1976 Trip Report to the Pierre St. Martin cave in France.

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1976 Trip Report to the Pierre St. Martin cave in France.

Postby Phil Winkler » Apr 11, 2012 2:16 pm

Graham recently dug this out and we scanned it to a pdf.
Our 1976 expedition report to the Pierre St Martin in France was found recently in Graham's house and scanned to a pdf file. Brings back great memories from 36 years ago.
http://www.members.dca.net/pwink/alumni/psm1976.pdf

We've had some weird behavior posting the link, too.

Check out the list of food in the Annex. Much of this was Army dehydrated canned foods. "Rations for 15 people down-range for 14 days." was on the order sheet. The mess sergeant at Wiesbaden needed rubber aprons badly for the steaming operations and I had lots of them in our lab. Seemed like a good trade to both of us. :big grin:
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Re: 1976 Trip Report to the Pierre St. Martin cave in France

Postby Phil Winkler » Apr 11, 2012 7:06 pm

To put this into some kind of perspective keep in mind that many of us had only been caving a couple of years and no one had done any kind of expedition caving before. So, we fell back on our military training of trying to plan every detail and activity.

In hindsight it seems clear to me that the two leaders had different views on how the process should work.

I find all our standards then quite funny compared to what has been done since then.

Anyway, it is a look back at the past that I find myself doing more often nowadays. Why is that? :roll:
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Re: 1976 Trip Report to the Pierre St. Martin cave in France

Postby submassabielle » Apr 12, 2012 10:33 am

Great! I look forward to reading this. I just (last night) finished re-reading "Caves of Adventure" by Haroun Tazieff, telling the story of the expeditions in the 1950's and the death of Marcel Loubens, including the dicovery of the largest room, which at the time was named after Loubens (as far as I can see from "googling", the name of this room seems to have changed). It was this book which sparked (re-sparked) my interest in caves last summer...I don't think I would be on this forum if it weren't for this book (which I bought almost by accident).
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Re: 1976 Trip Report to the Pierre St. Martin cave in France

Postby Phil Winkler » Apr 12, 2012 2:12 pm

The room you mention would be Salle La Verna: http://www.laverna.fr/

There remains a memorial to Loubens at the foot of the Lepineaux Shaft where he died. The cross is made of reflective aluminum strips. Written in carbide smoke on the large rock alongside in French is:
"Here Marcel Loubens spent the last days of a courageous life."

See here: http://www.agamemnon.ch/06_p-lecture/psm-a-48.htm
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Re: 1976 Trip Report to the Pierre St. Martin cave in France

Postby Leclused » Apr 19, 2012 5:54 am

Phil Winkler wrote:The room you mention would be Salle La Verna: http://www.laverna.fr/

There remains a memorial to Loubens at the foot of the Lepineaux Shaft where he died. The cross is made of reflective aluminum strips. Written in carbide smoke on the large rock alongside in French is:
"Here Marcel Loubens spent the last days of a courageous life."

See here: http://www.agamemnon.ch/06_p-lecture/psm-a-48.htm


Hi Phil,

At the bottom the Lepineux shaft the chamber is called 'Salle Lepineux'. La Salle Verna is more downstream (2 hours). So in fact these are 2 seperate rooms.
Salle Loubens and salle Chevalier are in between those rooms.

The Lepineux shaft has been remapped last summer by two members of Avalon. And there is a project going on to remap all the big rooms in the PSM. This is done by ARSIP

BR

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