Cavers: Collin, Eugeniya, Rory, Isabella, Tomasz
By Collin
A good and proper entrance, demarcated by a large sinkhole and a winding, high-quality staircase with a tasteful amount of curve to it leading down to the quintessential hole in the ground. It's followed by a straight corridor and a robust ladder with one rung too many that leads you to the bottom of the main room. Continuing forward around a corner, large rocks placed like stepping stones remind you that this part of the cave was once commercialized. There lied another very large room, with a large boulder the size of a small boulder that had clearly detached from the ceiling at some point. The angle and muddiness make it a very tempting ramp to slide down, but the dropoff at the bottom of the ramp comes with surprise and demands caution. Don't ask me know I know.
More stairs lead into an antechamber where we first ran into the other cavers who were visiting that day from New Jersey. They were just finishing exploring what they called the Salamander Tubes, with two of their party still in the tubes. Other documents have different names for this part of the cave, but the Salamander part of the name is consistent. When their friends exited, they didn't realize we were there until a "your mom" joke elicited more laughter than they seemed to expect and they discovered that the number of people in the room was twice what it should've been.
We got our turn in the Salamander Tubes next, which was a nice warm-up for what was to come later. It was a tall crevice that you could wedge yourself into above the floor, chimneying horizontally along the length of it until it becomes impassable, then you get to turn around and do it all again! According to other maps I looked at afterwards, this almost connects to the adjacent Crossbones Cave but just barely does not. Maybe someday it will?
Returning back to the main room with the ladder in it, we entered a system of more of these tall canyons, these ones wide enough to walk along the bottom of (athough sometimes you didn't want to because of the slop). One of them had a hole in the wall fairly high up that you could chimney up to and use to access another canyon right next to it. A sturdy board of wood wedged between the walls of the adjacent canyon made access much easier. Back there we saw a pool of suspiciously crystal-clear water with a thin sheet of dust floating on the surface.
Having now exhausted most other directions from the main room that we cared about, it was time for the main event. Traversing behind the ladder gave our first proper crawl (the Keyhole), leading into a long room with a water pool, a live snake, and a lot of deep, goopy mud. The other cavers later called this room "slop city", which is a name they probably just made up but is descriptive. From there, we were staring straight down the barrel of the gun. The gun barrel. It's an appropriate name, given the shape of the feature. It's a very long tube with a remarkably consistent cross-section throughout its entire length (although others seem to disagree with me on just how consistent the cross-section was). The main part of the cross-section is roughly circular, just a little too small to comfortable fit my shoulders in. Then there's a bit of a V shaped trench giving a few extra inches of height in the center, making the preferred option to pass through on your side, with one arm and one leg in the trench. I'm told it lasted about 40 feet.
This was, psychologically, the most difficult passage I have ever encountered in a cave so far. Not that I'm a particularly experienced caver. I thought myself brave, I thought myself enthused, I thought myself up for a challenge, so I volunteered to go first and went straight in. As I wormed my way several feet in, I felt a much more severe form of the anxiety I briefly felt entering my first cave; that every inch I fought to progress would put up 10 times the fight should something go wrong and I need to back out. This was not helped by discovering that there were people in it behind me already. From the start, you can't see the end. Every time I stopped to rest and push my pack forward, the determination to carry on came almost entirely from faith that it would not last forever and that there was a room behind it.
Finally, I was able to make out the end of it. And I was not enthused. It visibly did *not* open up into a significantly larger room. My faith rattled, I was reassured that it turns into a better kind of crawl and then a real room. This did turn out to be true, and I was so happy to have a place to finally sit up that I sat just there at the end of the gun barrel instead of continuing just a little farther onward to a bench that had been impressively constructed from slabs of rock presumably harvested from the next room (the Broken Room). I first thought to myself, "wow I never want to do that again", which I quickly recognized as the hallmark thought pattern of experiencing present-tense Type 2 Fun. By the time the next person emerged from the barrel, I decided that maybe someday I'd be willing to do it again, and by the time we were exiting the cave I would've been prepared to do it again had we not decided to opt for the bypass instead.
The bench room was the next place we encountered the other party, as they were on their way out. It's fortuitous that both places we encountered them were in large rooms where communication and passing each other were easy. A short ways from the bench room was the broken room, which felt as if it was carved from an enourmous pile of dinner plates precariously stacked upon each other. From the broken room, I first went up, over some boulders lodged in a canyon to the vertical "Lemon Squeeze". From below the squeeze, you can pre-stage your head in the correct orientation, navigate your helmet through it, then stand up. Once you get your shoulders and arms through, the challenge is generating the upwards force to pull the rest of your body through it. The squeeze hole that your body is in is at the bottom of a cone, with nothing very good to push or pull from. I found a shoulder press technique that worked for me, but didn't seem to for anyone else and I'm not really sure what they did.
From atop the Lemon Squeeze, I climbed over another boulder stuck in the walls of the canyon to inspect the webbing that had been set up as a bypass to the lemon squeeze, if you were willing to trust it to climb 20 feet off the ground. The webbing was hung by a non-locking carabiner from a single piton. The piton itself looked alright, but there was something very suspicious with the way the webbing and the carabiner were resting. I would not recommend using it.
The passage from the Lemon Squeeze to the Aalabaster Room was my favorite part of the cave. Another tall canyon, too narrow to fit through most of it, save for a wider chamber at the top that was pretty consistently large enough to crawl through very comfortably as you straddle a gap staring down 10 feet of abyss. Sometimes the upper chamber would narrow, but the canyon would widen and you could descend into it to move through a different part of the cross section. There were even places where you could pass through either the top or the bottom and reach the same place. The movement was fun and easy throughout and the formations were very cool. Finally, we reached the Crystal Crawl into the Alabaster Room. The crawl is short, but deposits you face first onto a 45-degree descending slope into a pit. The distance onto the slope that you have to crawl before you can turn around and go feet forward to not fall down the pit into the Alabaster Room is slightly disconcerting, but not as disconcerting as the prospect of exiting the pit back onto the slope appears from the top (although it was actually quite easy to exit). The Alabaster Room was full of stalactites, which were pretty cool but I enjoyed the journey more than the destination on this occasion.
Back to the Broken Room, there was not only an up option but also a down option. I explored a little bit of the down section, which I call the Mud Matrix. It's a network of tall canyons that extend farther than you can see and intersect each other at perfect 90-degree angles, making you feel like you're Godzilla in a scale model of city and after the first two identical intersection you fear you may get lost before discovering that there are actually only like five passable intersections total and it just feels like way more. And the whole place is made of mud.
The Mud Matrix's "streets" were not very large. The largest of them you could shuffle sideways through, but a lot of the passage was crawling through mud on your side since the upper parts were not wide enough and some of the side streets running along the short edges of the city blocks (which I at one point referred to as "East-West" streets, before realizing that was a completely arbitrary distinction I had made based on an imagined city map with no relation to the cardinal directions of reality) were more like tunnels than canyons. On the outskirts of the Mud Matrix we found a bumpout with some mud sculptures left by previous cavers. Continuing around the outskirts of the Mud Matrix and taking one more alleyway towards the center, there was a larger room higher up that was roughly the size of one of the scale-model city blocks. We suspected that it may also have been accessible by chimneying up from one of the earlier intersections, but we didn't try and didn't go far enough into the room to examine the possibility since we felt it was time to turn around and begin our exit.
The Mud Matrix conceptually was a highlight of the cave for me, but I hesitate to call it my second-favorite part of the cave because of how gross the mud part of it all was. Going down the pit from the Broken Room into the Mud Matrix really felt like I was entering a dimension of pure mud. There was not a surface to be seen that wasn't pure mud, and washing it all off our gear later that night caused an impressive amount of sediment to accumulate at the bottom of the sink drain.
This was by far the longest I've spent in a cave so far, and my enjoyment was comparable only to the amount of time I spent asleep over the subsequent 24 hours. Very thankful to have had this experience with a group that was as excited as I was about it!