CUCC Expeditions to Austria: 1976 - 2024

Wassil was excited to finally make some progress on 2nd coming, so we walked over to Homecoming from top camp with a nice new rope to have a serious rigging attempt.

Met Charlotte's group at the entrance and had an awkward conversation about rope as they were short, but we wanted to use what we'd carried over to rig down so couldn't really spare any.

In fact on packing we realised that we could spare about 40m, but the others had gone. Sent quick-change Sieds down to try and catch them up but he was too late, so that didn't help in the end.

When I got to 2nd Coming I was _very_ impressed with the draft, which is massive despite a very tall rift. Wassil and Sieds went off to start rerigging down the pitches and I was left to tart up the dodgy traverses, using my nice new Miwaukee M12 drill. I'd not actually put a through-bolt in since China in 2014 so a quick refresh was done to be sure I didn't screw it up. I now spent about 7 hours on my own except for 2 visits from Sieds looking for more bolts and/or nuts. The existing rigging was pretty shoddy with a few bits of cut rope on traverse segments, but not much rhyme or reason about which bits were rigged and which weren't. It was true that much of it didn't exactly _need_ a rope, but as a trade route it really wasn't very safe without one.

I started where the previous trip had left off after a couple of bolts, soon noticing that there was a perfectly good floor about 6m down so went to see why not just go that way. It was a bit narrow in places and after about 80m you end up pushed back up to the traverse level by rockfall, so maybe staying at the traverse level made sense, although it seemed marginal. Initially I replaced the old 2012 rope with some in-date stuff, but rapidly ran out of new rope and had to put the old stuff back on the next section. Someone to discuss rigging with would have been nice, as it was very hard to decide which bits should have a rope and which didn't need one, but as it was just me I did my best to make it not-shit. Did some gardening too.

Hours with no floor is a pain. I had to unchain a ~60m rope without anywhere to put the loops except one wedged rock. Turns out it can be done, by draping the rope carefully over your legs braced across the rift and taking a lot of care not to get things tangled, but that was another 40 mins gone.

Eventually the others returned, having run out of nuts, even the ones scavenged from my rigging. I had put 11.5 bolts in (with a 4ah battery) and it still wsn't quite dead, so that was good. Wassil told me to put rope on the couple of sections I'd decided were easy enough to remain unroped, so apparently I should have just done the whole lot anyway.

I put one more hole in on the way out, near the top of Wallace, just above the deviation, in order to get rid of the ridiculous offset rebelay and epic return deviation, but that finally did finish off the battery so I had to leave it as a job to be finished another time. 12 holes final score. Got out about midnight, and we still had that bloody walk back to the Stone Bridge as Garlic was full of Charlotte's team. It's 150m of height gain over the 2nd kilometre, plus another 35m of extra up-and-downing (according to my GPS), which is why it feels like bloody hard work, especially carying all your gear at 2am. At least our improved reflectoring and cairning (and less cloud) meant we didn't get lost this time.

A good trip, although it was a pity I didn't get to see more of the route in the end, as I was now decamping to Balcony to help get that rigged.