July 1 at Hancock Cave

Destination: Hancock Cave

Trip Date: July 1, 2006

Participants: Matt Jenkins, Tanya McLaughlin, Ken Walsh, and Aaron Gladder

I felt a pang of nervousness when we arrived at the parking area for Hancock Cave. A tractor was clearing part of the field, and I was afraid that we might not get a chance to go underground that day. It turns out that the tractor driver was the new owner of the cave. We introduced ourselves in person to him and his wife, great folks building a retirement home on the property. That was enough to make the trip worthwhile.

Good thing.

Despite the five leads that we knocked off on the June 10 trip, the cave still has many unexplored leads on this side of the Funnel Tunnel. The problem is that some leads are tricky to get to and others require certain skills (e.g., anorexia). Tanya, Matt, and I had explored much of the cave in the 1990’s so we thought we knew what laid ahead. The funny thing was that drafting the map had skewed my memory a bit, and our long absence had made me forget the depth of the pits.

We made the two leads beyond You-Don’t-Know-Jack and Not-in-the-Face Pits our first goal. Because the pits are near the entrance with no good riggable walls and one lead was a pit and the other a climb, we elected to try a novel climbing technique, Tanya’s aluminum ladder. The 13-foot extension ladder was lightweight and made the pathway into the Grantham Room trivial to travel. After that, I let Matt drag the ladder along the crawlway back toward Not-in-the-Face Pit.

On my draft map I had drawn a ledge beside an unnamed pit along the way. I looked at the ledge and realized that there was no way to get Tanya to walk along the sloped ledge, pushing her hands against the opposite wall without staring down twenty feet, and climb up the other side. We solved this conundrum by extending the ladder across the pit (with 1.5 feet to spare). On belay I started across the ledge using the ladder for handholds. The tough part was that now I had to crook my neck and move across the ledge on my left knee with my right leg extended across the pit. On the other side, I rigged an etrier to the ladder rung and easily climbed out.

Before bringing Matt and Tanya across, I crawled over to Not-in-the-Face Pit to scout it out. The ladder wasn’t going to be long enough to get us to the bottom of the 18-foot-deep pit. Matt came up with the unique idea of tying the cable ladder to the aluminum ladder, dropping the extended aluminum ladder into the unnamed pit, and climbing down the cable ladder. The flaw in the logic was that as soon as we released the cable ladder, both ladders would’ve disappeared from our reach. Other variations involved people simultaneously jumping into pits while attached to one another, but Tanya and I couldn’t be convinced.

The aluminum ladder was no use at all in attempts to cross YDKJ Pit, so we returned it to the Grantham Room. We took a side trip to scout out the drop into the Whine Cellar, and my confidence in the ability to get the aluminum ladder to the lead down there waned.

Matt then led us almost directly back to TJ’s Trap. It’s good to see that his navigational skills have improved since his dowel days. He asked me if he could descend first with the handline, and I pointed out that that meant he’d have to catch me at the bottom. He reconsidered and let me go down first.

We went to the lead where Gordon hung in mid-air in much the same way that bricks don’t (we watched H2G2 the night before that trip). Matt refused to rig the webbing to the rock pendant I suggested (quite wisely) and instead tied Tanya’s webbing into a major loop around the rock holding Mike Davidson’s mud sculptures. The only downside to this rigging was that if you grabbed one side of the webbing, someone else had to pull the other way (another one of Matt’s ways to have one person descend while raising another).

I clipped an etrier to the bottom, and we descended into the passage below. Dave Duguid had been into this passage through the tight crawlway a few weeks earlier, and he told us that the passage looked as though it definitely continued. I checked out the passage, and instead it ended abruptly at the base of Which Glob Pit.

Matt, Tanya, and I all remembered our survey of Which Glob Pit from December 1997. Back then Matt and I were both hanging from the same cable ladder while reading instruments; Tanya was freezing at the top writing down all the notes and I sketched it in afterwards. As a payment for this shoddy survey, the three of us found ourselves at the bottom of Which Glob Pit again last weekend shortly after the area had received seven inches of rain in one day.

The dampness is significant because Matt and I were forced to figure out which protrusion he had used as a station nine years earlier. We surveyed from Like Bricks Don’t to the base of Which Glob in order to map this area and netted just 49 feet of survey. However, it knocks off two more leads in Hancock Cave. When it’s drier, it might be worth digging at the base of Which Glob Pit because this is the furthest point downstream in that part of the cave and blows air.

To get back up, we knew that Tanya didn’t want to climb up the loopy webbing, so we sent her out along the crawlway where Dave and Gordon both said I’d never fit. She eventually found the tight spot but insisted she couldn’t fit through. When she told us that we were responsible for getting her out in one piece, Matt and I began entertaining thoughts of a Frankens-Tanya who could be reassembled after passing the pieces out of the cave.

We did manage to squeeze her pelvis through the tight spot, get ourselves out of the cave with nothing more than a webbing line, and arrive at the Tuscan Italian Grill at 10 PM. It’s great that they’re open until 11 PM on Saturdays. The included survey length of the cave is now up to 2.08 miles.