Since the golden age of alpinism in the 19th century, mountaineering expeditions have garnered significant media attention. Much less coverage, however, has been given to their underground counterpart: the expeditions that go down rather than up. Yet caving expeditions are just as gruelling and rewarding.
Of course, whereas mountaineering expeditions typically revolve around the aim of reaching a summit, caving expeditions rarely have such a fixed objective. Instead, they focus on the exploration of unknown and unexplored cave passages, which includes surveying (mapping) the discovered caves. There are still a considerable number of undiscovered caves in Europe, some exceeding depths of 1,000 metres.
The expedition to the Loser Plateau in the Totes Gebirge has been running since 1976 when it was set up by a team from the Cambridge University Caving Club. Since then, the expedition has made extensive progress exploring the the Schwarzmooskogel (SMK) cave system, with the primary aim of connecting it to the Schonenberg system. The SMK system is currently at 137.7km long, and the Schonenberg system is currently at 156.9km long: if these two were connected, it would make the system the sixth longest cave in the world.
The logistics of carrying out a deep alpine expedition are immense. It takes months of preparation to acquire all the equipment and food, to draw up preliminary plans for exploration and then at least a week to set up the camps. This year, our expedition had five camps: one base camp, two higher level camps, and two underground camps (in different caves). The high-level camps, known as Stony Bridge and Garlic Cave, enabled cavers to get an early start, and provided a vital place to rest after long caving trips. Both camps were situated on the Loser Plateau, a treacherous, desolate expanse of limestone that stretches on for miles and is a magnet for alpine storms. It is riddled with knife-edge ridges, deep holes (some with a straight drop of over 100 metres) and loose boulders. In sections, clusters of dwarf pines huddle together so densely that it is almost impossible to move through them. The Plateau is full of hidden dangers that have caused many trips to hospital over the years.
Before I could go caving, I needed to carry my kit across the plateau to Garlic camp, which would be my base for exploration in Homecoming cave. My partner and I set off early to follow the convoluted route across the plateau, marked only by the occasional cairn. We got lost repeatedly and often ended up backtracking to follow a different, equally arduous route. A searing pain spread through my muscles like wildfire as I struggled with a rucksack that weighed over a third of my bodyweight.
‘Totes Gebirge’ translates to ‘Dead Mountains’, in relation to the lack of flora and fauna to be found on the vast expanse of limestone. Apart from the occasional snake and salamander, we saw no wildlife during our crossing, the skies empty of birds and cloaking the plateau in an eerie silence. Pale rock curved and jutted outwards in awkward angles like a carcass skinned to the bone, splattered in purple patches of aconite – the most poisonous plant in Europe. It seemed like everything there was made to kill.
After four hours of traversing around cliffs, teetering on sharp ridges, climbing over giant boulders and leaping across gaping rifts in the ground, the site of Garlic Cave was a great relief. The so-called ‘camp’ was more of a bivouac, using the natural walls of the cave as shelter, with a tarp to keep the offending ceiling drips off our sleeping area. Its yawning mouth opened into a wide amphitheatre lined by vertical cliffs, sheltering a permanent snow plug at the base. Inside, there was a camping stove, a large bucket of suspiciously orange-coloured water filled by ceiling drips for our water supply, and the most luxurious item of all: solar-powered fairy lights.
After fuelling up with some instant noodles, we set off back across the geological obstacle course. With our packs empty, and slightly fewer route-finding errors at the return attempt, we made it back across in three hours. On the other side the evening sun glazed the alpine meadows in honey. The purples, yellows and pinks of harebells, hawkbits, bladder campions and hairy alpenrosen made it seem as if the sunset had been sprinkled across the grass. With the knowledge that I would soon be descending deep into the darkness, I savoured every inch of life around me.
Before we began exploring new caves, we returned to a previously explored cave to assess changes in the cave and improve our caving fitness – effectively the caver’s version of acclimatising. Although the cave is made of limestone and connects into the SMK system, its floor is a sweeping sheet of ice peppered with towering ice columns. The entrance is an abseil down a pothole onto an enormous volcano of snow, providing a bird’s eye view of the ice palace. Before getting into caving, one of my primary passions was winter mountaineering, so it was a joy to don my crampons and ice axe once again. Sadly, the ice cave is melting rapidly. The cascading ice falls that once rippled down the walls have vanished entirely, and as we walked across the ice we could see rivers of meltwater running underneath. It is a place living on borrowed time. Although one of my companions, who had viewed the cave in all its splendour back in the ‘80s, described the cave as a ‘shadow of its former self’, I still felt privileged to view what remained, while it lasted.
Our exploration began a couple of days later, on a crisp morning ripe with the promise of adventure. The day started off poorly, when the dry-stone wall that sheltered our beds from the draught billowing into Garlic Cave collapsed. On last summer’s adventure, I broke two toes in a mountain hut on Slovenia’s highest peak due to a combination of rain-soaked floors and hut slippers with poor toe protection. This year, I had the sense to wear shoes with good toe protection at all times to avoid a repeat of the incident. I must have had some very bad luck for the dry-stone wall to collapse just as I was changing from one pair of shoes to another – a large hunk of limestone with razor-sharp edges crashed onto my foot and fractured one of the same toes as last year! Whereas last year I spent an evening sobbing with dashed dreams, this time I simply cleansed the wounds, wrapped my toe tightly and focused on the mission at hand. I pushed the lingering fear, pain and self-doubt to the recesses of my mind and placed my trust in the fact that when it matters most, I will always be able to rely on myself to get through whatever trials come my way. Going into the cave was non-negotiable for me. But coming back out was non-negotiable, too.
After getting changed into caving kit by the pothole, our team of four abseiled into the darkness, laden with tackle sacks carrying camping gear and food for two days. The first two hours of caving consisted of many pitches (vertical drops which require Single Rope Technique (SRT) to ascend and descend), flying down, down, down into perpetual night. This culminated in an 80-metre descent through two pitches called ‘Wallace and Gromit’, which were discovered by my partner in 2018. At the base of Gromit, we crossed an exposed traverse where I needed to do the splits to keep a foot on each opposing wall, desperately trying not to slip into the gaping chasm beneath. Time warped as we crawled, climbed, abseiled and crawled some more to reach a gigantic pit called ‘Strained by Gravity’. As I abseiled down, the shadows rushed past me like a flock of startled birds taking to the sky, and I thought that it was as close as I’ll ever get to flying.
Following this, 400 exhausting metres of un-roped traversing commenced, which began with my partner falling head-over-heels 3 metres onto the cave floor. Luckily, no bones were broken and the rest of the traverse was free from further falls. After what felt like years, we reached the large aven (a vertical shaft connecting different levels of cave passages) where we were to set up camp. We abseiled down to a boulder-filled ledge halfway down, where there was just enough space to squeeze a tent in between the cave wall and jagged rocks. The area was fairly small, and a few steps out of the tent in the wrong direction would have resulted in us falling down the rest of the aven to almost certain death.
We squeezed the tent in between boulders, ate some noodles and continued travelling deeper into the cave. After 2 more hours spent squeezing, climbing and abseiling through the twisting labyrinth, we reached the pushing front (the farthest point of exploration in the cave). This was in a meandering streamway, at a point where the floor vanished and the clear water plummeted down a drop of unknown depth. While one member of the team got to work on bolting a traverse along the rift, the rest of us prepared to survey (gathering data to create a map of the cave) and discovered another barrier: our disto (survey device) wasn’t calibrated. We couldn’t calibrate it underground, and at this point we were six hours under so going back out and returning was not an option. The three of us opted to lean against the cave wall and eat Haribo in the dark while our teammate continued bolting. Progress along the rift was slow, eventually leading to a pitch followed by another rift. In the void almost half a kilometre below the surface, where the draught was painfully cold and the line between life and death began to blur, the ‘pushing front’ felt more like the Western Front. I thought of the war poet Wilfred Owen’s words:
our brains ache, in the merciless iced East winds that knive us… / wearied we keep awake because the night is silent
They felt like an apt description of our condition. With only one person doing the work at a time, my eyelids grew heavy and I felt close to slumping into the streamway, which would have been extremely dangerous in an air temperature of 2 degrees Celsius with no spare clothes. At about 9:30pm, two of us decided to start heading back to camp. The upwards journey of strenuous climbing and complex ropework soon made my muscles burn, each step feeling more impossible than the last. Fatigue ripped through my body like a famished wolf, and by the halfway point I was certain that I had reached my physical and emotional limits. Except down there, the only form of rest that was an option was death. No one was coming to rescue me, and only I could get myself out alive. So, I pulled myself up, kicking and crying and screaming, one move at a time, up climbs devoid of holds and through cracks where the rocks squeezed my aching chest, until we eventually we reached our camp. We quickly ate some noodles before collapsing into bed. As I switched my headlight off and the darkness swept in, I welcomed it with open arms.
‘What time is it?’ someone whispered.
‘I don’t know.’ I replied. I had no idea how long I’d been asleep for – it could have been 2 hours, or it could have been 12. I felt a rustle next to me, and glimpsed the faint glow of a watch.
‘10am.’ My partner muttered. Nestled in a sleeping bag between my partner and my best friend, I felt extremely cosy, and the thought of what I was about to do filled me with dread. The surface was still so far away, and I had no idea how I’d manage to reach it. I didn’t know if I could. I suggested the others leave me here, tucked away in my sleeping bag to live out the rest of my days, but that was vetoed. My friend on the end, who had been spooning a ‘very sharp boulder’ all night, was unsurprisingly the first out of the tent and the rest of us soon followed. We fuelled up on noodles, packed up camp and soon I was climbing up the first pitch. This proved more challenging than expected. Each step felt like wading through thick mud, and I felt so slow, so weak, so powerless. After about 10 metres I was sitting on the rope, gently swinging from side to side, and sobbing uncontrollably. I couldn’t do it. There were hundreds of metres between us and the surface, and if I was struggling this much with the first 10 then I didn’t stand a chance. My friends shouted some words of encouragement from below, but they seemed so far away, the shadows between us shrouding their light and the wind stealing their voices. I took a few deep breaths and kept climbing, one step at a time.
We re-traced our steps from the day before, only pausing once for another dose of instant noodles. My arms burned with the weight of continually pulling my body and tackle sacks up the rope, the exhaustion growing inside of me like an unquenchable flame. It took all my focus to keep moving, and I worried that if I stopped I might not be able to start again.
When we finally reached the surface, the sun was still shining. After 31 hours underground, adorned with mud, cuts, bruises, blisters and broken bones, the deep blue sky was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Most astonishing was the fact that I thought I had reached my limits over 20 hours beforehand – but those hadn’t really been my limits at all. If I had to, I could have kept going for several more hours (though I may have grumbled a bit). I still don’t know what those limits are – if they even exist at all. Perhaps the biggest reward for going through such trials, is the knowledge that there is always more strength to be found inside of us, even when we think it has all gone.
After a return to base camp and a couple of rest days, I was back up the hill for round 2. This time, I was in a group of 3 going to explore a different part of Homecoming, while another group of friends returned to the section I had previously been in. My muscles seemed to remember the movements required to pass the more challenging sections, and before long I was abseiling down an unexplored hole. Our motivation for descending was not only to see what was there, but also to rescue the Simple (abseiling device) of a friend who had dropped it while traversing over the top. We weren’t expecting to find much at the bottom, so it was a great surprise to find the Simple still shiny and intact, alongside a large chamber with various rifts branching off in different directions. There were endless possibilities, but we chose to follow the main phreatic passage (a passage formed below the water table) for some time until our disto ran out of battery. The unexplored passages remain for us to return to on next year’s expedition. We named the section of cave Simple Pleasures, which seemed like a fitting name given the return of the Simple and the unexpected delight of what lay at the bottom.
We celebrated our discovery with some more noodles, and then started heading back out of the cave. Everything felt easier this time. I was stronger, fitter and more confident than before. The journey seemed to go smoothly until I was swinging in the air, part-way up Gromit pitch, when I heard a shout from above.
‘BELOW!’
A cascade of rocks rained down on me, clattering off my helmet and pummelling into my legs. I clutched the rope tightly as I held my breath. Once the rockfall faded away, I dared to look up and inspect the rope above me. Getting bruises from a few rocks was one thing, but it wouldn’t take much for a sharp rock to cut through the taut rope and leave me falling into the void below. Satisfied that I wasn’t about to die, I continued climbing until a strange banging sound echoed through the cave once again. This time, it seemed further away, reverberating through the walls like the growl of an ancient dragon awakening. With a sinking feeling I realised that it was the sound of a sudden flood pulsing through the cave. By now we were in the dry section of cave, above the point where the water became dangerous, but our friends weren’t. If their trip had followed the estimated time, then at the moment I heard the flood pulse thundering through the cave, they would also have been at the most flood-prone part of the cave. There was nothing we could do – they were several hours of caving away from us, we didn’t have the supplies to support such an extended trip and putting ourselves in danger would only have added further complications. We kept moving upwards, each step taking us further away from our friends and the rumbling flood, until we emerged into an indigo twilight laced with thick cloud.
It was clear that it had rained heavily while we were underground, and by the time we reached Garlic it was raining again. While I lay in my bivvy bag and the harmonious drips of water began to lull me to sleep, my mind kept drifting back to those still in the darkness far below us.
Our friends returned in the early hours of the morning, fatigued and soaking wet, but alive. The flood had hit as they were on the ropes in the lowest section of cave, causing them to abandon their tackle and make a hasty retreat. After getting caught in the flood pulse, they were saturated with icy water, so they didn’t stop to rest as they raced through the exhausting journey back out in order to prevent hypothermia setting in. A scary moment with a happy ending.
It took weeks for my body to recover from the expedition, and even longer for my mind to fully process everything that happened. There are parts of this earth that only I have been to, and it is most likely that no one will ever go there again. It is a great privilege to get to know the inside of our earth so intimately, and the feeling of uncovering new cave passage makes all of the suffering worth it. People often ask me if I feel scared when I’m caving, and the answer is yes. Caves are some of the most remote and most dangerous parts of our earth: sometimes, I feel terrified. But caving is all about feeling the fear and doing it anyway. For cavers, the unknown gradually becomes less of a fear and more of an attraction. There are still many caves to be explored on the Loser Plateau and beyond, with their own stories to tell and their own secrets to be uncovered, in time.
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Samuel D
October 03, 2024
An excellent read, sounds like a great trip