WUG Pot, Austria - August 2016 - Trip Report

The best photos are courtesy of Axel Hack

This year I was determined to get out on a big trip. I only had about a week free though so time was going to be tight. I'd be mountaineering in the Alps for the previous 4 weeks and hadn't been intending to come over to Austria, not wanting the added expense of the drive and the lost value of the remaining days on my lift pass. However, I changed my mind and the last moment and made the long drive over, fortunate that I'd bothered to pack my caving kit when leaving the UK a month ago. This was probably the best decision I made all summer - I really enjoyed the exped and hope to go back next year if time allows.

The Hirlatz Hole runs through the bottom of the Dachstein mountain range. Current exploration has revealed about 1100m of depth and 110km of passage, although there is surely still plenty more to be found. The Dachstein Caving Expedition has been investigating the caves on the top of the mountain for the last 30 years, trying to find a way into the Hirlatz Hole from the top. However the caves in the Dachstein are hard. They are cold (around 2 degrees), liable to flash floods and long vertical pitches are interspersed by narrow meanders that are energy sapping as you try to squeeze through them. Generally the caves in the Dachstein have beaten the expedition; there are several that are still thought to 'go' but they've been abandoned as they became too dangerous or hard as the explorers got deeper. Getting into these caves is easy, getting out is gruelling.

WUG Pot may be different. The pitches have stayed more open for longer, there are less meanders and the pitch head transitions are just a touch easier that most of the other caves explored in this region. When I was out here in 2012 a camp had been set up at about -800m and the Forlorn Hope lead was just starting to be pushed. The problem with the Forlorn Hope lead is that the difficulty has immediately ramped up, the cave has got smaller, colder and wetter. However, if WUG is joined to the Hirlatz then it will create a 1500m deep cave, one of the top ten deepest caves in the world. Also, as the other deep caves in the world tend to have less length than the Hirlatz, the connected cave would basically be a bit of a beast.

Sadly my impression on returning this time was that not much progress has been made since 2012. The exped was still reluctantly pushing the Forlorn Hope lead but no-one seemed to strongly believe in it. I headed down for a 4 day trip into the deeper reaches of WUG with Tom Foord and Stefano Fancello. We were planning to resurvey some of the bigger passages near camp in the hope that it might generate another lead. A second team of two was following us down a day later for a pushing trip into Forlorn Hope. The plan was that I'd do a bag carry for them to the entrance of Forlorn Hope and then head back to camp by myself. I agreed to do this without really thinking about it and soon began to regret it; I've never really caved by myself and doing it at -800m in a cave I don't know didn't seem like the best way to start!

Camp was impressive. There's a lot of gear down there given it's so far underground and I can't begin to estimate the amount of manpower it must have taken to get everything set-up. Caving still very much uses mountaineering style siege tactics, I wonder if the sport will ever progress to the equivalent of fast and light alpine style climbing? Camp didn't start well for me, my oversuit had severely ripped on the way down in the seam from the top of my bum to the top of my crotch. I knew I couldn't really help with the carry for the Forlorn Hope pushing trip like this; my thermal underlayers would get ripped and soaked within minutes. I wouldn't be able to get them dry and I'd become cold and a liability. Rooting around camp I came up with what I thought was the ingenious idea of sewing my oversuit back together using my caving knife and a spare guy line. This started out well until the 3rd or 4th stitch when my caving knife slipped (it is a Petzl Spatha and for some reason you can't lock the blade open with the older models) and took a decent chunk of skin off my right thumb. There was an impressive amount of blood. Some improvised first aid later (we bandaged it normally, then cut the thumb off a marigold and duct taped that to my thumb to help with waterproofing and cleanliness) and I was ready to go again - I still had to get the oversuit fixed!

The problem with slicing off the tip of your right thumb is that it's a fairly important part of the body for vertical caving; whenever you open jammers or descenders it tends to be your right thumb that you use. Putting pressure on my thumb started it bleeding again which didn't seem ideal. However after a bit of practice I was able to do most of my caving activities left-handed. That night I made an interesting discovery; my thumb started to hurt when I was sleeping. I guessed that this was because it was warming up - for the next nights I slept with my right hand out of the sleeping bag so that the chilly air would numb the pain.

The next day was another survey day near camp. We survey through the Chutney Mines (a very low and awkward passage) that had been dug out a couple of years ago and had led into Chutney Chambers. Chutney Chambers is a large passage (tens of metres high and wide and a few hundred long) has been thought a promising lead when discovered but had soon been abandoned as no onward passage was found. Chutney Chambers is a big passage where the floor has fallen in and as a result you're constantly climbing up and down boulders. I was quite keen to make the most of my time in there (I didn't want to have to come back through Chutney Mines!) and was sticking my head down every little hole I could find, despite Tom's assurances that some of them had already been checked out in previous years.

Somehow we got lucky. Exploring at the edge of the chamber I managed to squeeze through some boulders and onto a steep mud slope. This cut back underneath the boulders and into a small rift with a hole in the role. Standing at the top of this hole I could feel a strong breeze, a good indication that there was more passage ahead! The hole only dropped a metre into a small chamber with mudslopes descending steeply in two directions. There wasn't much room once in the small chamber, and a potential risk of slipping down the mud slopes into the unknown, so in a moment of rare restraint I called for Tom and sensibly suggested he went first (I like my life, I don't want to die in a muddy cave). Tom was visibly excited by this lead, the breeze was strong and we knew the Chutney Chambers must be going somewhere. He dropped onto the ledge and confirmed that the passage went - the mud slopes descended steeply for a few metres in tight passage and then dropped into vertical pitches!

Tom now showed his sensible side by suggesting I descended them on a rope, whilst he remained safe at the top. We'd only brought one SRT kit with us which Stefano was wearing so I called him to us and got changed into his kit. We also only had a 30m rope, not ideal but hopefully enough to see whether it was worth coming back. There weren't really any anchors once you dropped into the chamber and so I'd run the rope back through the narrow rift we were standing on and tied it to a boulder jammed at the entrance to the rift. It wasn't the most reassuring anchor, the boulder was a thin flake rather than a nice rounded block and I was a bit worried it would just snap in half if loaded heavily. Working in my favour was the angle of the terrain - I figured that most of my weight would be going through the floor of the rift and therefore the anchor wouldn't actually take much load. It's impressive what you can talk yourself into it.

Dropping down into the chamber I was just able to squeeze past Tom and slide down the muddy slope. At the pitch head I could see that the passage opened out. There was only a short vertical pitch (more a climb over a big boulder) and then the passage carried on descending steeply on boulders and mud. This was it! We'd done it! We'd found a way through the Chutney Chambers!

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that generally speaking my kit proved to be a bit rubbish on this trip. My oversuit had ripped. The contacts in my brand new caving lamp kept coming loose and my light would cut out sometimes and would be difficult to get going again. My pantin (foot jammer) kept jamming. My chest tape kept popping off. On one pitch when I was exiting from Forlorn Hope by myself my footloop (which had been tied years ago and which I've never had a problem with) somehow slipped, garrotting my foot like a noose and making it very difficult to prussik out (this led to me slowly making my way to the next bolt for safety and then performing some quite astounding aerial acrobatics to try and get myself free and my footloop retied). Anyway, all in all I wasn't feeling too confident in myself or my kit. I descended the 30m to the end of the rope and it looked like the passage got a lot bigger and kept going. However this was one of the times my headtorch stopped working properly; I couldn't see very far on my back-up and after untying from the rope and taking two steps away from it I got scared and decided to head back-up. To be honest neither Tom nor I covered ourselves in glory and tale of derring-do in this little exploration! Getting out was a lot harder but eventually I was up and through the rift. We headed back to camp and knew someone would have to come back to explore this further another time.

The next day I was loading carrying for the Forlorn Hope team (who had arrived the previous evening) but the thought of the new passage kept nagging at me. I did the Forlorn Hope carry, then spent a glamorous 5hrs cleaning my kit with a plastic spoon, before heading to bed.

The Forlorn Hope team came back sometime that night. They ate food, confirmed that Forlorn Hope was horrible, and decided to head out of the cave the following morning. This was what Tom, Stefano and I had been planning to do to but I wanted to stay and explore the new passage. We had plenty of food and water - the main problem was that my parents and Leanne (my girlfriend) were expecting me home. I didn't have any leeway so if I stayed another day I would be late - this would probably worry them and I wasn't sure how my girlfriend would take to the fact that I'd stayed another day in a cave rather than not coming back to her after 5 weeks apart!

Mud and misery won out over love. Tom was willing to stay for another day and I definitely wanted to. I sent a message out with the other cavers to give to Leanne so she wouldn't worry. Although I wrote the message down for them it somehow got lost in translation and all she got was "Neil's still in the cave", not the most reassuring! Luckily she assumed she would have received more information if it had been anything serious and so didn't worry. She was actually very understanding when I explained why I'd stayed for another day - I dont really think I deserve her!

Tom surveyed whilst I bolted. Neither of us were keen to drop the passage on the dodgy anchors I'd set up yesterday. I've not bolted much before but thought I was doing ok - however the feedback I got from the team that came down the following week was that one of my bolts had been "placed in marzipan". I never got any clarity on what that meant but it doesn't sound particularly promising for my bolting skills...

We were right to go and push this lead. After dropping the initial pitch the passage immediately opened out to maybe 10m high and 20m wide. The cave was actually quite beautiful down here - lots of dried mud floors and short low ceilings you had to crawl through for a few metres before the passage opened back out again. We'd named the squeezy entrance to these bigger passages "It's Not Ideal" as this had become our informal catchphrase for the expedition based on all the minor mishaps we had. A series of smaller muddy side tubes were called "The Gloryholes" - these are now expected to connect to the passage just after Forlorn Hope but haven't been pushed yet. The big passage itself was baptised "What You Forgot", a play on the name of the cave and the fact that the explorers from the last few years had missed it. Being the first people to ever see this was awe-inspiring; I know it's just mud and rock but I couldn't quite wrap my head around the fact that no-one has been here before. Being part of this discovery is definitely one of the best things that happened to me in my outdoor adventures.

Within a few hours of exploring we had made more progress in this part of the cave than the whole expedition has made in the last few years. The final survey data shows us to be almost 50m directly above the furthest point of the passages explored past Forlorn Hope. We were stopped at a pitch when we ran out of bolts. From the top of this pitch we could see the bottom immediately climbs steeply up again through boulders. A second team has now started pushing this but found the climbing difficult and so has been bolting it as they go, making progress slow. This part of the cave is still blowing strongly and apparently the style of the passage is very similar to the far reaches of the Hirlatz. The expedition seems reinvigorated and the feeling that the end may be close is prominent. 2017 may prove to be an interesting year...