Surface - Entrance hunting towards Griesskogel
Anthony
The objective for today was to head over towards the Griesskogel camp used by ARGE some years ago to find a few of their caves that are in interesting places given what we have recently found in deep Balkonhöhle. We also planned to swing by a few caves that were lacking entrance photos to rectify the shortfall. Ruairidh was also keen to drop an undescended pitch in 2012-ns-07 (aka 2016#01), so we took drill, rope SRT kit etc.
In the course of our wanderings, we came across an interesting rusty artefact. The base camp brains trust reckons this to be a reserve fuel tank likely jettisoned from a second world war era plane.
Our first target was to find the entrance to 1623/261. This is a fairly insignificant cave: <100m long, <50m deep. The interesting feature is that the cave is aligned with development in deep Balkonhöhle, specifically Charon, so I was interested to discover if there were any obvious similarly aligned surface features. Sure enough, the 1623/261 entrance was found to be in the side of a chossy gully. We didn't have a compass, so cannot confirm the alignment, but it seems highly probable that this surface feature is related to development of 1623/261 and deep Balkonhöhle. (There is another similarly aligned ARGE cave - Haldenloch (appears not to have a number) - that is further away to the northeast that we didn't visit.)
We also found the campsite used by ARGE some years ago, identified as the flat area of limestone complete with hangers that they used to fasten their tents to. Immediately above this campsite, we found the entrance to Griesskogelschacht (1623/232).
On our way home, we stopped off at 2012-ns-07 (tagged as 2016#01). Ruairidh headed down in dry grots while I sat in the sun offering advice on thrubolt placement technique and rock quality from a vantage point 15m away where I couldn't actually see what was going on. Two bolts later, Ruairidh made it to the bottom which appears to be choked with boulders (though someone in an oversuit may prove more willing to absolutely confirm that). There is also an upgoing unexplored passage (QM B). Not super promising, but probably worth a return visit. If the cave goes anywhere, it is likely to connect to the upper levels of Balkonhöhle.
In the course of our wanderings we took photos of the following entrances:
- 2012-dd-01
- 2012-ns-05
- 2012-ns-06
- 2012-ns-07, aka 2016#01
- 2012-ns-09
- 2012-ns-10
- 2012-ns-12
All photos have been added to the relevant cave page (except where an existing entrance photo could be resurrected). With the exception of 2012-dd-01, all other caves should now have sufficient information to be added to the Kataster. There is a 2022 survey of 2012-ns-05 and 2012-ns-06 that is not in the dataset; the survex file is very sparse and contains no clues as to where the connecting points should be.
T/U applies to Ruairidh only.