These are the pages of the Culiembro 2009 expedition. During July/August of 2009 a team of 9 cave divers visited this cave in Northern Spain. Culiembro is the resurgance cave for Xitu and the other high level caves of the 'Ario' plateau in the Picos do Europa.
The team of cavers and divers spent two weeks in the field based at the village of Cain, high in the Picos de Europa mountains. During these two weeks the team worked in the cave to survey the passages, climb waterfalls and dive unexplored underwater sections. All of the various open ends of the cave system (the Arched Window, the Round Window and the Square Window) were explored further to some extent. It was hard work and every day we had to carry diving cylinders out of the cave to fill them for the following day’s exploration.
The final sump of the Arched Window was dived and this turned out to only be 4m long. Approximately 150m of passage was discovered beyond though this remains to be surveyed. Sump 4 of the Square Window was dived using a rebreather and this reached 40m and was left ongoing. Finally the previous limit of exploration in the Round Window was reached and the survey up to this point completed. This took several long trips but the survey data we have collected has given us a great deal of information about where this cave is going and which caves it is likely to connect to. Further progress was made climbing cascades and waterfalls at the end of the Round Window and the way on here is open for next year. Extremely significantly the survey of this branch shows this section of passage heading for the cave known as “2-7” and for the cave ‘Xitu’. However the distance to “2-7” is more than 500m vertically meaning a great deal of aid climbing is ahead.
Bad weather during the middle portion of the trip restricted the teams’ options and prevented diving for several days and important lessons were learnt about the nature of the cave and how it responds to adverse weather. Despite this nearly all of the objectives of the group were met including making a film about our experiences.
Full Report as pdf exluding survey (below)
Picos overview survey
.jpg)
The expedition was extremely successful, we were able to completely map the known sections of the cave and explore several new areas. This included climbing one of the cascades at the end of the "Round Window" branch, finding some passage beyond an undived sump in the "Arched window" and diving to 40m depth in the 4th sump in the .jpg)
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg)
The expedition will be in the field from 25th July to 9th August. We’ll be based at the village of Cain, approximately a 1 hour hike along the Cares gorge to the cave and will need to carry all our exploration and diving equipment along this route each day. The longer sumps will require either re-breathers or large diving cylinders and these will need to be carried out of the cave to be re-filled. However we hope to place a compressor near to the cave itself to avoid carrying cylinders back along the path to Cain every night.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
