Joined: Jun 17, 2004
Posts: 73
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PH Survey, Memorial Day Cave
1/8/05 Dwight Livingston
Rick Royer and Bob Zimmerman rode with me Friday out to Germany Valley. We saw no cavers at the Gateway - Rib Eye Steak and Shrimp special for all of us - and later when we slid to a stop on Devin Kout's lawn we saw no one there either. It was raining lightly and dark, and we all changed in the shed and entered the cave by 6:15 pm.
My first camp trip in MDC was last February, when I had left a sleeping bag and pad at camp. I hadn't used it from March until November and, feeling like I was trashing the cave by leaving it there, decided to bring it out my first opportunity. Last November, when I came out after surveying with Ralph Hartley and Pete Penzer, I decided that the total load wasn't all that heavy and that all I needed was, instead of carrying two bags, to carry one pack large enough to hold everything. So I bought a GGG Cheve expedition bag, and that was what I had packed for the weekend. I was a bit surprised by how big and how heavy it turned out to be. Some of those Russians handle those things like there're just a big caving bag. I had to treat the thing completely different.
In the Chocolate Surprise, I found that the heavy pack didn't push easily, nor did it push down Miles Mouse Hole without fiddling with it the whole way. Pushing through the Puppet Buster was nearly impossible. I figured then I'd have try a new approach. Fortunately, when we started up Columbia Canyon, the substantial shoulder straps and waist belt made it easy to hike with. For most of the passage I was stripped to the waist and sweated up and down the hills, same as other trips.
We found no one at camp. White fungus puffs abounded, particularly around the east end of camp, but it did not smell so bad. I spread my gear at the camp entrance and was in bed by midnight, glad to have a perfectly sweet smelling sleeping bag, much improved from last time. I feel asleep quickly.
Sometime later, way too early it seemed, I woke to the sound of a gas stove flame and sounds of food prep. Instead of rising I lay awhile listening, and discovered in fact it was way too early. The noise was Lew Carroll and Mark Stover, who had arrived late and were now making dinner. They were politely quiet but must have turned that stove on and off twenty times.
Our first objective for the survey was the Pearl Harbor Passage, a lead that Bob and Pete Penzer had started in December. Bob wanted very much to return, and we were eager, so we climbed the Pinnacle Room to the top of a roped mud wall and scrambled only a few yards in to where the survey left off. It was quite a lead.
Heading off northeast, fifteen to twenty feet high and more wide, with a meandering channel for a floor, the passage allowed long shots. Rick poked up to a dome with a good lead above a potential twenty-foot bolt climb. About a hundred feet back, where the main passage turned right, we climbed to high lead on the left wall, a short room with bat bones and a too-tight passage dipping steeply east. Though smaller, this lead turned out to be the farthest we got toward the edge of the map.
Back at the main passage, a big room smoothly sculpted in distinctly banded rock, we followed the curve right, into a smaller passage that bobbed and weaved and quickly narrowed to a crawl. It split, rejoined, dodged left and right. Somehow we managed to set a line stations in the order 9,13, 10, 11, 17, 12, and 18. Finally it all ended, at a cross joint with a mild case of breakdown. We called it the "Room That Will Live in Infamy." We decided it might be a dig lead, then dug a while, then decided, as Rick squeezed under and inspected the remaining movable rocks, that it was indeed ended and impassable, no longer a dig but rather a dug.
After a little more survey near the Pinnacle Room - which included Bob exploring down a potential pit and having the floor drop out from underneath him, revealing a pit in fact - we made it to camp for the dinner hour. After eating we headed up the ramp from camp to search out station F11 and find what might turn out to be a back door to the Gunsight Room. Bob said Pete Penzer had dropped this pit in December and had seen a station, so a connection seemed likely. None of us had actually seen the thing before, so we had a little trouble route-finding through the rat's maze next to camp. RaIph's "take the obvious route" instructions included a couple of very low crawls, but we found it without wasting too much time. While I changed into vertical gear, Rick rigged the hundred foot rope. The rope turned out to be the same one I had to deal with last November with Pete, which is threaded through a piece of webbing that won't come off so only part of the rope is useable. We put the longer useable end down the hole and I went after it.
The pit is a roughly twelve-foot caliber tube pointing straight down fifty feet to a sandy floor. The floor was, as described by Pete, a bridge over a canyon, with a hole at either end where the canyon passed below and a small hole in the middle of the floor where all the falling rocks went. I could hear water and just see reflections maybe twenty feet down the upstream hole, but the canyon was narrow and hard to judge. Downstream looked roomier so I dropped that side a little farther. I couldn't see bottom where I stopped. Certainly no survey stations.
We taped the drop, then Rick and Bob came down. We surveyed part way down the downstream end, then Rick and I worked a way to the bottom. It was roomier there than I had pictured, and decorated with gnarly soda straws and a little blood red flowstone. Bob rerigged down the upstream hole, which from below we could see was a straight shot down and easier to exit.
Bob and Rick had both surveyed the passage that runs somewhere below this pit, and they both agreed this was nothing like that passage. The stream was descending steeply, cutting down toward the east. We surveyed upstream and west, to a dead end with some meager potential as a breakdown climb, and then returned to run a shot to a small room below the pit. We flagged a last station there for whoever goes next. While Bob started climbing out, I scouted downstream and found a roomy level, enough for easy passage, descending about ten feet above the stream bottom and heading east.
We were in bed by midnight, and next morning were on the trail out Columbia Canyon by nine twenty. I took all my gear, not knowing when I'll be back. I did a little better handling the big pack, this time pulling it behind me as I backed through the Puppet Buster. That worked better, and I'll probably bring it next time, whenever that is. We made it out by quarter after three in the afternoon, to a glorious warm and sunny sky and rolling fields.
I look forward to hearing how the lead below F11 goes. I don't know what the survey station was that Pete saw, or if the story got scrambled. I checked the line plots and it certainly looks as if that all may actually connect with the "Goes Big" lead near W33, which I marked back in March. Good luck. |
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