Dunc's Work Blog

Back to Gouffre Berger
I'm on holidays as of this evening, and I thought I'd write a little about what I'm planning since what I get up to on my holidays is a little different.

In 2002, I joined a bunch of cavers from the Wessex Cave Club and Devon Speleological Society on their joint expedition to Gouffre Berger. Gouffre Berger, situated in the Vercors region, just SW of Grenoble, is one of the classic deep caves in France, currently ranking as the 23rd deepest cave in the world. It's a physically demanding cave, that despite having some 25 pitches (vertical drops) is more akin to hillwalking underground. Being an active, ie. wet, cave for much of its length, it's also potentially very dangerous in flood conditions. We weren't blessed with good weather. When I set off on my trip to the bottom, I'd didn't realise that it would be nearly two days before I made it back to the surface. Ian Wilton-Jones wrote up his experience of the trip. Only 7 out of 60+ cavers on that expedition reached the bottom of the cave.

So now, two years later, I'm heading back. This time with a combined team of Irish & French cavers. having been to the bottom before, my priorities are different. I want to help my girlfriend reach Camp 1, 500m down, and I want to take some nice photos. The cave is well decorated in places as these photos from SpeleoClub Avalon show. I'll go to the bottom again, but only if the weather's looking a bit more settled!

Now for some tech/geek stuff. We've made arrangements to use the System Nicola radios, which should allow us to contact the surface from Camp 1. We use a variant of these radios in the Irish Cave Rescue organisation, of which I'm a member, and they work very well. I'm also using a different lighting system this time. Last time I used a carbide lamp. You may recall those high school science lessons where you added water to calcium dicarbide to produce ethyne? Well we use this to produce light underground (with the added benefit of some nice heat!). The problem with this is that you need to carry a fair bit of carbide for a trip of this length, and then there's the problem of the byproducts which have in the past been dumped in the cave by less environmentally-conscious cavers. So this time, I'm using a SpeleoTechnics Nova LED headset with FX-Ion batteries. Right up there at the cutting edge of caving lights!

All going well, I'll be back in the office on 6th September with some nice photos!

Congrats to John & Shena!
As Tim mentioned, I borrowed his camera over the weekend to take some photos at a wedding I'd been invited to. All went according to plan: