Hi Laura,
Thanks a lot for the news from Ed. Please keep us posted of any further word.
The Maverick Grotto meets tomorrow night. You ought to come.
Bill
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Here is the area Ed, etal are in: http://www.kuelapperu.com/. I got the
attached picture from him last Friday along with the message �Was in
Chachapoyas last night. Might get up mountain tomorrow/next day. They have
fireworks in Peru every night!� So sounds like he made it there, at least.
~ Laura
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-cave...@cavetex.net [mailto:owner-cave...@cavetex.net] On Behalf Of
speleoste...@comcast.net
Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2005 8:07 AM
To: cave...@cavetex.net
Subject: CaveTex: Ed Goff is caving in Peru
Texas caver Ed Goff of Dallas left for a caving trip to Peru last week. We
haven't heard anything from him yet, but what follows was just posted on TagNet
and is about recent caving in Peru.
Caving in Peru
By: Andy Zellner (Marietta, Georgia)
andyzell...@hotmail.com
Over the past several summers, Steve Knutson has been organizing small
caving expeditions to a remote corner of Northern Peru. While the
Andes Mountains of South America have never been regarded as a good
place to search for deep vertical caves, this is mostly because few
people have taken the time to go there and look. Roads into the area
are quite scarce, and the high elevations (14,000 feet or even higher)
in some of these karst areas make exploration a bit of a challenge.
Plus, the weather usually sucks.
>From July 10th to about July 25th, five of us returned to an area we
call "Gringobamba" (Place of the Gringos). This year's participants
were Steve Knutson, Jason Record, Mike ! Green, Heather Levy and myself.
Past expeditions had revealed the place to be a pit-bouncer's paradise
-- within 4 miles of our base camp, we have explored more virgin pits
over 200 feet deep than there is in all of TAG. The deepest shafts are
well over 300 feet deep, including a few in the 700-800 foot range. A
pit that sounds merely a hundred feet deep or less is usually GPS'ed
and then skipped over -- there are likely bigger ones to explore right
nearby. Most of these pits end in a big talus pile at the bottom with
no visible way on, a product of centuries of freezing and thawing and
rockfall. But some of them go quite a bit deeper.
There were several leads left over from the previous year's
expedition, which is always nice to look forward to. After a day or so
of getting acclimatized (and finding a few new 200-foot pits right
near camp), we split up to explore these leads. Mike and Jason went
back to South America Pit, a grea! t big 200-foot open-air pit that was
in the exact shape of South America, even down to the little islands
and fjords at the southern tip. Previous exploration had stopped at
the top of a second drippy pit in the 50-foot range. They set one bolt
and rappelled into a nice canyon passage, a few hundred feet long.
Beyond that was a tight crack with airflow, which took a lot of
hammering to make it human-sized. They turned around in a series of
tricky climbdowns, with the passage getting larger and larger. We
returned the next day with an extra push rope, and managed to get down
one more 20-foot pit before the cave slammed shut, way too tight, not
much airflow. Total surveyed depth was around 450 feet, total length
about 300 feet. A nice little cave.
Right nearby was another big gaping 270-foot shaft called Echo Pit,
which looks a lot like Valhalla, but bigger. A short pit lead had been
noticed at the bottom of this pit as well, but i! t turned out to be
just a tricky climbdown and not much else.
Meanwhile, Heather and I hiked about an hour in the other
direction, to
L.E.D. Cave. This was an old, fossil horizontal borehole cave, which
seems to be very very rare in this part of the world. It must
have been at the bottom of a valley or sink at some point in
the past, but the entrance is now over 1000 feet above the
valley floor. A previous survey trip in here had netted about
1000 feet of nice, dry canyon passage, averaging 10 feet wide
and 30 feet tall. We had stopped where a blind 80-foot dome/pit
had intersected the main passage, though more cave could easily
be seen beyond. ! The last thing I had done on the previous
expedition was to set a bolt traverse across this obstacle, and
I've been wondering for three years what was on the other side.
Fortunately the rope was still there in good condition, and we soon
found ourselves in virgin walking passage. Lots of formations in this
area, though 95% of them are old and dry now. The cave moves a lot of
airflow (we could watch clouds getting sucked in the entrance), and
this has resulted in a lot of wind-directed formation growth. Most of
the columns had 2-3 inches of popcorn growing on the upwind side, and
unfortunately every step we took was crunching a few wind-blown
aragonite crystals. Alas, this nice big borehole ended in another few
hundred feet, apparently it just ran back into the edge of the
mountain and collapsed. The air went up a side canyon, which was
explored and pushed the ! next day to a 50-foot pit. This also turned
out to be blind, with all the air going into smaller and smaller side
passages. All total, the cave was about half a mile long, still
significant in a place like Peru.
The next several days were spent bouncing pit after pit, culminating
in the discovery of Wishing Well, a very fun 850-foot deep multidrop
cave. Jason already told that story quite well, so I won't repeat it
here. As with past trips to the area, we found more holes than we had
time to explore, even with Mike and Jason caving late into the night
almost every night. We have been surveying every cave and pit that we
actually entered, which must be well over a hundred by now. From time
to time, we've also seen evidence that we were not the first people to
visit some of the pits. It's difficult to say how long ago this
happened, but the shepherds living nearby today have no recollection
of the interesting things we found.
There are plans to return to the Gringobamba area next summer,
probably in July. We're looking for a few hardy souls to come with us
next time. The only real requirement is that you are well-skilled in
vertical caving techniques, and are willing to live on a 14,000-foot
mountainside with several other smelly cavers for a few weeks. Due to
the location, elevation and general pain in the butt it is to get to
the area, it's a minimum of a three-week round trip, preferably four
weeks if you can swing it.
Indications are that we have barely touched a vast karst area, with a
depth potential of at least 1000 meters. More virgin cave is
guaranteed. The scenery is amazing, and the local people are about as
friendly as we could hope for. Of course, the nearest trained cave
rescue squad is probably somewhere in Mexico, so we're pretty much on
our own if something goes wrong.
So if you're interested, keep us in mind...
--Andy Z.! andyzell...@hotmail.com--- Begin Message ---
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