We split the 9 people into two groups for this trip to the monster Austrian cave - the 97.5km long Hirlatz. 

A plan was hatched for myself, Laura, Dave P and Mike (Pyro) Young to go to the West to Grunkogel to move the camp there to Sahara whilst the others went to carry on dropping the pitch series in Schwabenland. Everything was fine with this plan until 9pm on Monday night when a group of Hungarian cavers arrived to ‘help’ us out. I was given the job of being their tour guide and they were invited to join our team going to the west. We headed up into the mountains around lunch time and soon discovered that the snow was really deep this year – I mean I knew it’d be deep and the path buried but I had no idea about how deep it really would be until we started to head up the slope. Over several hours we beat and dug a path, often in chest deep snow, up to the entrance. One of the Hungarian cavers suffered badly with this delay – the conditions outside were freezing and the walk extremely tiring with a very heavy bag. Once we set off into the cave it became apparent that she was in no fit state for a multi-day trip and just 1 ½ hours into the cave the Hungarian team were forced to turn back.  

With all the delays we decided not to head further than the first camp at Springstella that night and get up early in the morning instead. After a good night’s sleep we were packed up and on our way to the west by 10.30am the next day. Although I thought the route finding would be complicated we reached Grunkogel in a comfy 3 ½ hours before unloading our bags, re-packing them with the gear we were moving and heading to Sahara. Three hours later we were back at camp eating our dinner and getting our heads down for an early night. One mystery did develop however. Before we’d left for Sahara Pyro packed 5 gas canisters into his bag but when we arrived there were only 3 there – all the way back to Grunkogel we watched for the missing canisters but found nothing and when we got back to camp we still couldn’t find them. It was only the next morning before we set off again that they were spotted – at the bottom of the steep slope below camp, amongst the boulders – they must have rolled away when no one way looking. 

It took us just 2 ½ hours to get back to Springstella and then another four to reach the camp in Schwabenland for that night. As expected the others were off exploring when we arrived so we made space in camp, cooked our dinner, collected water and settled down for the night. About 12.30 Ian, Flo and H rolled into camp and Joel and Martin appeared a couple of hours later. They’d had a good day and dropped about 140m worth of pitches. However the drill had run out of battery power and it didn’t look like they were going to intercept any large horizontal passage – which is what we’d come to explore.  

The following day we went to check out one final lead in the area – a window above the pitch series (which didn’t go anywhere) before dragging the gear back to camp and heading for the surface. My group went to Spingstella that night whilst the others stayed in Schwabenland and we all surfaced to a bright and brilliant day around lunch time.