Freesteel Blog » CUCC Austria Expo 2011 is over

CUCC Austria Expo 2011 is over

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 at 8:10 pm Written by:

It was the usual destiny with drama. I’ll provide links to the logbook when it is typed in. (Here it is)

We drove direct from the Pyrenees via Cannes where the McGuires were on holiday, went for a swim in the corner of the public beach, and partook an evening bike tour past all these pointless party boats where the super-rich with no better ideas in their puny minds appear to blow their money on brightly lit floating buckets.

We finally reached Hilde’s place after a drive through sheets of Austrian rain to find that most of the ropes had been untangled and everything that belonged there had been carried up top camp. Cave exploration had begun.

I proceeded to fester, eat other peoples desserts, bake bread, drive people up and down the hill and generally not do very much caving all the while bitterly complaining about how much more new cave everyone else was discovering.

I did get underground a couple of times to get up to not very much. Here’s a photo of the Chocolate River which was discovered in the Old Man extensions in Cave number 161 (Kaninchenhöhle):

The way on turned out not to be on this stupid ledge, but actually down the obvious hole.

The expedition hadn’t visited Kaninchenhöhle in 2010, but evidently some local cavers had as they scrawled their webpage all over our name rock that had been kept neat and tidy since we discovered it in 1988, long before web was invented or many of the members of the expedition had been born.

And here’s the aforementioned webpage showing those perverts committing that scrawl:

The tyrolean rig on Strange Across-fall was a slack load of rubbish. It practically killed my arms to haul myself across it.

Hmm. Getting a bit negative here. Old man being grumpy.

I went on a couple of kletterstein excursions nearby.

Then finally Becka cleared off onto another fancier caving expedition with the local Austrian club, and Andrew appeared and showed the way to unfeasible amounts of new cave. The final pushing trip sat on the Runnel Stone in a place called Holey Cow and took a photo of themsevles:

Here is the preliminary map of what was found at the far end of Kaninchenhöhle. The cyan is our discoveries over those two days. [Click on the image for a detailed view]

Here’s an example page of mapping notes to show what it’s all about. It is unusual to be able to cover so much ground without the need of a rope, which we didn’t have.

After a long hot few days cleaning up and seeing everyone off (“would you mind taking this bag back to the UK in your car”), Becka returned to an empty campsite and a completely rammed full car, which we parked near Salzburg for a few hours to take a quick excursion down the jolly fine Strubklamm canyon with its three 8 metre jumps and too much swimming (luckily we shared a pair of force fins, one each, that can be worn over wellies to power our way onwards one-legged). I expect to take many cavers back there next year.

Now we are at the Max Planck institute in Tuebingen not up to much useful apart from hacking on our computers and counting down the days till we drive home. It’s tiring for some reason.

1 Comment

  • 1. Freesteel&hellip replies at 21st August 2012, 2:01 pm :

    […] photo on the Runnel Stone at the far end. Same place as last year. The trip took 15 hours: too long for me. I was so glad to get out. Only Becka had the energy to […]

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