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Slovenia: Zelške jame

Zelške jame is a subterranean water cave system in the area of the Regional Park Rakov Škocjan. Some of my mountaineering friends decided to explore the caves and they invited me to join them. Since the weather forecast was bad, the best thing to do was to have a roof under my head and that was in the cave. In front of the cave, local cavers also joined us and together we went underground. Soon we entered the cave system, that was made by the Rak stream, that discharges the Lake Cerknica. The stream runs through Rakov Škocjan valley and disappears again in Tkalca jama (Weaver cave). Muddy cave was explored with boots, helmets and headlamps and inside we found many karst shapes. At the end we came to a the small lake that continues to the other side of the cave and some of us decided to swim through it, while the others returned back. We gathered again at the parking lot, where we continued with the beer and food.

Rainy day, bit we were prepared and we arranged everything for our picnic after the sightseeing.

Short walk towards the cave.

Let's go underground.

A sign, that we have a real cave here.

The system of the Zelška Caves is 7338m long.

This cave is fun to discover and shows many rare and interesting karst features.

The cave is part of a huge cave system which already started to collapse.

Local cavers told us many interesting stories.

It's been a while since I've been in the real cave again.

The bell.

 

A little bit of climbing.

 

Successfully through the narrow part of the cave.

In a few years, they'll still look the same, in a 1000 years, they may grow as much as a few centimetres.

 

Boots were the right choice.

For now, the cave system with the greatest total length of surveyed passage is Mammoth Cave in USA, at 652 km.

Where are the heads?

The water level can change a lot, as you can see from the straight horizontal line in the middle of the picture.

Ana, Maša, Jernej and mes decided to swim and exit the cave on the other side.

 

Others returned back.

After the picnic we slowly returned back home and on the way we admired Lake Cerknica, an intermittent lake in the southern part of the Cerknica Polje.

#caving #RakŠkocjan