Remote Places

I watched Mountain on BBC1 last night, it was really good, but I was disappointed that it was the last in the series. Hopefully it will be repeated soon!

The stuff about how even Everest has footprints all over it (and needs littler to be collected from it) got me thinking about how few places there are that hundreds of people haven't already visited. It made me realise how lucky I am to be able to explore caves in Austria that no-one else has ever been in. Even the caves that we are re-exploring were visited by only a handful of people in the 1970's and 1980's, commonly less people than have been to the moon! And within these caves, many of the passage we walk/crawl down, and the pitches we descend have never been seen by anyone, and quite possibly never will be seen by anyone else.

It certainly is very exciting to be crawling/wriggling along a passage with no idea what will come next because no-one has ever been there before, will it stop? will it get larger? will there be pretty formations?

Caving is great :)

Back from Austria

Got home from Austria on Tuesday having had a great caving expedition.

We found quite a lot of new cave, mostly in a cave that was explored in 1987. We managed to connect this to another cave via a huge ice formation, at the bottom you could see layers in the ice. Presumably the white ice corresponds to winter, and the thinner dark muddy layer from summer. The ice at the bottom must have been at least 40 years old!

We got to the top of the ice via a different passage, here the entire chamber had an icy floor, and some very cool curved icicles. I guess the ice must have flowed slightly to create them. I will try and post some photos later.

Despite finding lots of cave there is loads and loads more to be found, so hopefully we will be back next summer!