Government Canyon Karst Project Report
June 26, 2016 Participants: Marvin Miller, Kevin Pride, Joe Schaertl This trip was a special trip planned to pursue the survey of Lilyhammer Cave. On this trip we started surveying at station 10 and surveyed to the bottom of the pit that we named Shrieking Leia Pit. The pit is named after an incident that occurred on the first survey trip. Leia Hill had gone into the area at the top of the pit ahead of the survey team. Suddenly we heard a deathly scream. After a few seconds of hysteria we came to understand that Leia had seen a raccoon. The pit is barely free-climbable and there is loose rock on some of the walls. I was climbing on flowstone above the pit when my shirt barely brushed the wall and dislodged a 2 - 3 lb rock. It bounced off the wall of the pit below and caught Kevin's arm with a glancing blow. Thankfully, he wasn't seriously injured and the incident warned me that we needed to be more careful in this area. At the bottom of Shrieking Leia Pit is the slot that Kevin uncovered on his first trip into the cave. It is vertical and tight but did not prove as much an obstacle on the way out as I had feared. The down-climb to the floor of Kevin's Slot is just over 4 m. After a short horizontal jog of about a meter the cave continues vertical for another free-climbable pit. The entrance to this pit is small but the walls bell out to more than a meter. The shaft comes out in the ceiling of the room below, about 2 m off the floor. Good handholds along the lip allow one to swing down to the floor. This drop taped out at 6.46 m. In this little room we started seeing lots of sticky red mud. We stopped the survey there and Kevin led the way around a mound of mud and down about a meter to the lip of another pit. The ceiling was a meter or less over our heads and there were some holes going up into what looked like canyon passage. The pit was about 5 m deep. The walls were sheer and somewhat mud-covered and on the far side, about 3 m distant, was a sharp ridge of mud separating the near pit from another drop. A bright light pointed in that direction illuminated some large stalactites and cast their shadow on a wall or floor about 30 m distant. We set some bolts and Joe rappelled into the pit in front of us. We were hoping for passage at the bottom that would connect to the space we could see in the distance, but we were disappointed. If there is a passage it is plugged with rocks. We will take another look when we survey it. The length of the survey is currently 54.0 m and the depth is 26.0 m. The current deepest surveyed cave at GCSNA is Lost Pothole at 26.9 m deep. Lilyhammer will surpass that by at least 5 m. The air in the cave was not good but we didn't notice it until we started climbing out, and were huffing a good bit more than we should have been. Also, cigarette lighters would not light. The quality did not improve until we were in the entrance crawl. We did not experience any headaches so it must not have been that bad. October 8 & 9, 2016 Participants: Steve Gutting, Mio Kitano, Christin Miller, Leah Miller, Marvin Miller, Greg Mosier, Sharley Rivas, Joe Schaertl, Nicholas Spyker Five people were present Saturday morning. Steve, Mio, Christin, Nicholas, and I took two vehicles up the Joe Johnson Rd. and parked at the Rock Pile. We hiked north to Double Shot Drop, a new cave that was opened up on the May, 2016 trip. It is a small cave and was a good cave to train my daughter, Christin, in the art of sketching a cave. She has been interested in learning. Mio and Nicholas were new cavers and new to the project and they climbed down to check out the cave, which consists of a 4 m drop with a small, low room at the bottom. Then, while Christin and I got busy with the survey of the cave, Steve, Mio, and Nicholas went to continue the dig at FC-14, about 100 m to the northwest. Double Shot Drop turned out to be 4.32 m deep and 7.07 m long. While Christin sketched, I made a bug collection. I collected harvestmen, cave crickets, 2 tiny spiders, millipedes, and some other critters. When we were done with the survey we went to FC-14 to help out with the dig for the rest of the day. The team did some impressive work, pulling out more than a meter-depth of rock and dirt. The dig was helped along by Steve's rock-shaving techniques. The soil and rock at the bottom of the dig - almost 2 m down - are still loose, but when we ended for the day it looked like we had uncovered a solutioned protrusion from the wall that is filling much of the pit. We will need to deal with that on the next trip. On Sunday Leah, Greg, Sharley, and I headed to Big Dome Cave to push some leads. I took Leah to the narrow passage at the southwest corner of the cave that could be seen to go for about 3 m to a small hole. I was also curious if the passage continued around the corner. Leah has a slight enough build that I figured she would be able to negotiate the passage. She was able to and she found that the passage did go around the corner to the right, but then it quickly ended. We surveyed the passage and then went back out to the main room where Greg thought he had uncovered a lead. It turned out to drop into the I5 - I8 survey so it was nothing new. Greg and I then went to work on the lead that Michael Gibbons had found on a trip to the cave on Dec. 6, 2015. A 1.5-meter crawl in the wall of the Breakaway Room leads to a vertical drop of about a meter. The bottom of the drop is chocked rocks through which a floor can be seen several meters lower down. Greg started handing out rocks and I stashed them along the wall of the larger room. After a bit, when it became too awkward for him to reach more rocks he gave the lead to me. I managed to open up more space by knocking a few rocks loose with the hammer and soon had cleared a narrow slot that dropped to a floor about 2 m down. I did some more hammering and chiseling to take a few inches off the tightest spots. Interestingly, as I was working on widening the slot, a bat tried to fly up through the hole. It returned to the room below and fluttered around as I continued working. After more chiseling I managed to slide through and down about 2 m into a small room almost 4 m long by about 2 m wide. All the possible exits were either plugged with rock or were too-narrow cracks between breakdown. I didn't see the bat anywhere. Greg stayed above and helped me with surveying the shot through the slot up to him. I then did two shots to either end of the room. Once back up on top we surveyed back out to tie into Station 15 in the Breakaway Room. I named the passage and small room "Gibbon's Lead". The two leads added 20.92 m to the survey length of the cave. The cave is now 353.4 m long and still 18.1 m deep. The bat in Gibbon's Lead is the first record of a bat in the cave. The next project weekend is coming up on November 5 and 6. #TexasCaver (good idea, Bennett) Posted by Marvin Miller.
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