Journal Entries
Knee deep, dead sheep
Posted Aug 23, 2004
Got back from Slovenia last week, and went digging in Wales. As a respite from our riverside shaft dig, we are currently excavating an old mineshaft that may give access to a lost cave with the potential to form a link bewteen two of the main local systems.
I turned up with my caving gear, but somehow most of the others didn't have theirs. They hadn't said much about the dig itself, just the odd mention of a few bags they'd removed the previous week, and buried nearby.
On descending the shaft, I found the reason why no-one else was keen on going down. The shaft bottom (about 5ft by 2ft6) was composed entirely of dead sheep deposited by a local farmer in times past, some in fertiliser bags, some just loose. There was little obvious smell, and nothing noticably moving, but it still wasn't a terribly pleasant job. If anything the bags were the worst - you were never entirely sure what was inside, and imagination isn't really desirable in a situation like that.
In reality, there wasn't much there other than a mess of skulls and bones, and fleeces squeezed into felt-like mats by the weight of the sheep above, but it took a while before I went from just using the entrenching tool to pull bits into the hauling bucket to using my (gloved) hands as well. I reckon I cleared something over metre depth of remains in my time down there, and the next guy down only had to shift a few more sacks before he cleared the sheep layer and got into old household rubbish.
I do wish someone had advised me to take my old PVC oversuit rather than my new fabric one, since PVC is rather easier to clean and sterilise. Still, apparently the previous week's digging had been a bit more unpleasant, with warmer weather and fresher remains to remove, so I suppose I should be grateful.
What *are* the first symptoms of anthrax?
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Latest reply: Aug 23, 2004
Slovenia again
Posted Jul 16, 2004
Off to London in a few hours, then driving to Slovenia on Saturday for a month of exploration.
This year's target is to connect Gardener's World (extended from -570m to -750m deep last year) to the main Migovec system. The caves are only a couple of hundred metres apart, and GW was going like a train in wide-open passage when we left it last year.
When connected, we should have the second-longest cave system in Slovenia, and with a bit of luck we could be nipping at Postonja's heels fairly soon.
Just got to prepare myself for a 24+ hour drive, then 2 or 3 days of ferrying large rucksacs up the mountain, then a few 3-day caving trips.
Wish me luck.
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Latest reply: Jul 16, 2004
Breakthrough?
Posted May 31, 2004
It seems the Welsh dig (see past journal) *might* be starting to go a bit. A couple of guys went to poke around at the end, and managed to get into ~20m of bedding-plane passage, 1-2ft high, 3-4ft wide, ending in a cappable blockage.
The entry to the bedding is currently classed as 'not ideal for mass access' (ie unstable), but should have been stabilised by Wednesday evening to allow most of the past digging team down safely to have a look. With luck, there may be enough room in the bedding for stacking some digging debris, so hauling everything all the way to surface might not be as necessary as it has been so far. In any case, having a solid one-piece roof would be most welcome novelty even if it is rather low.
Fingers crossed.
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Latest reply: May 31, 2004
Welsh digging
Posted Jan 27, 2004
Well.
After 6 months or more of digging in our valley-bottom shaft, things are changing a bit.
Total material removed maybe 10-20 tons. Various metalwork and a ton or two of cement and sand is holding the walls together and the roof up.
Thus far the cave has been a bit odd - the initial shaft had loads of washed-in rock and soil to remove, then the walls needed stabilising, and then the capping could begin. Strangely, given the amount of rock microblasted out of the cave, little of the wall surface shows signs of blasting, since rather than widening out a standard bedrock cave, this one had walls consisting of large in-situ broadly cuboid blocks that had been eroded around to the point of no longer being permanently attached to the bedrock. They still needed cracking into small pieces to haul out of the entrance, but did leave a tidy and natural-looking cave behind them.
We know where the water goes - to a cave in the hill the other side of the (small) valley the dig is in, but the way on isn't easy.
Now we seem to have encountered a region where a space above is loosely filled by disordered boulders that aren't in situ, and are too large to have come in the way we dug down, so it seems we've either broken out into the bottom of an old shaft to surface, filled with surface debris, or into the side of a pre-post-glaciation-infill gorge that used to be the valley bottom.
If the latter is the case, the dig is probably dead, but I hope it's really just a shaft of loose rock that we can find some safe way around the bottom of.
However, the fact that there was flood debris on the scaffolding in the roof of a wide part of the cave that was about 2m high and 1m wide, and about 4m above the current cave bottom does show that the potential for serious flooding is there. In an ideal world, there'll be a small constriction downstream somewhere that can be easily emoved, but digging is rarely an ideal-world sport.
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Latest reply: Jan 27, 2004
Poetry
Posted Aug 24, 2003
I've started writing some poetry, for pretty much the first time ever, apart from a few verses of a caving song some years ago.
Once I'd started, it seemed much easier to carry on than I expected, I think partly due to having the need to tell a true story or describe a cave in proper order, since I always had a good idea of what words or actions I had to get in within the next few lines.
Rhyming was a little more difficult, since in a long poem (50+ 8-line verses) it can be hard to avoid using similar rhymes in different verses, and there is still the odd line (usually with a multisyllabic ending) where I ended up using 9 syllables rather than 8, but contracting the line would have made the rhythm awkward since the flow round the final word.
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Latest reply: Aug 24, 2003
Potholer
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