Recent caving
Most of my recent photos have been disappointing, discouraging me from posting anything – I really enjoy putting up the photos better than telling my stories. I finally selected just a few that are acceptable; here are short descriptions to accompany them:
Tobaccoport Saltpeter Cave is a nice historic cave in Stewart County. It’s inhabited year-round by gray bats and is closed to protect them. Heather Garland of The Nature Conservancy needed to go out there and check on the colony, and suggested that a survey could be done at the same time with little additional disturbance, so Ken Oeser and I went along with her, on March 25th. With her help we got the survey done, even though there is quite a bit more cave than we were expecting (over 1700 feet, instead of the 600 recorded in the TCS), and Ken is working on a map. I’ve posted a photo of penciled signatures from the saltpeter era, dated 1888, and one of an impressive flowstone mound.
On Saturday March 31st, Joe Douglas and I went up to Standing Stone State Forest to bounce Wheat Hole. There’s an entrance pit that takes about a hundred feet of rope, even though the free part of the drop is only 28 feet, and then a 122-foot drop into a large room. It’s a lot of work because of the double-rigging, and the big pit has a steady drip that can’t be avoided, so you get pretty wet, but it’s well worth doing. We surveyed out, and I have a map just about finished. Then we walked around the forest for a while, enjoying the fine spring afternoon. We walked past the two Rocky Mount pits, and wound up at Little Crystal Well, which we’re saving for some future day.
Last Saturday Ken was taking some of his coworkers to Camps Gulf. Lauren hadn’t been there, so we tagged along. Lauren was unhappy with me because I hadn’t washed her coveralls after Caney Hollow, but they were hardly dirty – look up those old photos and see for yourself! Mine, on the other hand, had been thoroughly guanoed at Tobaccoport, washed, and then came home from Wheat Hole soaking wet and got washed again, so I couldn’t help that I started out clean. We saw 3 of the 4 big rooms and then went down the river borehole to the end. It’s just too big in there to take good amateur photos, so the only thing I have for you is a couple of shots from the river passage. Use Google to find spectacular photos of the big rooms if you’d like to see them.
