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kvmapr
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Post subject: ALPENA BLOW HOLE CAVE - December 5, 2004
 Posted: Dec 15, 2004 - 03:14 PM
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Joined: Jun 16, 2004
Posts: 224
Status: Offline
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ALPENA BLOW HOLE CAVE
December 5, 2004
By Richard Hand
On the 5th of December 2004, I went with Berry Horner, Rocky Parsons, and Doug McCarty to connect the upstream and downstream surveys in the cave. It was a nice clear day with a cold wind blowing – visibility was excellent. Rocky wore a bright orange vest; I, bright blue coveralls, and Doug and Berry were in bright red. It was “deer season!” and we did not want to be misunderstood. We hiked up a jeep trail from the parking area, crossed over to another trail, took a deer trail, then no trail. The entire area was pocketed with numerous sinkholes and one rock face had a cave entrance for a mouth.
Our cave entrance was in the bottom of one of the sinkholes, a tight hole in black mud with darkness below. Not knowing the climb down, I let someone who knew the cave take the lead. Next I plunged in feet-first. Squirming and sliding, as my feet searched for a foothold, that they never found, I dropped out of control. We walked down stream to the place where a little digging, a few months ago, permitted real cavers to do a through-trip. We mapped the crawl through the dug section, dropped down a pit, and slithered through a full-immersion flat-out belly-crawl. We had arrived in a large breakdown room and connected the surveys.
Berry said to just follow the stream, and we would go out the lower entrance. I climbed down to the top of waterfall on the very slippery rock and came to different opinion. There was so much water going over the falls that no way could be seen to climb down. Berry thought that he could climb down from memory, but on second thought realized that the lower cave, with this much water, must be siphoned closed. If we had climbed down in the full force of the water, we probably would not have been able to climb back up. Completely soaked, trapped in this wet cave, the outcome would have most likely been deadly.
The fact that I am writing this trip report indicates that we climbed back out the upper entrance. Time wise it had been a short trip, but the crawling and climbing, constantly exposed to, if not immersed in, very cold had an exhausting effect. We were cold and wet, but the fast hike back to the cars kept us reasonably warm. One other thing kept us moving. We were all completely mud brown from head to foot, deer brown!
It had been an exciting cave trip, we completed an important part of the survey, and we had gotten to see some very pretty and interesting things in the cave. The down stream entrance is Alpena. Now that I have seen both ends, it is still one of my favorite caves. |
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posted by KVMAPR
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