Expedition Name (& Club): YUCPC Montenegro (YUCPC)

Destination country: Montenegro
Region:

Lat: 43.1283 Long: 19.0367 Elevation: 0 m
MEF funding: none

Leader: Mr Mark Sims

Brief Expedition objectives:

List a short summary of the main Expedition objectives.

We will return to the 2011/2012 camp with the primary objective of pushing, surveying and photographing our best lead from 2012, YF1. Secondary objectives include returning to and pushing entrances identified in 2011/2012 and prospecting promising looking areas that we didn't manage to cover in previous years

Detailed description of objectives:

Give a more detailed account of the purpose of the trip, including any particular known caves you intend to visit, specific areas where you will explore for new cave, and scientific experiments you will attempt.

We have several open leads down YF1 which we couldn’t explore in 2012 due to a lack of gear, time and manpower. With more rope and more people we aim to push and survey these continuations. There are also a large number of entrances identified from the previous two years that require revisits with gear to descend. Any significant discoveries down these will also be surveyed. Finally, we have identified promising looking areas that have not yet been prospected for entrances, so we will aim to cover these systematically as we have done with areas covered so far.

Having had a fairly successful expedition last year we are hoping that more people will be able to participate this year, hopefully in the region of 15 in total

Previous work in this area:

Give details of any previous work in this area by your own and other teams. Include references to reports and articles published on the area, and the names of any local cavers or academics with whom you have discussed the Expedition.

ASAK (Belgrade University Caving Club) have regularly arranged international expeditions to the southern part of Durmitor since the mid ‘80s during which several significant caves have been found including JVB (-775 m), Jama u Malom Lomnom dolu (-605 m) and Fliš (-582 m).

Having joined these expeditions in 2004, 2007 and 2010 and making no major discoveries, 3 of us went on a reccy trip in 2011 to look at the Northern region, having browsed maps of Durmitor, talked to ASAK about it and found no published evidence of expeditions to the area. We had just 40 m of rope, but found enough potential to warrant a return trip in 2012 and found no evidence of previous visits.

2012 saw 10 of us return to the area with much more kit than previously and managed to push and survey YF1 to -133 m where we ran out of gear with multiple open leads continuing below. We also pushed two other finds from 2011, YF10 and YF11, to probable conclusions with surveyed lengths of 204 m and 192 m respectively. We found a promising looking area in 2012 with much more solid rock than most other areas of the mountain, where we identified a large number of entrances that need gear to descend and left a sizeable area which we didn’t have time to look at.

Full accounts of previous visits can be found at our new Durmitor website: durmitor.yucpc.org.uk