Logarcek - 7th Aug 2009

Friday August 7th 2009

Members present: Chad B,  Matt Gosling,  Matthijs Bouwman,  Max Spicer,  Thomas Blakey

This was the longest dry cave that I did whilst in Slovenia. The poor description in the cave book meant that it took us a quite a while to find, the entrance hole is much smaller than the measurements mentioned in the guide. The entrance pitch leads over the edge to a well positioned rebelay with a convenient ledge. Chad rigged the rebelay and abseiled straight down to the floor of the pitch but called back to say he was coming back up. It turned out that there were more rub points on the hang than he had anticipated and having seen a thread to rig a deviation off had decided to throw it in for completion. He sorted this out pretty quickly and before we knew it we were following him down a really nice entrance pitch. Gigantic calcite baubles and flowstone, all dimly lit by the light making it through the obscured entrance, surrounded the pitch giving an amazing view whilst making the descent. I abseiled slowly to take it all in, the formations all had the dried, flaky appearance that seemed common to caves of the area, almost making them look like freshly scooped ice-cream. The bottom of the entrance pitch lands on a steep loose slope with much mud and debris. As it happened, mud was to define many plotlines in the unfolding of the day!

It was my job to route-find so I pulled out the survey. The chamber was slightly more complicated than it appeared on the survey but I knew that the way on should be a chimney up a traverse to the left so I scouted up some really nice scrambling sections to a very small looking crack in the floor. I thought “man that looks small as hell” but tried to wedge myself through anyway. Immediately my croll became stuck on the rock at the side so I moved out of the way to let Blakey have a go at it whilst I took my SRT kit off in order to become more streamlined. Blakey didn’t look very comfortable at all as he tried to wriggle through, but then much to our surprise Max’s head popped up below Blakey, “hello there!” he exclaimed. As it turned out there was a much easier chimney further down the traverse that we should have followed in the first place. Tom and I were both pretty relieved that we didn’t have to go through that tight horrible thing after all and I put my SRT kit back on. The correct chimney down then follows into short crawls and then onto a traverse with an in situ rope for protection leading to a very linear section of well decorated passage culminating in the head of the second pitch. This very certainly is a pitch and should not be rigged as a hand-line as the guide suggests. (What the fuck? You would die!) Chad stormed into action rigging the pitch with a fairly tight rebelay a few meters down the slope. I had to laugh when I got to the final rebelay on this pitch. Although it was certainly necessary to prevent rope damage, it was only about two meters above the floor and as it happens I got strung up on it for a while!

Here we landed in a passage that led off in two directions. Our way on was down the longest route to the left so we proceeded through an absolute calcite wonderland. It was just such a shame that many of the decorations had been covered in a glaze of mud. Oh well, for their size alone they were quite magnificent. At one point we had to cross a slippery mud traverse that would have certainly led to broken legs if we had slipped. We had been warned about this section by a previous YUCPC team to visit the cave and had been slightly concerned but it turned out to be fairly easy as long as you dig your arm deep into the mud to avoid falling. Eventually we came to a gigantic chamber with a floor of sandy mud dunes. At the entrance to the chamber I leapt into a power slide down the flaking mud and landed in the bottom in total awe of the crazily large underground void I now found myself. I noticed that the floor was covered in little white cave insects that were scuttling around all over the place, at one point I found one crawling about in my ear. This was good news as I knew that with so much life around I was likely to see an Olm for the first time which was one of the things I had really wanted to get out of Slovenia. Finding the way on from this chamber was not at all trivial. The place was massive and the crawl to the next section small and obscured. It turns out that I missed the way on as I had tried to push the wrong crawl but Matt B managed to find the correct path which sent us stooping and crawling into the next section of cave.

After a while we came to a massive monument of calcite curtains with a stairway of gour pools radiating outwards from the bottom. I walked over to take a look. As my headlight began to illuminate the scene I disturbed something living in the water and it dashed across the surface of the largest gour. Incredible! It was an Olm, its white body glowing against the darkness. They really are such cute organisms with their mini legs and splayed external gills. They sort of whip their body around and mong about looking for things to eat. This one must have been the boss thrashing about in his gour pool like it was his little mansion. Further down the passage we encountered deeper and deeper pools that were absolutely heaving with Olms. Their numbers were incredible; some of them were nuzzling each other, maybe they were couples. At the end of the cave we had a break and ate some food, and then we thought that actually we may not be at the end of the cave after all and walked round an alternate route to find an extremely muddy stooping section of cave with a rope leading over it. This was crazy, I felt like I was walking in quick sand, my feet being repeatedly dragged into the gloopy floor. After crossing this we looked on over a large pool that seemed to be the end of the cave although I did think that I could perhaps see another passage leading off at the other side of the pool and tried to traverse around a ledge that turned out to be just made of mud and disintegrated as soon as I stepped on it, crumbling away into the still gloomy water below. I decided now that Id had enough and started back. On the way back across the muddy stooping section my boot got sucked into the mud and was pulled clean off my foot. I had to dig it out with my hands. I hadn’t noticed at the time but I must have also lost my kneepad at the time as it was not there when I later exited the cave. The amount of mud that I was covered in totally obscured this however so that I had no idea until I was back on the surface.

We eventually made our way back to the pitch that dropped into the junction. Matt B and Max decided to go out and left Blakey, Chad and myself to go and explore the other passage. This was certainly a worthwhile endeavour. The formations in this part of the cave were much larger and often cleaner. The most notable was a fat stalagmite that almost totally obscured the huge passage we were in and meant that we had to pin ourselves to the wall in order to get past. Eventually the passage floor became an impassable muddy bog so we decided to turn round and go out. I was the last to leave the cave derigging the sun-kissed entrance pitch, the warmth stirring my soul. The contrast in the warmth of the air as you leave all of the Slovenian caves is one of the things I can remember most vividly. The forest was as beautiful as ever and another day had passed in which I felt like I had wandered into another beautiful and breathtaking world. The Underworld.