h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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.

az

Well, we didn't make the connection - a couple of streamways were heading in the right direction, but closed down too much to be sensibly followable.

We did map another 1.5km of passage, and extended the cave to 800m deep, and I got a few decent pictures
( http://www.potholer.com/gallery/lep2004_1.html )

We camped underground at ~-700m, in a relatively good site with water nearby. The air temperature was 1 degree Celsius at the camp, but the air wasn't entirely damp so it was possible to dry off thermal clothing if you removed your oversuit and sat around for a while before going to bed.
Most of the cave below ~650m has a layer of fine white/pale brown sand (likely glacial rock flour) on the floor, and the stuff gets absolutely *everywhere* - in the cooking pots, inside showerproof caving lights, inside foil-sealed packs of chewing gum, inside 3 layers of thermal socks, and it seemd to carry on spreading (if not multiplying) after people got back to the surface.

Overall, a very good trip - still some leads for next year, at varying depths in the cave, more surface leads found, no significant injuries, no huge personailty clashes, and I lost about 8 pounds in 4 weeks, despite spending much of my surface time eating. Also, I managed the joint fastsest time for getting out from deep camp, so didn't get shown up by any of the youngsters.
The only downside of my preparatory fitness program was that, being more efficient muscularly, I didn't generate as much waste heat, so if I sat down for a breather of more than a couple of minutes on the way out, I chilled off quite rapidly. Still, it's a small price to pay for getting out one, two, or more hours ahead of the pack.

My new homemade dual-beam Luxeon LED lighting system (unofficially christened the MigLite) proved itself pretty well. Neither mine, nor the four I built for other people malfunctioned at all, and everyone I made them for seemed more than satisfied (one guy managed one ~10 hour bounce trip, and two 3-day camping trips on a single 4.5V duracell flatpack).
I seem to have orders (or strong interest) for another half-dozen lights at least. I just have to streamline my production process so it doesn't take a day or so to build a single light, and tweak the circuitry and my microcontroller software a little in the light of feedback from the users.
Mind you, it's a bit scary having a light that will happily light up the bottom of a 40m pitch when you're nervously clambering around at the top. Sometimes *less* light can give you more confidence.