Lover's Leap Cave Trip Report

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Tanya McLaughlin was good enough to allow Matthew Van Fossen, Ken Walsh, and Matthew Lubin to stay at her house Friday night, October 2. After a hearty breakfast at the new Pioneer Restaurant, not far from the old, the skies were gray but remained closed on Saturday morning above Lover’s Leap Cave, and stayed closed long enough to allow them to climb the hill to the cave and descend to the entrance without getting soaked. Surveying was a learning process for the two Matthews. We covered about 200 feet in length, encountering a bat and some possible evidence of cave rat habitation along the way, and a couple of previously marked survey points. Leads were examined and new positions marked. In the army, “familizarization” with each new piece of equipment and in particular with weapons is a well-worn process for new recruits; “familiarization” with the clinometer and compass for the two Matthews consisted of a series of angles shot both forwards and backwards, with no more than a 2-degree variation permitted between the measurements. One line from a point on a low cave ceiling to a point on a slightly higher rocky outcropping, hovering above a deep pit, proved particularly challenging, but was useful in teaching the value of settling into the best possible position to take instrument measurements, whether that involves acrobatics that would make a Chicago Bulls halftime rubber man proud, or simply taking one’s helmet off to avoid scraping a low ceiling.
Stretching from about 11 in the morning to slightly past 5, the trip was quite uneventful and added some new information on Lover’s Leap Cave to our previous store. The strains of bluegrass once again greeted those exiting the cave. Lubin struggled to get the line for climbing up the hill from the cave entrance back, so that Walsh passed some tricky moments on hands and knees endeavoring to get up a steep slope unaided by any rope. Eventually the summit was reached, and the subsequent climb down was by earlier standards uneventful. After dinner with Tanya, they returned to Raleigh and Chapel Hill.