Yorkshire Subterranean Society

When you visit a country like Slovenia with intention of finding new caves you don’t really expect to leave the country with less caves than when you arrived but this is what nearly happened on our trip this year! I’ll explain later.

Slovenia 97 was one of those "on-off-on-off" things and it wasn’t until the first week in August that I finally decided to make my annual visit. There’d just be two of us myself and Eric, veteran of a visit in 1987. On our Journey down to catch "Le Shuttle" we called at Ian Bishop’s and picked up 200 copies of his new book - Caving Guide to Slovenia - sticking them In the back of my car was a pretty good way of getting them to Franc at the Speleo-Camp without paying postage.

I hadn’t given much of a thought to the Import taxes until we were In sight of the Slovenian customs house at the start of the tunnel that takes you from Austria into Slovenia. How were we going to hide three boxes of books stuck in full view on the back seat of the car? The problem was rather easily solved in the end by covering the boxes with a couple of Polish girls who happened to be trying to thumb a lift through the tunnel!

Arriving at the Speleo-camp at Laze around midnight, we found the place infested with the Wessex and Germans - including "Herr Araldite" (Fred and Stuart will know who I mean!) who’d been the previous year. The Wessex were heading home the following day, so It was a fairly noisy night. In the morning we realised how badly timed our visit was. Franc ("our" professor in the village), France (our Speleo camp host) and Boris (our pizza-Ioving cave guide) were all off to Switzerland for the International Caving Conference. Would we like to go? No thanks, we’ve only been in Slovenia a few hours! Now we understood why Franc was so keen to get his hands on 200 copies of the Slovenia Cave Guide - they were still suffering from Jet-lag when they were transferred into Franc’s car en route for Switzerland.

I’d planned a nice easy day pottering around the caves and natural bridges at Rakov Skocjan but Eric turned this into a forced march round the whole national park! Back at Laze, I was looking forward to a reasonably early night when we were somehow persuaded by Max and Giovanna, a German lad and his Italian girlfriend, who weren’t with the main group of Germans at the campsite, to act as guides for a trip Into Planinska Jama - one of the huge river caves in the area.

I was beginning to wonder what this thing called "steep" was as we entered the cave Just before midnight. A trip of about five hours consisted of much boulder hopping and Eric getting quite wet, as we attempted to explore as much of the cave as possible without using inflatable dinghies.

All I could manage the next day was a trip to the Skosjanske tourist cave. Despite the artificial entrance, and some insensitive lighting, the trip is quite dramatic, especially the river canyon and exit (although Eric wasn’t very impressed with the "caravan on rails" that transports visitors back to the surface!).

This year we only spent one day in the Mt Sneznik area. I’d spotted a new hole on the last day of our 1996 trip and had selfishly kept it to myself. The new hole turned out to be a blind shaft 15m deep. I suppose I could have called it "Fred n’ Stuart’s Revenge" but eventually decided on Majhen Jama (Small Cave). There was plenty of caving hour’s left in the day after surveying Majhen Jama so we set off searching the nearby hill for other openings.

Within 20 minutes Eric had spotted a likely looking depression on the steep hillside. Yes there was a shaft - and another - and another! Vecji Jama (Bigger Cave) turned out to be a complex system of interconnecting surface shafts linking at a daylight chamber floored by steeply sloping ice. A short pitch between the ice and the lower wall led to a climb down a precarious boulder fall into a sizeable chamber. Unfortunately the cave terminated at a depth of 56m in a total choke. Still - two more caves to add to our "Sneznik collection".

The following days were spent in a mixture of caving and walking. Highlights included a photographic trip into Matinska Jama - a well-decorated cave in the south, a visit to Ravenska Jama - a short cave which contains excellent pockets of aragonite crystals, and a two-day climb up Mt Triglav, the countries highest mountain.

But - to get back to how we managed to "lose" one of Slovenia’s caves. Following the pattern of previous years, Franc, the professor of Karst Studies at Ljubljana University, had a couple of things he’d like us to have a look at in the forested area to the northeast of Laze. Experience has taught us that this would mean hours of searching the forest up and down the side of innumerable Dolines and being targeted by some of the world’s most malicious mosquitos. The reward - one or two insignificant holes with dodgy belays and plenty of loose boulders. The first day of "forest activities" didn’t go too badly - a couple of 30m shafts, one of which was extremely well decorated (Cave No: 2787 Br. V. Vel Dolcu).

The second day happened to be our last in Slovenia and Franc had given us three tasks - find Cave No; 3949 and re-survey it, search for a new shaft found by forest workers and locate Brezno V Tesmarca, last descended in 1925! 3949 couldn’t be found, even after three hours, Brezno V Tesmarca has "disappeared" although we did spend a couple of hours searching for it, and the "new shaft" also proved elusive. We reported back to Franc. No problem about not finding 3949, not surprised that we didn’t find the new shaft, because he couldn’t either! And great news about Brezno V Tesmarca, but we didn’t find it! We’d Just confirmed that Brezno V Tesmarca was in fact Cave No: 2787 - Brezno V Vel Dolca - the cave we’d descended and surveyed the previous day! France produced a 1925 description and survey. Yes we’d spent a couple of sweaty hours looking for a non-existent cave! (Or to be more exact - a cave that went under another name in a different location!) So while Eric and I packed our gear for the return journey Franc was busy deleting one cave from the record books.

Another Slovenia trip had been and gone all too quickly, leaving only memories, a few photos and surveys and thoughts of next year.

Steve Greatorex