CUCC Expeditions to Austria: 1976 - 2024

With James having replaces his mentor in our trio of pushing in the upper area of Homecoming, Rosa and I returned to our pushing in the big drippy Aven in the 4th Pitch Tube area which we believed would lead to what we were looking down to from Banana Slip.

Rosa placed the first bolt for the traverse line - her second ever bolt! - and I rebolted the pitch head (there were two spit there already but I couldn't find any nuts for them anywhere around HC or GC so lovely new fixe expansions it was! I dropped the 20m pitch down into a fair sized ledge with two ways on - I first opted to go the shorter dryer way with the hope it would connect round to the rest of the big aven, using less bolts and rope. One side of this pitchhead is a drilled thread, the other a lovely bolt. This got down to a perfect end of the 25m rope and lead to a 2m climb.This later turned out to be Snagged and Shagged. There wasn't any clear promising leads here so I left Rosa and James to make the rigging topo for me and explore the area while I went on to continue bolting the pot.

A perfect height pitchead was placed which felt a very reasonably distance from the ledge. Unfortunately, with the nature of the rock there was immediately some pretty shit rope rope. The next 15 minutes was spent trying to figure out how to ameliorate this. Lots of time was spent trying to create a deviation below and right, but nothing was far enough back to fix the hang without then making me abseil straight into a pool of water. While this faff was going on, a rock ((tatty hut little printer sized) which I previously been solidly heel hooking and holding decided to come loose, missing me but being very exciting when it hit the tacklebag and then hitting the deck. I abandoned hopes over here and decided to swing the other way into the drippy aven and found a nice fault for a ledge for my feet so placed a rebelay and then used that to help me swing across to a nice ledge in a dry area where I bolted a traverse across and then rigged a short pitch down to the streamway below.

It should be noted that while I'm doing this Rosa managed to almost climb down snagged and shagged into the bottom of the pot, except she got stuck and from the walls I could see her light and hear her shout for me to come and help her - not something I was in much position to do so James went to her aid. She also didn't sound like she was in any real peril, just mabe unable to get her way back out so I figured I could always head back up with the drill and rope if it were really necessary.

We named the pot Tiered Gerkin and the Streamway Bannaboat Streamway at the time, but since then and the time of writing this up we've renamed the pot Saruman. The streamway is unfortunately too short to be worth naming. Note for clarity: the streamway was too short because it immediately descended into the two pitches that precede the Eye of Sauron.