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
