Most excellent trip report. It should be subtitled "wonderfully wet and sloppy" - love that line!
However - you shall NOT pass Longhorn Cavern. I, and the Friends of LCSP, challenge Ben3 to a survey-off (?). I KNOW we have more passage to add to our map, right team? HEHEHEHEHE julia -----Original Message----- From: Benjamin Schwartz <b...@txstate.edu> To: texascavers <texascavers@texascavers.com> Sent: Thu, Feb 9, 2012 12:17 pm Subject: [Texascavers] CWAN Trip Report - January 28, 2012 January 28, 2012 Cave Without A Name, Kinney County, TX Crew: Benjamin Hutchins, Benjamin Tobin, Benjamin Schwartz (Ben3) Report by: Benjamin Schwartz After a slow start leaving San Marcos on Saturday morning, the three of us piled into my truck and headed out to the cave. On the way we had to stop twice - once for breakfast tacos and another time for batteries (both critical caving supplies), but we made it to the cave before 10:00 am. Checking in with Mike Burrell, he reported that the water at our gauging weir was up a mere 0.08 feet after all the heavy rain in the region earlier in the previous week. The area around CWAN only got about 1.5 inches, and the stream level hardly budged, while other areas nearby got several times that amount and experienced more serious flooding. The plan for the day was to go to the Waterfall Room at the current upstream end of the cave and continue pushing a virgin upper level stream crawl that Brett Gerard, Ben Hutchins and I had turned around in on the previous trip to this part of the cave. During the previous two years, a group of us have systematically resurveyed the known cave in order to create a high quality map and (we hoped) find additional cave passage. Sometime last fall, the last previously enjoyed passage was surveyed and we were able to start pushing and surveying some of the many virgin leads that remained. Admittedly, a number of them are not very attractive when compared with the main stream passage, but there is good airflow moving through parts of the cave and I am convinced that there is potential for a significant amount of additional passage to be found. Our goal for the day was 260 m, which was the amount required to move CWAN up a notch in the TX long cave list. Quickly changing into our wetsuits and gearing up, we managed to leave the parking lot and enter the cave before scaring off too many tourists. We told Mike to expect us by midnight and headed upstream around 10:40. A little while later, we looked at each other and realized that none of us had a watch with us. This was strangely reminiscent of the last trip into the cave! I sloshed and jogged back to the surface, got my watch, and rejoined the others at 11:00 – finally we could really move! The trip upstream took around two hours as we swam, crawled, waded, and salamandered through the ~2.5 km of stream passage between the Tour Route and the Waterfall Room. On the way, we speculated about what some of the virgin side leads might do, and if we would get a chance to survey them on this trip. The two very low air space leads were still very low, but still blow, and none of the ‘sumps’ (low air sections, really) along the main route were any lower than normal – including the third one which, in the main passage, is the lowest and longest by far. At the Waterfall Room, we climbed into the upper part of it, traversed into the upper level passage leading out of it, and paused for a quick taco break and to push a potential breakdown lead. The lead didn’t look very good, but I did find another point to access the stream (with no passable leads) which feeds the waterfall entering the middle part of the room, as well as a possible lead that seemed to be have potential for rejoining the same water farther upstream. But more on that later… Our first lead for the day was another smaller stream in this upper level section. Both this and the larger ‘waterfall stream’ are flowing to the southwest and into the room, which is in the opposite flow direction when compared with the main stream below it. The streams are also perched on top of a green marly layer ~1.5m thick. The Waterfall Room appears to have developed at a point where water has punched down through this layer, intersected the main stream level, and caused a large zone of collapse which is slowly being dissolved away to create the room. Another interesting aspect of the room is that it is the largest known room/passage in the wild cave and is comparable in size to the large parts of the tour route, but with multiple levels and more complexity. Moving toward our objective, we traversed a section of complex dry breakdown passage before dropping through breakdown and into a low, dry, stream bed ~ .75m high and 2m wide. Following this upstream, the passage gradually became lower as we passed tiny holes in the floor where trickles of water are pirated away to some lower level during higher flow conditions. We soon reached an active piracy hole and the cave turned from sticky muddy to wonderfully wet and sloppy. Just past this, we arrived at the end of the previous survey and quickly started doing what we came for; survey. Ben Tobin sketched, Ben Hutchins did frontsights, and I got to do lead tape and backsights for the first time in nearly forever! But glory was not to be mine… The passage slowly became even lower, the water became deeper, then shallower, and the bedrock floor and ceiling got closer together and razor sharp and snaggy. Between snaggy sections, we plowed through mud slurry in low passage. Watching mud roll past your ears is always somewhat amusing when you consider what most people do on the weekend. Near the end, the cave completely shredded my shirt and somehow unzipped my wetsuit. I didn’t realize it until I noticed that rocks stabbing me in the back seemed unusually sharp. Thanks to Hutchins for helping me zip up again in the crawl. We pushed the passage to a bitter ‘end’ where it does continue, but only 15 to 20 cm high (with lots of snaggy rock protruding into that space) and 2 m wide for as far as I could see – about 6-8m . Although there was a slight hint of air moving upstream, it is not a priority dig lead by any stretch of the imagination. The passage also contains many small fragments of fossilized and well-tumbled bone and turtle shell. We named this passage the Bitter Ben. With this lead finished, we thrashed our way back downstream to the other potential lead I had seen. The passage started off low in large breakdown, and soon popped into what looked like some very nice walking passage. It was, but only for a few steps. The passage is coated in loose fluffy and super sticky mud; the kind of mud that peels up in 10 pound chunks when you put your hand down and pick it up again. Just imagine what happens to your feet. Unfortunately, the nice passage immediately degenerated into a small crawl coated with the same mud. Being lead tape, I pushed into it and thought I could see the end at a chunk of breakdown a couple short shots away. When I got to the end though, I could squeeze up onto the block and peer through a low slot into darkness beyond. Energized, I spent quite a while digging, breaking, and moving chunks of rotten muddy breakdown in a very tight tube. I finally opened the squeeze and pushed ahead and into the blackness. It turned out to be a low and wide room about 4 x 9m and less than 1 m high, with one short dead-end side passage off of it. I did a solo survey in the room so Ben and Ben didn’t have to suffer through the crawl. We called this section the Capricorn Party Passage in honor of a caver party happening above-ground (the horror!). With this lead finished, we declared the upper levels in the Waterfall Room complete, removed the handline and headed down to the waterfall for a 30 minute shower to clean ourselves and our gear. The ~120m of survey had taken us about 5 hours of very hard and muddy work. Clean again, we decided to head back down to the stream and survey a virgin walking canyon passage that heads out across the top of the 3m waterfall in the main stream – this is downstream from the Waterfall Room by a few hundred meters. This lead looked really nice and had the appearance of a paleo stream route. Currently the stream drops down the 3m waterfall and flows through what is now the third ‘sump’. We surveyed quickly and efficiently along a 2m high x 1-1.5m wide dry and meandering canyon. After about 80 m, the passage abruptly ended in a blank wall at a cross joint and the only apparent way on is a 2 cm diameter hole down low in one end of the joint. After plotting the data up, this passage has gone off into blank space to the east of the main stream, so it is too bad it didn’t continue. Still short of our goal for the day, we moved back upstream to a comfortable dry crawl lead on the NW side of the main stream canyon. This passage stayed roughly the same for ~60 m before looping back to the main stream and connecting with another known lead. Ben Tobin calculated that we were only a few meters short of our goal at this point, and we decided to finish up the day by tying in a hanging shot in a side lead much farther downstream. In short order we arrived, did the two survey shots required, and called it a day with right around 260 m of virgin cave survey in the book. We got out of the cave by 11:30 and enjoyed a TX version of winter weather; clear, crisp, starry, and just cold enough to make a stinky wetsuit steam. What a wonderful way to end a wonderful trip with great friends. It was not until the next day that Ben Tobin entered the data and reported that we were only a few meters short of passing Longhorn Caverns. Arghhhh!!! We’ll pass it next time, for sure! Benjamin Schwartz Assistant Professor Department of Biology Texas State University - San Marcos 206 FAB, Freeman Aquatic Station 601 University Drive San Marcos, TX 78666 http://www.bio.txstate.edu/~bschwartz/ b...@txstate.edu office: 1-512-245-7608