Jama Na Meji - 5th Aug 2009

Wednesday August 5th 2009

Members present: Alexander Stelfox,  Chad B,  George Bunyan,  Louise Bell,  Matt Gosling,  Matthijs Bouwman

We had hoped to do both this and Logarcek, having been the first team to leave Specleocamp hopes were high. However we were probably not well prepared in the map department with only having a drawing that showed our path to the cave and non others adjacent to this. We soon left the cave trail (although we were not actually sure at this stage what the symbol of circles / triangles meant). As it happened we stumbled on the team doing Jama Za Teglovko, who seemed puzzled by where we were heading, they pointed in the right direction… It must have been another good few hours by the time we actually did find the cave, by this time we were all quite well dispersed throughout the forest, by serendipity I cave across this huge abyss in the woods, and saw the number 208, a relief to all as I’m sure we were not too far away from giving up on this. So Matt set about rigging, tree to tree and then down. I gather that other groups had rigged this totally differently and perhaps had not had such a good descent as we had. Can’t actually recall telegraph poles being an issue as it clearly was for later groups, although there was a far amount of stuff at the bottom. Matt had called me down second to add a re-belay at the ledge; unfortunately I couldn’t do this as he still had the hangers, so I put in a rope protector. At least it was rigged on the way out where a discarded ground matt came in useful! Rope rub was certainly going to be a factor in Slovenian caving. A fantastic entrance chamber, unfortunately no sign of the Owl. While everyone else was coming down I went exploring down the scree slope to find the way on, scouting this out proved wise as the right hand side was certainly quite unstable. The adjoining chamber was awesome, a spectacular flowstone that you could walk around, plenty of stalls. Not sure how much progress has been going on in the dig over the last 10 years! Had a good de-rig on the way out, although it was a little alarming that the nut wasn’t even finger tight. A great cave to start the holiday on, one of the best on the cave trail. We still had time to find the entrance to Logarcek, it was rather hot and we were all very de-hydrated so soon called that off, as it happens we were not that far off from finding it.