CUCC Expeditions to Austria: 1976 - 2024

I love camping in unusual places and so I was excited, if not a little apprehensive, for an underground camp. This would be my first surveying trip and first trip after becoming quite ill in Homecoming and so the fear of everything that could go wrong so deep underground for so long was quite high but luckily the thrill of adventure triumphed in the end. I was in good hands with two very experienced expo goers who offered great advice whilst packing for the trip - a special shout out to the raisins and seeds that Anthony packed which made our morning porridge significantly more palatable and nutritious. I was worried we would be stuck at top camp in the pouring rain for the day but it turns out I never fully understood the meaning of caving faff until I helped pack for an underground camp. We were only just about ready when the rain lessened up around 4pm and so we took advantage of the weather window and scampered across the plateau under ominous clouds, hopes high that nothing too important had been forgotten.

We were already commenting on the ridiculous amount of gear we had to lug through the entrance series but a couple more parcels of tackle sack joy awaited us on the way and Wookey would eventually have to give me and Anthony his bags since Mongol Rally still hadn't finished being rigged. An epic train of tackle sacks had to be ferried through the crawl at the top of Mongol Rally. I was tasked with scurrying up the muddy slope so that Wookey could hook his foot around the straps. The largest bag only just barely fit through.

Anthony and I gave Wookey a head start to rig and rebolt and as I heard his woohoos as he abseiled into the abyss, I tried to absorb his gleeful energy and not think about the fourth tackle bag waiting for me at one of the rebelays. We briefly considered doing multiple trips to carry the bags down but in the end decided against the idea given how late it was getting. I started off a bit shaky after accidentally clipping my hand jammer into the rope I was leaving rather than the rope I was on and then descending out of reach of it, but soon I was on my way, my efficiency gradually improving. I had to constantly fight to maintain my balance as the bags got snagged and swung about and I thought I was winning until one of the hanging rebelays towards the end claimed victory over me. I just could not physically unweight my cowstails there was so much weight pulling at my harness. Once again, my despair was lifted by a cry of glee from Wookey as he had just finished rigging the final swing to the pit stop after much swinging about and offered to come relinquish me of a couple bags. He came to my rescue and soon we were all down, Anthony not having the same problems I did but probably carrying more weight. When I got to the pit stop though I was alone, Wookey having gotten a head start on the bag ferrying. In a moment of rare navigational confidence and with a vague memory of Wookey saying the way to camp was a short very obvious walk, I headed off in what seemed to me the obvious direction, only to hear Wookey’s shouts from behind me after a while. Wookey commented that he didn’t even realise there was another option. With my navigational confidence crushed, we headed back to camp where, after a couple hours of set up and some food, we got to bed at the ripe hour of 3am.

A wake up time of 10:30am had been determined by an 8 hour timer that Wookey had accidentally set instead of an 8 minute timer for our rehydrated meals although it may as well have been 8 minutes I had a such a cold and restless night. Luckily the thrill of undiscovered passages motivated me out the relative warmth of my sleeping bed and helped clear my groggy head. It felt luxurious that the pushing front was only about an hour of relatively chill caving away but the tricky dance of remaining relatively mud free, warm and well fed in such an inhospitable environment meant we were on our way a couple hours later.

Once we arrived at Medusa’s Maze and identified some of the A-leads we were planning on pursuing, Anthony wandered into a chamber that he though might be connected to a B-lead we had just passed. Scrambling back up and spotting his light was exciting since it meant the cave exploration had officially begun. Wookey and I set to work surveying whilst Anthony busied himself with some re-bolting. I explored some possible other leads in the chamber, which we later named Gorgons’ Lair to continue with the mythological theme. One ended in a small muddy chamber (which Wookey thought could potentially be a dig) but another led to a short pitch (about 5m) with a medium draught after a short crawl over a false floor. I was thrilled to have discovered this new lead which Anthony described as “very interesting” however once we were finally surveying it, Wookey realised that most of the data from the digital survey he had been drawing was lost. And thus I experienced a high and low of cave exploration. I lay around unhelpfully, nail polish and disto in hand, whilst Wookey fiddled with the app and we gradually got quite cold from the draught. Once we begrudgingly restarted the process of resurveying, technology continued to conspire against us since the disto seemed to unexpectedly die and so we returned to our tackle sacks to replace the batteries, spirits dampened. As it turned out, the disto had merely faked its death but as we were shoving our coats back into our bags for the millionth time, we realised that if we just put them on our problem of being too cold would be solved.

We smashed out the survey in record time and connected it back the main system (Wookey promised to do the bulk of the drawing later). This time I noticed I was much more dextrous in my splaying and station pointing, at least I’d like to think. Anthony joined us to follow the A lead just opposite the chamber that was our original goal, but it quickly ended in a very unappealing looking wet boulder choke, although it did have a slight draught. After Wookey connected up a few more C lead rifts, we decided to call it a day to get to bed at a more reasonable hour.

Although facilities diminish from top camps to underground camps, this camp had its advantages for me. It’s mice and snail free. (I was sure I had something else to add here but I think that’s it. Its very strong advantage though in my opinion. Mice terrify me. Also I am pretty sure snails are out to get me.)

That night in an attempt to get more sleep I made the strategic decision to transfer one of my two pairs of caving socks over to join my single pair of sleeping socks. That, along with some hand warmers, the discovery of the shoulder toggle in the sleeping bag and perhaps just sheer exhaustion led to a much deeper sleep.

I can say with the utmost sincerity that I enjoyed prussiking out the next day with one medium sized tackle sack more than I did abseiling down with many of various sizes. It was slightly depressing though that Wookey who was doing some rigging fettling and was missing his pantin was hot of my heels most of the way up, not that my pantin was very useful for most of mongol rally, it was so caked in mud. I was very happy to see the many ridges that had ensnared my tackle sacks disappearing into the darkness below although perhaps the bug of caving exploration will beckon me once again.

I had no awareness of the passage of time until I was struck by hunger pains at the bottom of Honeycomb, it just was rope, rope and more rope. As it turns out, we were well into the afternoon at this point.

We were greeted by a few rays of sunshine when we finally exited around 5pm before the rain started to fall on our walk back to top camp where Becka, James and Colin were waiting for us expectantly to begin their own journey. We gave them the inventory of the camp whilst they updated us on base camp happenings and world politics (Biden had dropped out of the presidential race!) I had remarked to Wookey and Anthony somewhat jokingly underground that the apocalypse could happen and we wouldn’t be aware of a it until a couple days later but was not expecting such big news. It was nice to have escaped worldly problems for a 48 hours and replaced them with underground ones.