Gouffre Berger SUSS Bottoming Camp
Thursday June 18th 2026
Members present: Tyler Hudson
Report by Tyler Hudson
Our first visit to the cave was to carry the gear down to the entrance in the sweltering French heat, which kind of sucked. However, it’s an awful lot better than what the original explorers used to do, so you’re kind of obliged to just suck it up. Eventually, all the gear had been carried down, stashed, and we returned to the Gîte a lot lighter on bags. The following day, I did the Grotte de Gournier, (otherwise known as the Grooty Goony,) which is really epic but not the cave i’m writing this about, so you'll have to imagine it.
My first actual trip down the Burger was fairly short, as I wasn't really feeling up to a mega trip on that day. I descended with the intention of only doing the entrance pitch, but changed my mind once at the bottom and thought I may as well descend down to Cairn. Entering the Burger is very odd - the plateau it’s on is very wide, flat, and quite warm except for right where the Burger is, where a strikingly cool draft provides a nice contrasting chill. An indication of its depth? I imagined the draft blowing from a kilometer down, the gales of hurricane having travelled up, past the cascades, canals, the Font, the hall of thirteen, the grand rubble heap, the starless river, the meanders, the Cairn, and up and out at me, and shivered in the cool draft. The first pitch leads to the actual entrance of the cave. A short descent reveals a rusted, old gate that seemingly once guarded the entrance but now only provides a very convenient place to get cowstails caught while attempting the downclimb beyond. A short traverse then leads to the next pitch, Ruiz, which then immediately leads to the Holiday Slides pitch. The entrance pitches were all double rigged, and this pitch had a lot of deviations so I kept getting tangled up at this point which only served to cement my desire to be back on the plateau at the earliest convenience. Immediately after this followed Cairn Pitch, taking me down to my decided-on turnaround point, and quite interestingly the same point the original explorers had reached on their first trip before turning around as well.
The Cairn is quite an impressive chamber. A large aven, bisected by a sizeable flake quite akin to a ship’s hull stretching up to the barely-visible ceiling. A huge cairn, believe it or not, is in the middle, and I couldn’t help but add a rock to it when I got there. The rest of the group, Will, Charlie, Viki, and Asher, bode their farewells, and with some encouraging words from Viki (‘the best part of leaving solo is that you can prussik as slowly as you want!’) they were off, to enjoy all the sights the meanders had to offer.
The group after us descended shortly thereafter. Chris, Ben, and Abbie on their way to camp 1. Once they had continued I then started my ascent , up Cairn, up the holiday slides, up Ruiz, and finally up the entrance pitch to be embraced by the warmth of the plateau. I did some scrambling around the surrounding area, got a bit lost, found the burger again, and was eventually greeted by Asher and Charlie, followed by Viki and Will, and after a leisurely change in the sun we wandered back home.
A few days after that, I had my next trip down the Burger. This was a trip down to camp, with Erika, Charlie, Will, and Asher. The first few pitches passed, we continued onwards down the meanders, a super windy, rifty passage with a few vaguely awkward squeezes or climbs as you go. Eventually, the floor disappears, and the traverse starts, and a bit after that, the first anchors appear. Then the footholds disappear, then the anchors disappear, then the floor appears again. I, personally, would have designed that section in a different order, but considering how the proper hard French cavers usually don't rig it at all, I was quite grateful for the rope that was there. The meanders are even more fun if you have a Charlie and Asher making you inspect every anchor along the way. They're mostly fine!
Eventually, you reach the Boudoir, into which a very tumbly downclimb leads. The boudoir is, however, merely a brief respite from the whole traversing rigmarole, and you’re very quickly into the next meander-ey section, this one a lot shorter as it very quickly leads onto Puit Garby, a delightfully circular pitch with an equally delightful place to sit while waiting for the ‘rope free’. This rope free is quickly followed, in our case, by the most horrifyingly fast rope I’ve ever used. It really does impress upon you how you’re actually holding yourself above a 38 meter freefall with your own two hands when those same two hands are struggling quite a bit to hold on at all. I did survive, however, and with this exciting obstacle passed, we were off to the last bits of the meanders, Puit Gontard, the relay pitches, and finally, Puit Aldo. The traverse leading to Puit Gontard has an excellently committing mix between a climb and a fall, with an interesting lack of visible footholds. When I attempted it, it was quite kind to me, and the footholds revealed themselves as soon as I started my descent. I don’t think the others in my group had as nice an experience, however. Onwards to Aldo’s pitch, which was the first pitch where I really noticed how deep we were going. It’s pitch 9 - back in Yorkshire, the most pitches in a cave is about 12 (I think), and you’re still in the entrance series while doing Aldo’s! It’s an interesting pitch to do, with some nice warbled rock to distract you as you descend. Hitting the bottom was a surprise, and I thudded down into the puddle at the bottom. This then leads to a climb, a narrowish squeeze (the second in the cave!) and a choke. As you pass through the choke, you’ll notice a sudden vast echoing - you’re in the Starless River!
I’m going to run out of words for big while writing this trip report. The Starless River is an absolutely gargantuan chamber. It's a medium width but the walls stretch upwards seemingly forever. There's a small stream trickling through the middle (although I have heard it gets pretty rapid!) Ahead of you is a map of the cave, provided by a scheme aiming to get people to help clean the Burger. There’s a few of these in the cave, and they seem to have been successful, as Wikipedia says the cave is clean now. The way on is rightwards, and after stopping for pictures, we made our way forwards between the vast, overhanging walls of the cañon. The floor is muddy and silted up, with lots of slippery boulder scrambles. At one point, there’s a large false floor that passes over your head, with what looks like a summoning circle beneath it (how Tony Seddon gets to work in the morning.) The mud then gives way to swathes of moonmilk threatening to slip you up. I did fall over in the moonmilk a few times and every time it happened I had visions of breaking my wrist and having to prussik out one handed. Luckily, that never happened, and we survived the moonmilk only slightly bruised. This then led to the bourgin hall, a marvellous display of speleothem. We also then passed the two pitches in the middle of the river, the Petit Generàl and the Pool Traverse. As you stand at the bottom of these two pitches, you can turn your light off and watch back up at the lights of the people descending after you, and it’s very pretty. We then continued on to the Tyrolean Traverse, a brief taste of the last 500m of the cave (although it was hardly wet enough to bother), and this led us down past the last of the moonmilk and into the Great Rubble Heap.
The size of the Great Rubble Heap is difficult to convey in words, not least because I’ve used most of them already (it’s a big cave!). It’s a huge pile of boulders , built up as the chamber slowly collapsed over the last however many millenia. Adding to the vast feel of the chamber is the sudden silence, as the gentle trickle of the stream disappears beneath the rubble underfoot. The walls of the chamber are so broadly spaced, the echo seems to vanish. Climbing over the great rubble heap is proper hard work, in the words of Salfie. It’s surprisingly exhausting - directions are given by reflector tape left by previous visitors, so you end up moving at quite a pace over some rather challenging terrain. The vastness of the chamber continues laterally, as the rubble heap seems to never end. You start to descend quite steeply, sliding down some bits, and eventually, after what feels like miles, you’ll turn a corner and see the last slope leading to Camp 1. On arrival, Charlie immediately set to work fiddling with the radio to try and get it working, while the rest of us had a sit down to eat some flapjack. Eventually, Charlie stopped fiddling, had his flapjack, and we all took a quick pilgrimage the last 6 meters down towards the Hall of the Thirteen. There are honestly too many notable spots in this cave to be able to do them all justice in one trip report - it starts with some very wonky, alien stalactites sprouting out the rock, each formed of many tiers like very thin wedding cakes. You have to leap over some large cupric gour pools to reach the rest of the chamber, some huge pillars of waxy calcite stretching upwards far above your head, reminiscent of huge melting candles. We weaved between them, walking over ledges and passing by deep pools of water. At one point, the speleothem become very orangey and it feels like you’re on mars.
On this trip, we turned around at this point and began the climb back upwards. However, my next trip was down to the canals with Asher, Salfie and Joe from Suss, who at the entrance misheard us and for a moment thought the trip was a 600m abseil straight down, and was remarkably cool about that fact. Skipping forward to where that trip reached the Hall of the Thirteen:
We continued onwards, past the Hall of the 13 and down some awkward downclimbs over some great bounding flowstone which ended very sharply at the Balcon pitch. You feel quite woozy as you look down at that slippery wet flowstone leading straight towards a 20m drop, and I very quickly clipped in to the traverse line. The pitch is very clean, with a thin sheen of water running over it. Ahead of us, we began to hear a deep rumbling, like a massive, thunderous waterfall. The passage closed in a little as we went ahead and as more flowstone climbs were navigated the roar only got louder. Eventually, as the noise was getting to be unbearable, we turned a corner to reach the source of the din - the Font! The Font, or the Elephant’s Urinal, or La Vagin, or some other names I’m sure I’m forgetting, is a singular thin shaft of water crashing out the ceiling with the force of a thousand suns. It lands in a calcited bowl of rock, the Urinal, and flows onwards to rejoin the river down below. You’re obligated to stop here and piss in it, although I had to wait for my next trip to manage this, as at that current point in time I was feeling quite dry.
Pissing complete, we continued onto the Vagin pitch, where a somewhat bold step across a calcite ledge leads to a traverse line-descent- thing around a large column. Some more caving, including a handlined climb and a short traverse under some boulders guarded by a very dubiously-anchored handline leads to St Mathieu’s pitch, a short ab down some more bounding, slippery flowstone. A fun pitch to ascend, as it's very splashy and you can basically just walk up it, although I did manage to thread the whole rope through my footloop when doing so, which is one of the more interesting ways to get strung up. The passage ahead closes down to a wall of calcite which folds away to reveal a triangular gap directly in the centre. A rope leads down into this hole, marked as the Vestaire pitch by a very ominous sign announcing that the cave is about to get a lot harder. This message is punctuated with a single line - ‘Are you sure?’
We decided we were and descended the Vestaire pitch. Almost immediately, the cave begins to show how technical it can be. The first descent is fun little slide, followed by a crawling traverse and some awkwardly angled traversing - a lot finnickier on the way up, but that was a problem for future us, so we kept moving onwards. It’s a lot louder and wetter in this part of the cave. There’s a bit of route-finding but it’s hard to get lost (more route-locating really, it’s just looking for the only way on) and the regular maps provided by the Berger Clean Operation helped us make sure we were on the right track. Eventually, we reached the Canals, where the overall sogginess ramped up considerably, with the way into the canal being through a mini waterfall.
The canals are basically a very long lake (a type of formation some may know as a river). It’s a narrow, winding channel, with plenty of large calcite formations along its length. The actual canals gameplay is a VERY long traverse - I remember doing the Valley Entrance High Traverse and thinking it was sick; this is that, on steroids. It’s quite challenging physically and mentally, as on the way in you’re trying to conserve energy as much as possible, so you have to think about being as efficient as you can. It’s also a lot of using the same muscles, so it ends up quite tiring. There is, however, a narrow crawl in the middle, which is an excellent way to break up the gameplay. The canals end quite ceremoniously at a very picturesque beach with some lovely long straws right above it.
My trip with Asher and Salfie and Joe Suss (Juss) actually ended back at the start of the canals, so it’s probably a good time to introduce the last group I went with, a bunch of people from SUSS that I can’t fully remember the names of because it was two months ago and I’m a terrible person. They were all very lovely although at one point they did stop to all learn how to tie a munter hitch, for no real reason, which was very funny because all I could imagine while this was happening was the absolute aneurysm it would cause in some maybe less fafffull people in the yuck puck. Anyway,
The cascades! These are basically the canals again but a LOT more thunderous and really quite strikingly tekkers. Before I did the bottoming trip, Viki mentioned how absolutely mentally exhausting it is to hear the thunder of the cascades for however many hours you’re down there, but I didn’t realise how true this was until I got there. It’s a kind of deep booming thunder of the cascades with the shriek of the spray splashing against the rocks in your ears, constantly. The architecture of the cascades is a lot of traversing over very fast flowing water, with the occasional climb and descent back down to shake things up. All my memories of the cascades are loud and incredibly disorienting. The cave itself seems darker as the members of your trip are reduced to only their lights, blinding you through the haze of the waterfalls. And yet I think it was an incredibly fun section, especially on the way up! There’s tension lines, tight traverse lines you can zipline across, and interesting SRT problems I hadn’t encountered before. There was a lot of problem solving and it was super fun to traverse over the freezing current right below you. Claudine’s Cascade ends the first part of the cascades, a sodden pitch with a surprisingly high amount of ropes and a very questionable sling supporting a heavy metal pipe above your head. It’s a dramatic abseil down which leads over to another tension line which gently drops you on a rock beach.
Continuing on, the cave gets a bit quieter again as you enter the Grand Cañon. It’s a reflective place. Very steep and slippery - a few handlines aid the descent down the great muddy rock pile. Every slip brought to mind visions of how awful being rescued from there would have been, so great care was taken and eventually the latter half of the cascades was reached. A few more wet, thunderous pitches (like 25 total at this point? They do start to blur together a little.) led to the Grand Cascade, or as I thought at the time, Hurricane! (I saw a picture of the top of the grand cascade labelled hurricane and believed it, I’m very silly.) It’s a pretty windy descent that drops you on another rock beach, where the group convened and tried to figure out where we were. We eventually agreed on probably the grand cascade and continued on.
This brief break is probably a good time to bring up the absolute rate at which we were consuming snacks during this trip. I was hitting a solid 2 SPH at points (snacks per hour), scranning them whenever I had a minute, and it was the only way I had enough energy to manage.
Aside over, we made our way beyond the grand cascade and down another short pitch towards the only proper crawl of the cave. My kneepads finally served their purpose as I completed this crawl in absolute luxury, for all 2 metres thereof. I felt briefly at home in Yorkshire before the cave opened out to boring pleasant caving again. This crawl then led to some prussiking which led to the Little Monkey, a fun, surprisingly large pitch. At this point we kind of had no idea where we were but it became apparent as soon as we made it to rhe next pitch-
HURRICANE! The magical 1000m!
Puits de l’Ouragan, as it’s known in France and some parts of Switzerland, is big. The river transitions into a booming waterfall as it descends into what can only be described as a void below, as the chamber stretches unknowably far beyond. Your light catches absolutely nothing. It honestly feels like hell itself should be down there. And there’s one way to find out! To the left is a crawly traverse in a C shaped cutout in the rock leading out to the pitch head. You balance precariously, forced to look at the 50m waterfall below you, safety on your left, terror on your right. The abject blackness contrasts with the white of the rock cradling you. The spray from the waterfall, kicked up by the wind and caught by the light of your headlamp, swirls like a whirlpool over the nothing beneath you. The hurricane howls and the rope ahead stretches invitingly downwards. Getting onto the pitch head is quite exciting, a bold swing out marks the start of the ab. You’re battered by spray and wind as you twirl down towards where the waterfall crashes below. There is one devo, marking 1000m down, and you finish the descent drenched through. Opposite the waterfall is a boulder pile you have to climb to continue the cave, and standing atop it gets the full force of the Hurricane’s gale - like standing on a beach in a wicked storm.
We reconvened at the Foreigner’s camp, which seemed like quite a miserable place to sleep. We'd seen Hurricane and basically bottomed the Burger (topologically) so were very excited about what we'd managed, but some people were getting quite fed up and wanted to turn back, so after going a little bit further we soon began the long ascent back up, 8 hours in and with another 7 to go before we could sleep.
Some people think the lowest point in the Berger is -1122m. These people are fools. The lowest point is approximately four pitches up, when it truly sets in how mammoth a task it will be to make it back to camp. Soaked through, tired, the pounding in your ears never letting up, it feels like you’ve made it to the bowels of hell. It's an absolutely nightmarish point. Plus, I was very sick of flapjacks by this point. However, my mood shifted as soon as we got back to the CASCADES, baby! They’re really fun upwards and the challenge suddenly shifts to how to tackle going up the angled traverses, which is an interesting one to face. I had a lot of fun here, somehow more than I did going downwards. The Grand Cañon was a great place to stop and make a hot chocolate, which quickly became a cold chocolate when we couldn't get the lighters working. This did definitely have a chance of giving us giardiasis, as the pots were washed in burger water, but a week later I hadn't shit myself even once so it turned out fine.
The rest of the ascent I honestly hardly remember. We probably did the canals again? I think I remember thinking it sounded louder than before, which freaked me out, so I srt'd as quickly as I could. We almost overshot vestaire, but didn't, and it was very welcoming to be out of the scary wet sections. Balcon was passed verrrrry slowly and we fell asleep immediately upon making it to camp.
8 hours later...
We awoke to a bright and sunny camp 1. (ish.) I slept like a rock but kept waking up cause I was very cold. Theredespite, I think the 8 hours worked out and we all felt very well rested in the morning, when we awoke to Will, Ben and Salfie just starting their bottoming trip (we might have slept in a little.) Jean Luc had been trying to get us to eat as much as possible so I gladly had two breakfasts. I felt actually honestly very refreshed after that and put my horrible soggy cold caving gear on, ready to face the last three and a half hours of caving before we could see the sun again. However, this rejuvenated feeling quickly passed as soon as we started moving and my muscles started to ache again. The SUSS people were all very efficient in their horizontal caving so I managed to lag behind the whole time. The great rubble heap took it out of me and the starless river took even more out of me. Luckily, however, I am a yuck puck member through and through, so the prussiking out the entrance series was no issue at all! Aldo's was only a little bit soul destroying and I didn't even have much soul left for it to destroy so it hardly mattered. I definitely had a breakdown in the meanders but it was ok in the end. We all eventually managed to make it out, 29ish hours after entering. That final climb up and out of the cave was definitely the last of my energy and I flopped down onto a warm rock and collapsed, having bottomed (give or take) the Burger and with a fun and exciting 40 minute uphill hike ahead of us.
