Izgubljeni Raj 15-07-2011

Formations in King Minos' Palace.

Summary of Exploration

Between 15th July and the 15th August 2011, Imperial College Caving Club had twenty members participate in the Izgubljeni Raj 2011 expedition to Tolminski Migovec, Slovenia. The aims for this expedition were the continued exploration of Vrtnarija, where considerable efforts in 2010 had led to the discovery of 2.2km of mainly horizontal passage, all below 500m in depth. At the start of the expedition, Vrtnarija was 8796m long and 807m deep.

This summer we had less manpower than last year, but were still attempting to set up a similar four-man camp at -550m and carry out deep pushing. Our exploration continued routes which were diverse in direction from camp---soon we were taking many hours just to travel from camp to the pushing front and back.

As a result of the reduced man power and the considerable demands that exploration of Vrtnarija was making on our time, we unfortunately did not manage to contribute towards the exploration of Kavkna Jama and the attempted connection of the Migovec and Vrtnarija systems.

Our efforts were considerably hampered by the weather. We had the wettest summer we've ever experienced on Migovec. We only very rarely had sunny enough periods to dry our caving equipment and clothes. A particularly memorable rainstorm of 48 hours near the beginning of expedition was rounded off by a heavy snow storm -- the first we've ever experienced in 15 summers on this mountain!

For two periods of 36 hours, underground camp was effectively cut off from the surface by high water levels in the cave system, making some of the pitches impassable. Thanks to the quality, warmth, provisions and size of underground camp this wasn't a major problem as exploration simply stopped and the explorers got a lot of sleep instead. Certainly underground camp was a more pleasant environment than the windswept, rain lashed and barely above freezing surface of the mountain.

In all we discovered 2229m of new cave passage taking the cave to 11025m long and 888m deep. All these extensions have been made at depths greater than 500m, on multi-day trips based at an underground camp. Vrtnarija now has the vast majority of passage, over 8km, at depths of greater than 500m.

We presented our exploits at the BCRA 'Hidden Earth' Caving conference in Monmouth on 25th September 2011. The slides are available, either as a PDF (33MB) or the original ODP (26MB), or online via Scribd.