Speleofest 2008
The MIT Caving Club met a group from Syracuse in Knox Cave once upon a
time. As a result they decided to have a Speleofest. So, a couple
months later, we met up with three people from Syracuse University
(Keluo, Eliah, and Kevin) at Schoharie Cabin in Schoharie County, New
York. After breakfast at a diner, we headed to Knox cave, where Eliah
and Kevin had previously staged wetsuits in the Alabaster Room. The
first part we visited required using a long PVC pole to pull down a
rope from a secret location, which we then ascended to enter a
little-visited passageway decorated with speleothems.
Afterwards, we ditched our vert gear and continued into the
northeast-running portion of the cave. We bypassed the narrow Gunbarrel
section and continued into a breakdown room. To get out of the room we
(eventually) all passed through the "Lemon Squeeze" into a long keyhole
passageway.
Finally, we reached the Alabaster Room, so named
for the clear/white stone which decorates its walls. The rest of the
cave is more recently dug out and not on the map, beginning with the
Football Room, so named because it is as long as a football field and
as tall as a football. After all this crawling we reached a stream,
where we changed into wetsuits and crawled into the cold water. We
spent about an hour and a half belly-crawling down a low-airspace
water-filled passageway and digging it out until we got through to a
slightly less low-airspace passageway. We took turns going down and
bringing out rocks and dirt until we reached another impassable
crawlway.
Although more digging might have broken through further, some
of us were starting to get cold, so we exited the cave. In total, we
spent nine and a half hours in Knox. [Rachel] I enjoyed my first caving
trip.
The next day we (Sid, Rachel, and Eliah) decided to go to
another cave in the area named Van Vleets. It was like a giant tube
full of chocolate pudding. There was only one room in the whole cave
(at the end) large enough to stand up in. The rest of the journey was
spent crawling/sliding/floating through soupy brown muck. As a result
of this cave, Rachel gives neoprene an "A" and PVC a "C-". At one
point, there was a side passageway which we decided not to enter
because we weren't sure we could fit in. Much later, another group of
Syracuse cavers did squeeze through this passage into a giant junction
room which leads to walking passages and thousands of feet of beautiful
cave. We should someday return to Van Vleets to investigate this half
of the cave (if we can fit).
That night, we (Sid and Rachel) visited Schoharie cave. This
is a large, easy cave consisting of about an hour's worth of walking
passageway through knee-deep water. This is a good cave to take your
mom in.
This trip was awesome, and we hope to go on further trips with SUOC
again soon.
--Sid and Rachel