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Tolminski Migovec Cave ExplorationSLOVENIAM2 — Kavkna JamaOctober 2011“To climb Mont Blanc by the Grepon route is one thing, to survey M2, as Totter once said, is quite another.” ![]() PhotosWe fly into Trieste on Friday and drive to Tolmin. On the way in we admire the snow capped peaks with trepidation: would the weather allow us a trip this weekend? The forests on the slopes are turning red and golden. A sight to behold. Arriving at Tetley's, we notice all the shutters are drawn and the lights out. From the darkness Tetley emerges to open the door. He is suffering from Tolmin lassitude, a condition brought on by the flu, by having hiked 40 miles in Yorkshire the previous weekend with his school boys (and girls) and possibly by the lingering trauma of last year's super action. After some deliberating, Tetley decides that in his condition he would only slow us down and bravely decides not to bring his caving gear. His generous and selfless sacrifice will not easily be forgotten.
Soon Jarv and I start ascending the climb that Tim and Fratnik explored in '09 and start surveying, Jarv takes book and instruments while I operate the laser disto. A short climb and some meander leads to the pushing front: a silted up rift. I poke my head in and feel uncomfortable in the confined space. In my most reassuring voice I tell Jarv: “This is just the passage for you Jarv! You might want to take your harness off”. I then sit back and wait till Jarv wriggles his way into a small chamber along the rift. He widens the passage a little by removing some of the silt with the entrenching tool we found on site. We both get a good feeling from this section. It drafts strongly and looks exactly like the passage around Kill'em All. We have to think of a name for the passage. Impressed by Tim's effort in free climbing this, we settle on “Wizard of Oz”.
Eventually we reach the head of the large pitch that was discovered last year. Here we meet the rest of the team, who are on the way out. The pitch head is reached by climbing over a blind pot and I am sitting on the edge of this pot, tied into the natural that forms the backup for the pitch. First out is Bozo. I help him with his tackle sack and my arm is almost wrenched out of its socket by the weight of it: petrol drills are really heavy. Bozo seems a little downcast, apparently the efforts to widen the rift at the pushing front have not been succesful. It must be depressing to have to carry the equipment out if it has not been useful! After Bozo comes Fratnik and Izi. Eventually Jarv and I descend the pitch, pass the last meander and reach the terminal chamber. There is not much of a draft here, but you can definitely hear an echo. We can see the marks from the drill. We settle on “Echo Rift” as a good name for this section of cave and start surveying back up the pitch. Eventually our survey reconnects with the end of Kinder Suprise and we have finished our task. It is now more or less midnight. We have been surveying for nine hours and it is time to get out. We have eaten all our Frutabella bars and are now ravenously hungry. The exit from the cave was honestly quite miserable. We were both extremely low on energy, and despite taking another Pro Plus, I felt rather sluggish. I tried to conserve my energy as much as possible, knowing that many squeeze-climbs and crawl-traverses were waiting for me on the way out and that each of these would require explosive power. So we caved out, step after step, prussick stroke after prussick stroke. I stopped after most large pitches and most squeezes to gain my breath. I checked and rechecked my bag to see if a chocolate bar had sneaked in somehow. On top of Silos I sat down and closed my eyes. I did not fall into a deep sleep, but into a dream-like state, when I heard the noise of Jarv coming up behind me I was jolted back into the cave. “We are pretty much out”, I kept repeating to myself, and “at least the squeezes get easier as you go further out”. At 4.30 a.m. we where back into the entrance of M2. Luckily the weather was fine, no wind and good vis. Jarv succesfully (miraculously?) navigated us back to the hut. I simply put one foot in front of the other and fell over quite regularly. Finally at 6.30 a.m. we were in Kal, our mission was over. A nice plate of jota and some tea and to sleep. The hut was even more packed than the day before, people were taking turns for sleeping! It was nice to have some company for dinner and I think our hosts were impressed that we had been on such a long trip. Next day we got back to town and entered the data into the survey. We had surveyed 245m of cave and added just over 100m to the depth of M2. We had walked for 4 hrs in the snow and caved for 17 ½ hours. We ate approximately 1500 calories and consumed several thousand more. We moved at an average speed of 3 meters per minute. We learnt always to bring extra food. And then some more. The silted rift at the end of Wizard of Oz is about 4 meters horizontally (+/- 30) from a survey leg at the edge of Dark Tranquillity. The passage is heading straight for Captain Kangaroo. The enduring question is: will it go? James Kirkpatrick ![]() ![]() View 'up' Dark Tranquillity. From the photograph perspective, M2 is approaching from the Right, towards the undropped side of the shaft. Photograph is taken approximately 4m off nearest approach PSS at the bottom of DT. Jarv's Technical Notes
(Jarv Nb: On Kinder Surprise we continued along the rift as we surveyed, missing the climb up into the rift that leads to the traverse over the pit to the large pitch. The rift was increasingly tight and I stopped at a corner beyond which I'm certain from wear no one has passed. There is a small trickle of water audible, and I believe there is a small pitch beyond the short, tight, continuation of the rift. There is a PSS in the corner, in a crack in the rock. Though one might have imagined that these two bits of passage connect, the echo from the rift isn't really large enough and there wasn't any vocal contact with the Slovenians who must have been climbing the big pitch at this point. This might, therefore, still be a lead: Photograph taken from last PSS at end of tight rift on corner
Jarv's 22-11-11 Monologue to Izi on the state of the rigging, and discussion of the dig:We left all the metal in the cave. You will need a normal rigging spanner. I only derigged pitches that were wet / might get wet. Silos, etc. is still fully rigged. There were a couple of places where the rope was fairly badly worn:
Digging Gear: We left the shovel at the bottom of the Tim/Fratnik climb. In the gear bag taken down last Autumn (which was left on the traverse above the new big pitch), there is a 1kg lump hammer. I'd recommend taking some kind of small drag tray, cord and a crow bar or two. The Dig: I got around the corner that stopped you + Tetley last year, no problem. I found the best was lying on my left side, then sort of corkscrewing up into the little chamber. I probably took my helmet off. From there I dug out the corner squeeze a little bit more. It shouldn't be a massive problem. The continuation was a flat out section with a mud floor. The mud was over calcite, so I found I could smash it up with the edge of the shovel then lift chunks out. There is stacking space in the little chamber. I suspect we're above an immature stream, that you can look into from the other side of the squeeze and back a bit. The flat out crawl continues, then nearly reaches the ceiling as the mud floor rises. It kind of turns into a short section of vertical rift as it goes out of sight. I pushed forwards on my back with my helmet off, and looked up into this rift, there is some kind of chamber beyond but it's impossible to say how large. Certainly it was giving out a lot of wind! I imagine it will take a couple of people just an hour or two to dig out the floor, as it's really easy. You may then find that you need to widen the rift so that you can get up into the continuing chamber, but it's impossible to be sure either way, as I was still a metre away from it, and couldn't be certain of its size. GOOD LUCK! JKP Additions: The only thing I would add is that with the lump hammer is a massive rope bag, so I would advise against taking rope. |