Mini calendar: Summer / Autumn 2011:

Summer Term 2012:
    Thurs 31st May - Tues 5th June -- Micro Jubilee Yorkshire Tour, Greenclose

July 13th - August 19th -- Sledi Vetra, Slovenia 2012 5-Week Expedition

Autumn Term 2012:
    28-30th Sep 2012 - ICCC 50th Birthday Weekend Trip, Greenclose/NPC, Yorkshire
    12-14th Oct 2012 - Weekend Trip, Wales (OFD) WSG 
    26-28th Oct 2012 - Weekend Trip, Wales (Llangattock) CSS
    9 -11th Nov 2012 - Weekend Trip, Yorkshire NPC
    23-25th Nov 2012 - Weekend Trip, Derbyshire Orpheus

Back to Mallorca, our first return since 2005. Sun, Sea, Sailing, Sports Climbing, Canyoning & more caves than you can shake a Stop at!

Back to Yorkshire! Excellent pair of trips attempting a Rift / Large exchange, but not making the connection through the rather aquatic duck. Sunday saw a rigging practice in Sunset Hole and a solo revisit to the flooded depths of Joint.

President: Rhys Tyers
Treasurer: Oliver Myerscough
Secretary: Sam Page
Tackle Master: Clare Tan | Foreign Secretary: Jana '5 languages' Carga | Medical Officer: Saber King | Health + Safety Officer: Konrad Domanski

Awards:
  For Evans' Sake: Kate Smith for her creative use of vomit, in Yorkshire, Mendips and on the jelly.
  Herman Herz: William 'my soft lock has forsaken me' French for breaking both heels in Quaking.
  "For Evans' Sake" Lifetime Achievement award: J. 'Drink your Own' Evans

A beautiful weekend in Yorkshire probing the muddy delights of the Easegill system. Torrential rain on Saturday didn't massively flood the caves, a beautiful bright and icy day on Sunday. Peterson Pot — Mistral, Lancaster Hole, County — Manchester Bypass all probed.

The forecast of SNOWPOCALYPSE put paid to our King Pot plans, as there would be no chance of getting out of Kingsdale. So we defaulted to Clapham, as it's a nice even drive to Greenclose and walked up into the Snowy Dales. Flood-Bar exchanged and the very muddy Jean Pot bottomed. Heavy snow on our return to the surface, and a careful snow-chained drive home. Sunday saw a photo-support trip to Hardrawkin, and a sump sampler session in Joint.

Short round and round! A bit of GB action, some Eastwater Cavern probing and the first trip of 2012 was a classic start to the caving season.

Cracking winter tour, we seemed to have the Dales to ourselves. The NPC was empty: we turned up at 2am, all was dark and we thought no one was there, but Dave and Tetley were, tucked up in their beds. The massive oven was put to good use churning out roast dinner after roast dinner. Weather was fairly kind for once, sub zero with snow on the first weekend (but still driveable), a fairly smooth thaw followed by warm foggy weather.

Notts I, Easegill County-Cow, Cow-County, County-Lancs via Cape Kennedy, Lost Johns, Alum Pot, Brown Hill and Rowten Pot all probed.

After the disasterous minibus behaviour of the weekend before, we had a free hire to spend! So why not take two buses to Derbyshire?

Believe it or not, this actually worked and over twenty members made it from London to go caving near Castleton. Maskhill, Giants, Peak Caver and P8 were all visited.

Ace weekend at the NPC. Attempted a Dis:Bar:Stream exchange on the Saturday, but Dis' duck was flooded, so became a successful Bar:Stream instead! Unfortunately, we returned to a dead Transit. Made it back to the NPC by shuttling in the cars, ate a fantastic curry, and spent the whole of Sunday faffing with the RAC on our merry way back to London.

Lovely little trip to the Llangattock escarpment, staying at the extremely comfortable Whitewalls cottage (CSS). Full frontal assault on Aggy (Ogof Agen Allwedd) breached both the boulder chokes and got everyone to North Western Junction, where the cooks left sedately, leaving the Turkey dreamers to meander upstream and inspec the formations, before slithering downstream down the impressive passage and then exiting. Excellent evening curry. Sunday saw more modest trips, to Eglwys Faen where a hippy-led Cello & multi instrumental concert was in full swing in the main chamber, and Ogof Pen Eryr which has retained its enjoyable corkscrew climb.

Two Ryanair tickets, one hold bag, one Fiat 500 car hire & a mission. What could possibly go wrong?

For once, not much actually. Apart from a self-imposed starvation diet, 273m of survey was brought back, adding an extra hundred to the known depth of M2 and bringing the closest approach with Vrtnarija to within 4m (nb: 1.4km loop, estimated ~30m error), along an easy mud-floored dig taking a huge draught.

A new year, and a new crop of freshers to introduce to the delights of caving. Excellent weekend altogether: 3 Trips down OFD - Ed's Shortcut / Salubrious, Top Waterfall & Poached-egg climb / round about everywhere climb. A trip to the Neath valley for Sunday, Little Neath by the wetsuit glad, and a fistful of smaller caves (Town Train, Bridge, White Lady) and a bit of wild swimming outside for the others... Good times!

Welcome Team 2011!
Come find our stand in Beit Quad during Freshers Fayre (11AM-4PM, Tuesday 4th October), and have a chat to one of our club members.

We have an excellent Autumn calendar of trips organised, and plans are afoot for foreign trips during the various university holidays.

Since you're here, check out some of our massive website. Thinking big, you may be interested in this Easter's trip to Sardinia (Photos, PDF Report), our exploration project in Slovenia (2011 Updates, 2010 Photos, Dec 2009 Winter Recce Photos). Closer to home, our weekend trip reports may give you a sense of what to expect: typical non-rope freshers trip weekend, SRT Yorkshire Weekend and the kind of harder trip we do later in the year, once all you new guys & girls are trained up.

Jan's put together a great writeup of our recent lightweight trip to Hidden Earth, the yearly national caving conference.

Suddenly it's that time of the year again! Soon we leave our South Ken haunts and haul a minibus of caving gear across Europe to head to a pretty little mountain in Slovenia called Tolminski Migovec.

We've some excellent leads and a keen team this year with a clear plan—we're immediately rerigging Vrtnarija (807m deep / 8776m long) to the bottom and setting up Camp X-Ray (-550m) as a hot-bunking 4-bed camp and pushing the multitude of leads from 500-800m deep. On the surface we will be launching trips down Kavkna Jama (M2) in search of the great, elusive, connection.

During this time we are slaves to the Sistem, so it may seem all a little quiet around here. However, thanks to the wonders of mobile telephony, for the fourth year running, you can follow our every move on twitter @ICCC.

The chief motivator was to get some experience bolt climbing with the new drills and the Raumer stick up, ahead of trying it 'for real' at -800m in Slovenia this summer. Some cheap advanced train tickets to Lancs, three bikes, panniers for the drill batteries and they were away...
Cycling up Kingsdale with cave exploration gear, a suitably retro start to the summer expedition practice...

Excellent three day weekend in Yorkshire ticking off King Pot (7.5hrs), Pennyghent (6hrs) and Meregill (4.5hrs). Fantastic weather, blue skies, sun and enough wind to blow you back down off the hill!

While some of us were jetting off to a Mediterranean isle, the home team completed the excellent JH-Peak through trip...

The Sardinia Easter Tour 2011 was a great success, 10 cavers enjoying the delights of Su Palu (and only Su Palu) via a 5-bed camp established at El Alamein. Day trips were made to Disneyland, Mordor and Sand Creek, with swims in the massive sump lake. Report still to be written...

Snow and missing kit couldn't stop IC3 delving the depths near Castleton. An excellent weekend of adventure repeatedly rescued from failure.

Well, it took us a while to get them together, rename them, sort them & etc., but finally here are all the photos from last summer's expedition to Slovenia! The Interim report is also mostly finished, and slowly we're getting organised for this summer's expedition — Izgubljeni Raj (Fri 15th July 2011 – Sun 15th August).

Current Survex cave data, and previous survey originals are now live: MigSurveyData, in particular you may be interested in the .3d file for viewing with Aven: mig.3d (200KB).

We've also prepared a ZIP archive of the photos downscaled to 'slideshow' resolution of 1024x768 for your offline viewing pleasure: VodnaSled2010_Photos_Slideshow_Resolution_1280x1024.zip.

Ended up a bit of an epic -- everyone had the latest virus, then a 12hr drive to Yorkshire (8PM to 8AM) due to foolish UK drivers blocking a snowy motorway. Temperature continued to drop, but no snow so we could get the 'bus up into the hills. Minus 10-15 degree changes quick got rather tiring, but we managed to crack off Grange Rigg / Christmas Pot, Lost Johns' Dome+Monastry (excellent route!) & a classic Easegill romp.

Excellent, but cold, trip to Derbyshire. Oxlow-Maskhill exchange and JH - white river series explore on the Saturday. Late return to the TSG in severe sub zero conditions (frozen harness, frozen minibus doors!).

A rather wet weekend in Yorkshire, staying at the NPC. Gaping Stream, Marilyn + Bar on the Saturday, with Jingling + Bullpot masterclass o nteh side. Sunday saw a lazy afternoon Jingling exchange (Lateral + Direct), as two teams were already down Rowten, and a little delve into Valley Entrance.

Ahh, Yorkshire! Well worth the quite frankly ludicrous drive in a speed limited minibus from London. Trips to bottom Lost Johns (Dome + Centipede) and Ireby Fell on the Saturday, rather late supper + a quick delve into Bullpot and Yordas (Kingsdale) on the Sunday. Rather damp underground - made the waterfalls rather impressive!

The sun never sets on the IC³ caving empire!
Quite literally while we were sleeping during our Welsh freshers trip, Andy and Toni were dipping their helmets in some of the caves that New Zealand have to offer...

Great first trip of the year! Weather was unbelievably good, and we managed two fantastic trips down OFD + some delightfully wet bimbles into Little Neath, Bridge Cave, White Lady, Cwm Pwll y Rydd and Town Drain.
WSG cottage was nice and cosy, caving games by the fireside, the usual morning fry ups & an epic chilli.

Beautiful little start to the caving year, with a pre-term trip to the wonders of the Yorkshire Dales. Nice solid trips down King Pot and Marble Steps, and a bit of doube-cave rig and derig practice for some of the 2nd years in Bullpot + Jingling, via the really quite nice new P-bolt lateral route. Appalling weather, play was rained off on Sunday.

This year's BCRA conference, Hidden Earth 2010, was really enjoyable. Five of us made it along and saw talks of the great expeditions that have been going on over the last year, and excellent results from digging in the UK. There was a really good vibe this year at the conference - helped I'm sure in no small part to the increasing postitive media exposure over the summer most notably with the Ireby-Rift connection; the 8.8km success of the Pozo Azul expedition; and the Culiembro dive into Xitu.
There's also been an increasing appearence of epic cave shots as the centrefolds of Sunday papers.

Closer to our own aspirations, there were a number of talks from university caving clubs: Cambridge UCC continued their exploration of the Loser plateau; York UCPC continued their systematic shaft bashing in the Durmitor region, Montenegro; Sheffield USS returned 'back to the fissures' in Crete; and the Dachstein open expedition continued their very succesful 'pincer' operation with a winter expedition to the lower extensive Hirlatz Hole horizontal level, and a summer expedition pushing the deep pots from the plateau above.

Many thanks to all those who came to our own talk on Tolminski Migovec - the slides are linked below should you wish to have a look. We were very pressed for time (107 slides in 30 minutes!), so the talk focuses very tightly on this year's discoveries in Vrtnarija rather than give a more general overview of the expedition, caves, or cavers!

Vodna Sled 2010 was an epic success - in all we discovered 2.2km of new passage, all below -500m, all in Vrtnarija using Camp X-Ray (Reloaded, four bed camp) -550m as a base.

Vrtnarija is now 8776/807m, 7th longest and 12th deepest cave in Slovenia. Connection with System Migovec (11300/970m) would yield a 20.075km system. Only 500m of additional passage would be necessary to make it the longest system in Slovenia.

The considerable discoveries this year are not ours to be proud of - they're a natural feature of the mountain that we've been honoured to shed first light on. Our achievement is in the logistical effort, team work and sheer determination that saw us rerigging (600m of new rope) to -550m within two days, safely taking first-year cavers to a deep underground camp and having so many cavers spending so long productively at depth in an alpine system.

It's that time of the year again when we decamp from our South Ken base, pack most of the contents of stores into a load of blue barrels, and set out across Europe to Tolminski Migovec, Slovenia. This year we're making a 4-bed camp down at X-Ray, Friendship Gallery (-550m) giving us access to the deep leads in Vrtnarija (Tolminski Korita, Republica, Muddy Window; leads with a lowercase l, leopard, ballamory, bolt climbing strap-on-the-nitro and to-infinity-and-beyond).
From the surface the main bounce trips will down Kavkna Jama / M2 (~-380m) & Captain Kangaroo - Vrtnarija (~-250-360m) to try and force a connection. And of course, we'll be looking for the next decade's work on the surface, in particular following up the GPS coordinates from the blowing holes recce earlier this year.

Hopefully we'll be too busy finding cave to update this webpage much, but we should be able to twitter our discoveries from the mountaintop, and maybe even get some photos onto our facebook page: