Since Pete brought up the stream crawl in Powell's Cave and my dive that connected it to Neel's Cave, I'll mention my experience in that crawl. No one had been through it in about 15 years. Randy Waters and I approached it from the downstream side. We'd been in the cave nearly 21 hours. We had had entered through Neel's, made the connection through seven sumps, including hacking our way through roots while underwater as Pete mentioned. We planned to exit through Powell's. We slogged our way upstream to where breakdown blocked the passage. We'd never been in this part of the cave but knew from the map to look for "Pete's Crawl" on the left side. The only option was low and grabby. We had our doubts but all of the water was coming from there and we couldn't find any other route.
Low and grabby didn't normally bother us. Neither did limited air space, as we proclaimed that "air space is for wimps!" But we were each carrying a scuba tank, plus we each had a cave pack and ammo box stuffed with diving and survey gear. We knew all that stuff would make "low and grabby" a real pain. We didn't realize how much of a pain until we started in. Have you ever been hit in the face with a scuba tank? Pulling the gear through didn't work. It caught on everything and it was impossible to turn around and unhook it against the current. The only real option was to push it ahead against the current, which also created a dam that would periodically slip the gear out of our hands and slam it into our faces. Eventually we got the hang of it and reduced the frequency of facial battery, and came out completely spent on other side. There was still a short slog upstream, then up The Crevice Passage, then up into the guano-covered maze and to the crawl at the bottom of the entrance pit. We made what was probably the last ascent up the old fence that hung down the 8-m deep pit, but left the gear in the crawl below. After hiking back to the van, we drove off and found Mark Minton and a few other cavers working at another nearby cave and they helped us retrieve the gear. I love caving! George
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