Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

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Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

Postby Phil Winkler » Nov 9, 2010 7:02 pm

My French caving buddy just emailed this link. Note the size of the caver's shadow on the rear wall.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYZH3PS-fA
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Re: Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

Postby Chads93GT » Nov 9, 2010 10:24 pm

Looks like a moderately sized room.......................................... gawd
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Re: Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

Postby self-deleted_user » Nov 9, 2010 10:25 pm

Oh my...what perfect composition too...my jaw is dropped in awe...it's just...beautiful beyond words.

Edit: check out that same person's other videos on youtube...I particularly like S-Women (hehe we should totally make tshirts for that) and this is another amazing cave...I like how the local person is just "ever since i was a child I come here for 30 minutes then leave"...I wonder if he even knows what is back in that cave, seems like he just hangs around the entrance. http://www.youtube.com/user/CASOLA2010# ... a99OPZtoqs
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Re: Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

Postby Phil Winkler » Nov 10, 2010 8:36 am

Amy, there are a lot of interesting things in this area. It is on the border of France and Spain in the Pyrenees where many of the people are Basque. The Pierre St. Martin (PSM) cave is one of the deepest in the world. It is also the cave described in the book Shibumi by Trevanian. Near the end of the book the hero is in the cave and swimming in the vast underground river when he exits the cave in a huge waterfall. This waterfall is a real place-Kakouetta Gorge seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc0LmWd1GfI This is not far from the town of St. En Grace in France. The plateau above is called the Pescamou (sp?) and is a treeless expanse of karst with pits everywhere. Supposedly it was once forested but all the trees were cut to build the Spanish Armada centuries ago.

As for Verna, when we entered the room from the EDF Tunnel half way up the west wall someone commented it was like being on a mountain top at night. That was 1976.
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Re: Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

Postby self-deleted_user » Nov 10, 2010 8:40 am

Amazing. I need to go there someday. :) Next time you visit let me know and take me with you! :bananabat:
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Re: Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

Postby Phil Winkler » Nov 11, 2010 2:58 pm

My French friend, Jean-Francois, called today to ask if I enjoyed the video of Verna. Of course, I told him. Several cavers have also commented on it, but how was it lighted? He responded that he assumed the photography team used the existing lighting. When I asked him what the hell he was talking about he said maybe he had forgotten to tell me that Verna was semi-commercialized two years ago! Go figure.

Anyhow, here is the web site: http://www.laverna.fr/ and I suspect Google or altavista.com can translate the page for you.

They have also succeeded in building a dam in the river in the cave and piping the water out and down the mountain to a hydro-electric plant in St. Engrace. This is what they tried to do back in the 60s when the EDF Tunnel was first made.

On google-earth go to: Arette Pierre St Martin, 64570 Arette, France

Kakoueta Groge and St Engrace are just west of this.
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Re: Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

Postby LukeM » Nov 11, 2010 3:28 pm

Phil Winkler wrote:Anyhow, here is the web site: http://www.laverna.fr/ and I suspect Google or altavista.com can translate the page for you.


Just click the little British flag in the lower right. I was very impressed with their tour options. 42 Euro for a 5hr "adventure" tour including some sort of vertical portion, and 60 Euro for a full day trip. The commercial cave nearest me charges $108 for for a little bit of crawling around.

Also came across this video of a hot air balloon in La Verna:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiqkddNxazQ&feature=player_embedded
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Re: Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

Postby Phil Winkler » Nov 11, 2010 3:53 pm

The balloon thing was by Ruben Gomez some years ago. Verna is about 90m in height. Ruben was one of the early explorers of the PSM.
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Re: Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

Postby Dave Bunnell » Nov 15, 2010 3:25 pm

Cool link Phil. That's a great way to portray a big room. Would like to see more stuff like that in the Multimedia Salon. This kind of zoom effect can be done with programs like Pictures to EXE and Microsoft's freebie program (Picture Story or something like that I think; I use PTE).

I was really impressed with the lighting too but if its a showcave lighting I'm now more impressed with the job THEY did to make it so. That has to be the largest underground chamber ever lit for show cave viewing. There's been talk over the years of doing something like that at the Sarawak Chamber even involving an underground railroad that would take visitors around it but hasn't come to pass, fortunately. But the trail through Deer Cave with its natural illumination is the biggest "commercial" cave space I've ever seen.

I too once visited the chamber through the EDF tunnel back in the 1980s. A group of us cave photographers (including the Bosteds and Kevin Downey) visited the cave after the Barcelona Congress. The room was cool but I was enjoying the nice downstream passage when Ann announced that we had to try and take a photo of the big chamber. I felt the prospects of a good photo didn't warrant missing seeing more cave but she won out. We set all our cameras up on tripods while two of us used big screwbase bulbs to try and light the room up. We had only voice communication. Well in the end after spending several hours, all of our flashes had gone off in one tiny corner of the room because the flashers were confused about where they were in relation to the camera. I would do it much differently today....but it looks like its a lot easier now to get a good shot at La Verna!

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Re: Panorama of Salle La Verna in the Pierre St. Martin

Postby Phil Winkler » Nov 15, 2010 3:57 pm

Dave, Not sure if you saw this one. This light bar was powered by a 12v car battery and the bulbs burned about 1-3 minutes. It did not do much to illuminate Verna and I think they used 5 or 6 of them. We brought this one out to assist.
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