I would just like to add some personal thoughts to Gill's post, After taking a dinner break, there are now 3 barrels ready to haul out, and 2 medium size rocks ready to be tandemed-out.
My theory is the large rocks we are standing on now, are the orignal ceiling of the room, which I think is what Gill is saying. But those rocks are large and held together with a thick gritty clay, which takes some patience at removing with a small pick-axe, before you can attempt to pry the rock. But once you can get a choker strap around part of the rock, then the gin-pole truck can dislodge it and then you can adjust the strap and haul it out. So that is what Gill means by the floor excavation is going faster. I have found prying the big rocks loose to be exhausting, but Gil, Don, John, and Ernie, seem to do it without breaking a sweat. My newly designed digging tool, did not work well in the clay, but I found other uses for it, as it could smack hard rocks better than the lighter tools. I ended up digging most of the day with a cheap hand-held pick-axe that I got at Harbor Freight Tools. The floor of the principal digging area is now about 10 feet in diameter and relatively flat, with a couple of spots that are at least a foot or 2 deeper than the bottom of the ladder, in the area where the leads are, but one of the holes is at least 4 feet deeper. The floor of the cave is deep enough now, that if you set your camera on the floor pointed towards the sky, you should be able to get a nice photo with a wide-angle lense. If the ladder was not there, it would be an 18 foot rappel, at the moment, but I think others believe it is going to be 28 feet when finished. Ernie let me camp 2 nights. I slept on my cot under his big oak tree, with just a cotton sheet rigged over a string. I got to relax there quiet a bit, so that was awesome. I did learn something new about caving on this trip, that is not in any caving book - you truly have not caved with a person until that person has released some spicy taco gas directly in your face. David Locklear On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Gill Edigar <gi...@att.net> wrote: > KIWI SINK Dig report--9 June 2013--The purpose of the dig continues to be > removing floor material in order to access the breakdown blocks nested in > the bottom of the sinkhole and hopefully getting access to horizontal cave > passage. Rains in the past few weeks washed some of the rocks beneath the > waterfall. There are still a few barrels of material left to remove. A > minor rain storm around 9 a.m. managed to raise the humidity a little above > average but the sky stayed cloudy most of the day. Large rocks buried in > the mud have become more numerous making excavation of the floor happen > faster. Only 5 diggers showed up and managed to fill 6 barrels, 2 of which > were left on the bottom of the pit. 5 rocks were hoisted, one being L, one > XL, and three Ms. A half-dozen or so more rocks are partially exposed and > will be ready to hoist with just a little more work. Nearly every rock > removed now exposes voids into the mostly clean breakdown below--exciting > stuff. The next dig will be on 23 June. There's still plenty of work left > to do. > Diggers on site included: > Don Broussard > Gill Ediger > Ernie Garza > David Locklear > John Schneider > Visitors included: > Leah, Jack, & Ruby Gluesenkamp > Jaime Brown >
