pitch (45 degree climb up the
wall), surveying as we went. In the process, Chris asked me to teach him to bolt,
so I walked through what good and bad rock sounds like, how wedge bolts work,
etc. And had him bolt the next 5m pitch. At the bottom, the passage turned into
a keyhole-shaped mud-filled tube of awfulness. And kept going and going. Continuing
indefinitely was a possibility, but at about 1m x 1m in the upper part of the
keyhole, and past our rough turnaround time (I had to hike back down the mountain
in the morning, pack, and catch a train), we called it quits after 90m of
survey.
On the way back out, we stopped briefly to bolt a sketchy traverse, to discover
the drill bit had fallen out of Chris' rather perforated pocket on our way. Oh well.
We stopped at the camp for some noodles, then grabbed all the steel (and the drill)
and made a rather slow 4-hour exit. The other team got out of the cave just as we
finished changing on the surface