54239. Wider view from the Entrance Hall towards the outside
Most images are approximately 768 x 1024 pixels in size, numbers in front of the picture descriptions are serial numbers of the original photo files. Jože Stražišar, of the Karlovica Caving Society (Jamarsko društvo Karlovica) helped make this excursion happen. The names in the cave were in several instances given by the author.
Page, texts and photos copyright (c) Primož Jakopin - Klok 2024.
54239. Wider view from the Entrance Hall towards the outside
54240. On a previous excursion, the author did not find a passage from, as he now named it, the White Vaulted Hall (it has no name on the cave map) to the White Hall. He believed he already reached the White Hall from the color of the hall ceiling. He showed Jože the photo of the hall, and from the fact that the author did not cross the muddy water barrier in front of the hall and also from the insufficient size of the hall, Jože concluded that it was actually not the White Hall, but some hall in front of it. He explained to the author that the passage to the White Hall is between stalagmites, followed by a large rock with passages on the left and right of it. The right side one is easier to pass. The most stalagmites in this hall, as far as the author could tell, were on the upper right side of the hall. As he is not really speedy he spent over an hour squeezing into all the cracks and narrows on top (right) side of the hall. When he was already on the verge of despair he descended to the bottom of the hall, where at the end there is a not-so-pleasant muddy squeeze, left it for the time being, and continued on the left side. He immediately found the correct passage. The rock mentioned by Jože, in the middle of the photo, is quite large and can easily be bypassed on the right side.
54242. Soon he reached the mud-and-water obstacle from Jože's description and after 15 meters of quick-mud with a few rocks scattered in between, it requires a speedy passage so that the boots don't sink too much into the mud, he reached the lake in the photo. The practice from Velika Karlovica taught him to neatly fold the pants of his caving suit, including the built-in knee pads, into his boots, used two little more than a meter and a half long sticks for support (one is on a stone next to him) and, with dry feet, reached the other side. The photo was taken from the pebble beach, is a view back across the lake.
54248. Flowstone column before the beginning of Javornik branch (Javorniški rokav). It resembles a tree with a wide crown
54245. This sleeve of the cave is not as spacious as the halls, but it is quite long, and Jože was of course not mistaken when he said that the tunnel would provide the author with a lot of interesting work. Because of the mistake he made on the previous excursion, the White Hall was clearly the author's primary goal today, but the Javorniki branch was quite easily accessible so he proceeded about 50 meters into the tunnel, to get a glimpse of it. In the photo: Hall with Slabs (Dvorana s ploščami), very picturesque and also slippery. It also has a large barrel-shaped flowstone column, which would require two extras, of a more suitable age and of different gender, for a proper photo. The most beautiful such column is in the South Tunnel of Zelške jame ...
54246. View back the tunnel just before its beginning, with a rock pillar, partially flowstone covered, here it looks like an elephant as seen from the front.
54249. A mighty flowstone hill at the beginning of the hall, which has almost completely closed the formerly wide and high tunnel that connects this place to other parts of the cave. There are many caves, especially in the littoral karst, where the tunnel ends with an impassable flowstone wall, usually formed on a collapse. As in the cave Mačkovica, a narrow but still sufficient passage remained, a little below the top of the hall. The cave is illuminated by five LED floodlights, which, to subdue too strong shadows, are complemented by a zoomable LED flashlight in the immediate vicinity of the camera stand.
54250. An improvised support for this flashlight, which held it in just the right position, ...
54251. ... seen up close here. The remaining two sticks carried two of the five floodlights, two were placed on small shelves in the left rock wall, one on the right side, on a stalactite pedestal at the side of the hill. The stand for the phone camera has extensions added so that the view of the flowstone hill is not obstructed by the stalagmites in the foreground.
54254. A cob-like stalagmite with folds in the lower part, to the left of the flowstone hill
54256. A rock slab with a nicely decorated border and nipples. It is close to one meter high.
54257. Often a dry twig brought by high water gets stuck under the ceiling of a tunnel and the blades of dry grass catch on it. View back along the passage, where the tunnel towards the Whitevaulted Hall branches off from the Main tunnel - which soon ends with a siphon.
54258. Cloud over Mt. Slivnica
Related pages:
Mala Karlovica, September 5, 2024
Jama pod Karlovškim gradom, September 18, 2024
This page, text and photos by Primož Jakopin,
member of the Ljubljana Cave Exploration Society (DZRJL).
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Page initiated on September 18, 2024; date of the last change: September 26, 2024.
URL: https://www.jakopin.net/primoz/slike/2024/PJ20240911_en.php
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