Tag Archives: caving

End of year thoughts

Inspired by others, I thought doing a retrospective on 2017 would be an interesting thing to look back on in a year’s time and see what’s changed.

Work things

December 2017 marked a year of me working for Endless. It’s been twelve months of fixing small bugs, maintaining some OS components, poking my nose into lower parts of the OS than I’m used to, and taking on one or two big projects. I spent a significant amount of time on a project to add new distribution features to libostree and flatpak. That’s something which will hopefully be rolling out in early 2018. It was good to be able to get fairly deeply involved with a new component at a lower level in the stack. More of that in 2018!

I also spent some of my time in 2017 picking up a bit more of the GLib maintenance workload. I’m not sure how much of a difference it’s made to the bug backlog, but it’s kept me occupied anyway.

Hobby things

For most of my working life, I’ve had the luxury of being able to work on FOSS software (mostly in the GNOME ecosystem) as my day job, and as a result, quite a few of my hobby projects are actually maintained during the day. The ones which aren’t have suffered during 2017, because time and energy are limited. I’ve been thinking of ways to ensure that code gets maintained, but haven’t come up with any good solutions in 2017. That’s one to carry over into 2018.

Trips

2017 was a bit less of a plane-heavy year than 2016, but some trips still happened:

  • FOSDEM, catching up with old friends and colleagues, and where the start of the current phase of GLib maintenance started.
  • A week of caving in South Wales, including a trip down the fantastic Dan-yr-Ogof cave (the short round), which included floating down an underground canal on an inflatable swimming pool ring.
  • A week of walking in the Glencoe area, where the weather was uncharacteristically cooperative, and the views were, predictably, pretty good.
  • A party in London to celebrate Endless’ 5th birthday. As always, it was good to spend quality time with my Endless colleagues in endless pubs.
  • Two weeks of caving in Austria, finding some new cave, and exploring further into existing cave. This is something I’m hoping to repeat in future.
  • GUADEC in Manchester, right on the back of the Austria trip (including some fun in posting a laptop to myself so I could have it at the conference). I gave a talk, which some people listened to. We also went on a walk in the Peak District, which was good fun (even if the weather was a bit grey).
  • Two weeks of long-distance trekking in the Svaneti region of Georgia. An excellent destination, with excellent cheese bread. We derived continual amusement from the guide’s dry humour, and the ‘helpful’ comments left by others on the trek information we were using. I did not get struck by lightning.
  • A long weekend in Stockholm to explore the city and catch up with friends. Stockholm has good running!

The outdoors

2017 has definitely been a year of taking advantage of living in the north of England.

  • Around 40 caving trips on weeknights and weekends, which have been interesting and (mostly) fun.
  • 12 fell races, a fun run along with a friend for part of their Bob Graham round, and my first ultra.
  • Running really took off for me: around 1300km run in total (and 57km of ascent), and about 150 hours of 2017 spent running.

Reading and listening

Gigs were a bit thin on the ground: despite there being plenty on in my local area, I always had something else to do. Despite that:

  • Insomnium were good, though I had to leave before the end because of trains.
  • Breabach were very good, and a band I hadn’t heard before going to the gig. Now a favourite.
  • Kreator sounded uncannily like their last live album, but were otherwise enjoyable.
  • Opeth were pretty fantastic, playing a good variety of new and old stuff.

I managed to read only 13 books in 2017, though that number is largely padded out by some short stories I read just to reach my yearly target. That’s not quite fair, though; I read 3250 pages in total. Most recommenable: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang; most disappointing: Hiroshima.

Cave exploration in Austria

For once, this is going to be a non-technical post. I hope to share some of what I’ve been up to in my summer holidays this year.

In late July, I spent two weeks on the Löser plateau in Austria, as part of a long-running caving expedition exploring the caves up there. The plateau is a huge expanse of limestone, opposite the Dachstein, and it contains hundreds of caves of varying sizes. The same expedition has been going there every summer for the last 40 years, slowly working its way across the plateau, trying to find big and deep caves. This was the first time I’d joined them.

Credit: Chris Densham

Some brief background: What is caving? It’s a sport where people descend caves, generally to the bottom (or as deep as they can get), to see and map what is there. It typically involves a lot of water (less of that in Austria than the UK) and mud, cold temperatures (definitely cold in Austria), and technical rope work to descend and ascend vertical shafts (‘pitches’). It combines the skills of climbing, scrambling and surveying; and often requires unshakeable enthusiasm for prolonged physical misery. It’s good fun.

Credit: Luke Stangroom

This year, we focused primarily on two existing (and large) caves: Tunnock’s, and Balcony. I spent a number of my days down Balcony, at around -300m (that’s 300m vertically below the entrance of the cave). We explored various new bits of passage, including a 100m×80m×80m chamber which, sadly, was a dead end; but good fun to get to and explore. Other trips included setting up the ropes (’rigging’) in some bits of cave so they could be re-explored from previous years; and re-surveying some other pieces of passage where the original surveys were incorrect.

Credit: Brendan Hall

Aside from trips down Balcony, we spent some time prospecting for new caves, finding a couple of promising new ones, and another which looked promising then turned into a dead end after 100m of depth. Since I left, another few cave entrances (some new, some rediscovered from 2012) have been found, and leads have been pushed even further in the existing caves.

Credit: Brendan Hall

What are conditions like in the caves? Unlike caves in the UK, most of the ones on the Löser plateau are dry apart from one or two sections. It’s only very recently that exploration has got down to a depth which routinely sees water. There is some mud, but not as much as in the UK. However, what there is is thicker and more pervasive. There’s generally more sand than one sees in caves in the UK, which does a good job of gritting up equipment and hands (think about what happens whenever you go to the beach). The caves are cold, but not ludicrously so — a few of them are cold enough to maintain large ice columns, but I was warm enough in my UK caving gear without extra thermals.

Credit: Brendan Hall

Why do people do this expedition caving? Many reasons, but most commonly, because it takes you to interesting new places, it’s a technical challenge, it’s a physical challenge, and the other people who do it are good fun to be around.

Credit: Luke Stangroom

When not caving, due to tiredness, laziness or weather, people spent their time in the valley, relaxing and drawing up surveys of the sections of caves they’d recently explored (‘nerding’). There are various bits of software for this, which take the legs of dead-reckoned survey and tie them together, using error distribution through loop closures to increase accuracy. The results are pretty nifty, though it takes a while to get up to speed with the software and draw up your surveys efficiently.

Credit: http://expo.survex.com/1623/264/264.html

Caving’s a fun sport with opportunities to go places where literally no human has ever been before, if you take it far enough. It’s easy to get into, too. Read more updates from the expedition if you want.