Cold Sink. The End.

Going into this weekend I was stoked. I had noted 14 potential surveyors, 12 of which I considered committed by the time we were driving to Marion. I was stunned when all 14 showed up! With that number I was essentially forced to make 4 survey teams surpassing my long standing goal of 3 teams in the cave. Everyone was pretty timely, the biggest delay coming from my explaining to all the teams who they were going to work with, and what leads they were going to work on. Lesson learned. Let's hope I have that challenge of coordinating lots of surveyors again many times in the future.

Because there were so many of us we staggered teams going into the cave . Early on Jason Schomo had a zipper malfunction which delayed us a bit, but we otherwise made very good time. The conditions in the early part of the cave were the driest they've been since the first survey trip. At that time we only traveled a short distance into the main crawls of the cave. These conditions made moving quicker and easier not only because the mud did less to impede us, but it seemed the mud balls we'd rolled pushing through the crawls on previous trips served like ball bearings as we slid along the floor. If anyone was bothered by the crawls on this trip, I didn't hear it. Okay, maybe Ken complained, but that doesn't count. Mark Daughtridge actually commented multiple times that the crawls were much nicer than he expected, suggesting they were much nicer what we went through on our Worley's survey trip back in November.

We didn't have a long list of leads for the cave, but we had enough for each group. Each team started in their respective section, but the teams were never far from each other. My team started with the two vertical leads we left last time. The first one didn't go anywhere, but shockingly the second did. My team ended up getting over 100' down there. As we neared completion of our survey of this level we felt we were close to known walking passage so we sent Jacob out to look for the connection. We made the handshake connection, but Jacob never returned. Instead he choose to spend the time chatting with another team. Dave and I were a bit annoyed by this, but it turns out that that nice walking passage we'd left them with ended fairly abruptly after 6 stations. When Dave and I returned to the group after wrangling with the short yet quite bothersome drop, we had a few snacks, and rallied the troops to seek out the other teams.

Very odd striations on the wall down here. Guesses on how they got there? (click image to enlarge)

When we found Dave Sockey's team, they were just finishing up the survey of their passage. Knowing the final team had the most promising continuing lead, I  led everyone toward where they were located. When I finally reached them after a surprisingly long descent, I was told they had two more stations and then they'd be done.

I was shocked.

This meant there were no more non-digging leads left. It was still afternoon at this point, so a few people poked at some of the plugged passages we'd encountered, but found nothing. Fully expecting to have a few more CS trips to line up I was left with a confused empty feeling. We did some rough estimates as this point and realized we were going to be just shy of my goal of mapping a cave over a mile long. My team was the last team out, and I moved a bit slower than I did on the way in. I'd spent a lot of time in the cave and I felt a bit like I was saying goodbye.

I guess now we just need to find the next big one. 

Now we're never going to get out!

A quiet gathering under the oculus

If you missed this last real CS survey, but still want to get into the cave, I'd like to plan another trip to get some final clean-up data for the map. Let me know when would work best for you.

Some statistics for the cave as we now know it:

Included survey length = 5103.6 Feet

Higest station = 31.9 Feet above entrance station

Lowest Station = -110.7 Feet below entrance station

Cave Depth = 142.6 Feet

A cave adapted millipede that was over an inch long.