Mark Little, Howard Holgate, Bryce Schroeder, and I joined Tanya McLaughlin to help her finish her survey of Flat Ridge Cave and the connecting Potato Bin Cave a few feet away. We began by driving down to the Sugar Grove lumberyard, and I checked out a previous insurgence that has now completely filled. While returning, wasps bit through my socks until Howard rescued me by hauling me back onto the bridge.
Mark didn't want to survey between the cave entrances, so he convinced Tanya that he could convert GPS coordinates into a vector that she could add to her survey program. We entered the resurgence to the cave after seven years and were happy to find it dry.
The muddy floors in this section of the cave looked familiar to me, and Tanya led the group toward a low belly crawl that headed toward Frog Bottom. Mark and Howard were more interested in an alternate non-belly route that I presented. Unfortunately Tanya and Bryce didn't wait for us beyond the belly crawl. We called out to them, headed down a few different passages, and eventually heard them respond to our calls. After getting turned around ourselves following the sound of their voices, we joined our leader again.
Then we found ourselves headed directly down a passage with no significant side routes. That's the way I remembered the path to Frog Bottom. I seemed to come to the passage end when I saw the NSS symbol on the ceiling, but a small hole in the floor offered hope. I slid on through and beckoned the others to follow into the big rooms beyond while I checked Tanya's map. With my compass in hand, I found that we were at the opposite end of the cave from Frog Bottom! I climbed down a hole to see the passage to the Birth Canal where Ericka Hoffmann had photographed a twisted me, and I knew for sure.
Fortunately we were on the side of the cave where we had hoped to break into Potato Bin Cave, the cave with a door beside Route 16 in Sugar Grove. We had little luck with the mud in the nearby passages. None of the leads seemed to go. I pressed up a dirty hill to find the vertical shaft up to nowhere that we had found about eight years earlier. The bottom of the shaft had a small hole where I remembered passage, but I now didn't even come close to fitting. Eventually I figured out that the passage we had explored in the bottom had filled in. It took fifteen seconds to correct that. I barrelled down into the next room and began digging furiously at a hole in the floor that blew air. Someone in the group began complaining about the cold, so I had to leave that dig for another day. I dropped in some flagging to find from the other side.
We checked out some leads for Tanya that all turned out to be dead ends and then headed to the big entrance room for a short break. Howard discovered some great spiders along the way with teardrop egg cases.
Then we headed for Frog Bottom. Howard was in front and reported that the Frog Bottom siphon had filled with mud to the ceiling. Frog Bottom had been an 8-foot slope down sand with a corresponding slope up on the other side. I couldn't believe that it had filled with mud, so I plunged in...almost up to my neck in muddy water. The leads beyond Frog Bottom would have to wait for another day.
Mark, Bryce, and I then surveyed down through the Vermi Chapel for about 75 feet more passage in six shots. Hieroglyphic vermiculations decorated the walls of the passage and the draperies we surveyed past. [According to Cave Minerals of the World, vermiculations are "thin, irregular, discontinuous deposits composed of incoherent materials (usually mud and clay), which are commonly found on the walls, ceilings, and floors of caves."]
When we joined Howard and Tanya to connect Potato Bin Cave to Flat Ridge, we grabbed the shovel and hoe from my brand new Escape Hybrid (a worthy caver's vehicle). Mark Daughtridge had poked into a hole in Potato Bin with little success last January, so we meant to open it up into Flat Ridge Cave. I could get my helmet in at first but not my head. I started digging with the hoe. I could then get my head in but only saw wall before me. I dug some more and got my chest past the tight spot and into a small box above. That still afforded me no view, and I only had one arm above me. Tanya put her feet against mine so I could get some traction, and I shoved myself into the box up to my waist. With some twisting and turning, I was disappointed that the box had no hope of exit by any other route. And no flagging tape.
It was still early in the day, so we headed over to Rich Valley in clean street clothes to check out some springs for Tanya. The first one was just a spring with plenty of dead air places to dig; good luck finding the cave there without erosion refilling it from the steep mountainside.
The second spring ran near a road built in the last decade. The spring was flowing heavily out of a 6-foot diameter concrete culvert that road crews had placed there. I straddled the stream and walked in about 100 feet to find that the spring actually leads to a cave, an adventure for another day.
