2 posts tagged “caves”

Had a great Thanksgiving in Nevada City with my grandfather, his wife, my aunt, her boyfriend, my brother, his wife, and my parents.  This is in spite of the fact that I had a cold.

Also in spite of that, I was heading to Lava Beds National Monument for a cave survey trip with the Cave Research Foundation (CRF).  This is about a five hour drive from Nevada City, and I wanted to not miss the crowd, so I left around 8am on Friday after Thanksgiving.

The night had been cold, and my car was encased in frost.  I loaned my ice scraper to another Bay Area woman who was up for the holiday before going to work on my windows.  (It doesn't ice over in the Bay Area, so ice scrapers are rare.)  Fortunately, my cold was waning.

But soon I was on the road, heading up the I-5-to-97 route to Lava Beds.  The day was gorgeous and clear, offering great views of Castle Crags and a towering snow-draped Mount Shasta.  Almost exactly five hours after my departure, I arrived at the CRF research center.

The research center building is a relatively new structure in the park which is used by CRF teams when they are doing cave work.  It's heated and has two bathrooms with hot showers, and a full kitchen.  In short, it's heaven compared to camping outside in freezing conditions.

And things get cold up there.  It's in northeastern California at an elevation of 1250 meters.  A few inches of patchy snow were on the ground and a consistant 15 km/h wind took the 0 C temperature down a couple more notches.  No more shorts-and-a-t-shirt.

But never fear; I had layers and layers and layers for the cave survey.

I popped in the door and called out , "Hello?"  No one was around.  There was a note that said they were at a meeting room somewhere.  Not only did I not know where the meeting room was, but I wasn't particularly keen to participate in the administrativia that plagues large projects such as this one.

Instead I got back in the car and went up to Catacombs cave to take some pictures.  Catacombs is one of my favorite caves in the park due to its many twisting little passages, all different.  Also, it has a single entrance which makes you feel like you're really back somewhere (unlike other lava tubes that have multiple collapse entrances all over.)

First stop was about five minutes inside the cave where I spent a few minutes trying to get back into shape with the camera.  I was displeased with the results, but post them here anyway.  (Click on the pictures for a bigger view, which is better!)  In these photos you can see the multiple levels, twists, and colorful walls that dominate this cave.

I also wanted to go to the complex deeper in the cave where the northern and southern arms intersect just downstream of a room called The Boxing Glove Chamber.  Three levels of tube come together at this point, with lava falls dropping onto the lower levels and passages heading off in all directions, including vertically.

A photo really can't sum it up, because the quarters are close and wide-angle just doesn't cut it.  So I spent several attempts trying to get a good shot of a lava ledge above the complex before settling on the one I liked.

As you can see, the lavadrip-covered ledge is slightly taller than I am, and I'm already standing on the middle level on the complex. The ceiling is also covered with fine examples of lavacicles.

At first I'd been wearing several layers since it was definitely cold outside.  But running around with the flash had warmed me up to the point that I was back in a t-shirt.  (Usually I set up a shot, set the timer, have 10 seconds to get into position, hear the shutter open, fire the flash, run around the corner to the next place, fire another flash, hear the shutter close, and then walk back to the camera.)

After an hour of photography, I decided to head back and see who else was there.  Turns out, no one.  But this time I only had to wait a few minutes before a couple people did show up, and then the gathering grew from there.

Total size of the group was 27 people, I think. Some slept outside, some slept in apartments at park headquarters, but most slept in the research center. (It was the floor for me, though there were many unused cots.  The cots weren't long enough. :) )

That first night, we had a big potluck feast which was delicious and stuffing. I mean, it was on top of Thanksgiving dinner the day before, right?  There was lots of food, music, and good company.  Cavers are an eclectic yet social bunch.

Gradually we fell asleep, food and wine getting the better of us.  That was ok, though, since it was a big day on the morrow.

Rising and shining, we split into five survey teams with the goal to take a big chunk out of the South Labyrinth Cave.  This cave had already been surveyed some time ago, but that survey didn't contain any vertical data, and we suspected it was also incomplete in the horizontal data as well.  So it's a big resurvey.

First thing, we joined forces with another team and made a shot through a 3" squeeze.  I passed the tape through to the other team, and then waited.  Normally I'd have more to do, but someone on the other side was getting instruction on how to read instruments and it was taking a little while.  All this time, the cave was blowing cool air past us which was starting to get a little bit chilling.  (At least it wasn't sucking frozen air in from the entrance nearby!)

So the Inventory person and I decided to run around and explore a bit to warm up.  (Inventory is recording what types of formations, floor, creatures, water, etc. are found between two survey stations.)  We crawled in two side passages that were marked as dead-ends on the original map but both led to small rooms, one through a 18 cm bellysqueeze.  My butt almost didn't fit, and the lavacicles on the ceiling threatened to pull my pants down as I forced my way through.

We returned to our team with the news, which meant we'd be surveying these side passages (which we thought connected to the other cave arm, but didn't.)  That would probably prevent us from reaching our goal of the collapse a few hundred feet down the tube.

Nothing for it but to get to work!  We found the piece of survey tape marking the last station visited from the day before, and started from there.  I was tape and lead instruments, which meant my responsibility was to select the location for the next station and also take "backsights" (altitude and azimuth data looking back to the previous station.)  Another team member took "foresights" which which is looking from the previous station to my station.  Our measurements need to match within two degrees.

And why wouldn't they, you might wonder?  How hard is it to read a precision compass graduated to half a degree, anyway?  It's not.  The problem is that all these lava rocks are iron-rich, and most of them are magnetic.  You have to move around quite a bit sometimes to get compass readings that match.  In one place, I found I could get a four-degree change just by moving the compass 10 centimeters up or down.

We mapped the passage to the 18 cm squeeze, and I set up a station on the ceiling at the top of the squeeze.  (These are "virtual" stations usually at the point of a rock of lavacicile.)  This was the hardest shot for me because I had to get all crunched in there, but we got accurate readings on the first try.  We did two more shots inside that room (which seems to be over another tube according to our maps) and went back out to the main passage.

Another side passage looped around, and we surveyed through that, connected the loop to the main passage, and stopped for lunch.  Even though we were only a few minutes from the surface, we ate lunch underground in the darkness, which was actually a first for me.  (My longest cave trips have been maybe three hours, so food wasn't really necessary.)  Some photos were taken at this time, too, and a couple groups of tourists came through as well.

No rest for the wicked, however, and we hit the other previously-known-as-a-dead-end side room.  Turns out this one is a real find!  The way the squeeze goes into collapse rubble, it looks like a dead end.  Until you stick your head in really far and look up, and then you can see another room.  Again, it was tight mapping in the squeeze, but we made it through and into the room.

The room had a breakdown floor and fantastic secondary mineral formations all over the ceiling, still wet and growing.  Some had grown into things that looked like blackberries--I'd never seen such formations in Lava Beds before.  Also a fantastic 20 cm lava stalagmite grew up off one of the pieces of breakdown, meaning that the room collapsed while it was still molten.  That would explain the interesting nature of the collapse rubble; it was all made of flat plates of stone.  Smaller lava stalagmites grew like old candles on a small ledge across the room.  Near Old Station lava stalagmites are common, but at Lava Beds I only knew of maybe two others before finding this room.

Off to the northeast, the room dropped to a 40 cm ceiling over more breakdown.  A tiny passage led to the right.  Elizabeth had suggested that it might have gone somewhere, but it was so inconveniently placed that it took me a minute just to get in position to look inside it.  With my head upside down, I saw a great chocolate (dark-colored smooth) ceiling curving maybe 15 cm over a big rock.  A small slot also led eastward around the rock.  Very tight.  I declined.

Elizabeth went back and looked, and then she also declined.

But Matt (185 cm tall, skinnier than I am)... he's gung-ho.  He put he head in, headed for the slot, and started pushing, stopping every 70 cm or so to take stock in the situation.  After a couple minutes we heard a muffled grunt, "Ugh, this sucks!"  Lavacicles were catching on everything.

A few more minutes, and his feet disappeared from view, and he was behind the rock in a small sitting-room chamber.  He described it to us while he rested.  Then after a couple moments of silence, we heard him say, "Huh."

We asked, "What?

He said, "How did I get through this?"

Chuckling, we said, "Well, you'd better figure it out, man, because none of us can fit in there to help you out."

Fortunately, Matt's got skillz, and he opted to back out the way he came in, which he made look easy.  Matt's left foot appeared, followed quickly by the rest of him.

Back out to the main passage, we were home free compared to that with huge booming passage before us.  We made three more shots at around 50 feet each, which is the max distance the mappers like to shoot.  (Yes, I know it's not metric, but we measure these caves in feet and tenths-of-feet, if you can believe it.)

With the final collapse in sight, we called it a day.  The collapse breakdown formed a crazy maze that would take some time to map out.  The final station was made on a rock on which was written "LABYRINTH" with red paint in fine 1920s scrawl.  It was historical graffiti from J. D. Howard, the man who originally found, explored, and named many of the caves in the park.

And we were late for dinner, so we surfaced, found a couple other also-late teams, and headed back.  Another large dinner awaited us and there was much relaxing and rejoicing.  And wine.  And cave photos.

Some people left at this time; there were storms forecast and no one wanted to be trapped.  I had chains, so... whatever!

The next day, our numbers were decimated.  We put together a single four-person survey team and went back to the same rock I ended on the night before.  I again took tape and shot up to the base of the collapse.

Elaine and I then tore into the collapse, trying to find if there was a passage that skirted the south part of the collapse pit.  Perhaps it might lead to more side tubes, or a lower tube.  We pushed through it on both sides, and found a decent-sized room along the tube wall, but nothing that went anywhere.  We'll have to look more some other time.

From there, I took the survey to the right, into the collapse, then vertically up near the top of the collapse rubble since there was no where else to make a good station in the rubble this direction.  (Vertical shots are neat because you don't need to measure the bearing or inclination.  The bearing is undefined since one station is directly below the other, and the inclination is +90 degrees.)

We then looped it around the main path and back to the second station we'd shot on the day.  We were hoping to get the collapse pit mapped out this trip, but it just didn't happen.  At least we set up one station outside that we can use in the future.

Time for lunch, Elaine and Fofo were leaving since they had no chains and it was starting to show.  Turns out there was only admin stuff to do after lunch and no more survey, so I decided to caravan down with them.  Counting work from all teams, about 2500 feet of passage was surveyed over the weekend.  Not bad!

Blasting through snow flurries to get out of the park, we managed to not get stuck in any appreciable snowfall, and traffic was decent, getting me back to Berkeley in about six hours of driving.

[Photo credits: Juergen Bohnert]

I've been caving for years up at Lava Beds National Monument (LABE) and other sites in Northern California, in particular the huge number of lava tubes that cover the northeast portion of the state.

Lava tubes are fun to explore and easy to find.  Not only are a lot of them marked on old USGS topo maps, but you can also see major flow systems on Google Maps and run around there looking for new caves to explore.

Limestone and marble caves, though they do exist in California, are much more difficult to find due to caver secrecy.  See, people tend to go into caves and do things that destroy delicate formations, like touch them.  And also tend to litter.  And spraypaint walls.  Since some of these caves take hundreds of thousands of years to form, they're definitely a limited treasure and could easily all be destroyed.

Additionally, they are dangerous.  Lava tubes form nice horizontal rough passages with very few pits, whereas marble and limestone caves tend to be made of smooth stone covered with wet mud, and have pits scores of meters deep all over the place.

To make a long story short, I know where very very few wild (as opposed to tourist or "show") marble or limestone caves actually are.  And the ones I did know about were all gated shut.

So, what do you do if you want to explore wild caves?  You join a "grotto", the colloquial name for a local chapter of the National Speleological Society (NSS).  The grottos know where the caves are, teach caving techniques, and lead cave trips.

I'd been to my local grotto, The Diablo Grotto in Oakland, California, a few times before.  I tend to go to their monthly meetings about once a year.  I'd been on a Cave Research Foundation (CRF) cave survey trip to Lava Beds a year and a half ago, and I'd attended part of a vertical practice at Cragmont Park in Berkeley.

But I'd never been on a wild cave trip until last weekend.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, I drove down to Union City and joined up with the trip leader and his right-hand man in the Cave Mobile, a Dodge minivan with six seats.  We put all the gear in and hit the road.

Stopping in Dublin to pick up another, we continued to the town of Angels Camp in Calaveras County.  (Yes, Mark Twain's jumping frog.)  Angel Camp is a still-hopping gold town which contains the Burger King that is the meeting point for most Diablo trips in the area.

We met up with the rest of our party, and headed for the hills.

Out of town about 20 minutes, we parked in front of a gate marked "NO TRESPASSING", got our gear together, and hiked in.  (We, as the grotto, had the permission of the landowner to visit the caves on the property.)

The hike was about 1.5 km over hilly terrain.  We followed a dirt road for some time, and then turned off road and followed a barely-worn leaf-strewn path through oak groves and gorgeous weathered blue marble outcrops.  The colors were surreal!

We got to the first cave of the day: Bobcat Cave.  A small sink lead down into the earth under a large jumble of marble and ended in breakdown.  Who goes first?

I do!  They have a little game called "find the entrance", wherein they all stand around and watch us noobs poke our heads around the collapse rubble trying to find the way in.  Since I was first, I followed the first false lead which went nowhere fast.  Up and around a corner, though, was the entrance proper.  Even outside, there were beautiful flowstone formations.

And down we went!  It was a tight little tunnel with smooth walls.  I was immediately impressed by the downhill angle, since I'm used to relatively flat lava tubes.

We scooched past a single sleeping bat on the ceiling, and into a small (sitting room-only) space with a small pillar and several stalactites.  From there, a false floor cut the passage in half horizontally, but I was able to squeeze under it into the back room of the cave.  This room also had a split floor.  (I'm guessing these develop when formations build up on mud that is subsequently washed away, or on water, which subsequently drains.)  Nice formations were all around, plus a little bit of 19th-century graffiti.

Turning back, we explored another flowstone-filled side room which led to a near-vertical exit climb of about 8 meters.   A couple people scaled it, and the rest of us headed back out the main entrance.

A short hike away, we hit the second cave called Porcupine. The main room in this small modestly-decorated cave featured a large central pillar and several exits, as well as a neat little formation garden.  Tiny crawls led off various directions.  I took a short climb out, and we moved toward the goal of the day: Grapevine Cave.

Grapevine was the best of the day (sagely saved for last.)  The collapse sink at the entrance was large and deep, and we took multiple paths down into it.

Just under the rubble, one passage ran immediately into a two-level 5-meter tall chamber with a great stalactite hanging down from the center of the ceiling.  (It's quite neat to stand under a garden of stalactities and look up at them--it's quite the "shower of knives" effect.)  This chamber dead-ended immediately, seemingly oblivious to how promising it had at first looked.

Instead, we found a tiny hole up through the rubble.  It was a squeeze and a push to get up there, but it was the main entrance to the cave.

Climbing through it, I found myself in a tall wide passage that split into a lower section on the right, and continued high on the left.  First we stuck to the left, skirting the edge of the lower level by holding onto the remains of two 30 cm diameter stalagmites that had been cut off near the base some time ago.  They were now polished smooth by years of gloves and hands.

And then it opened into the main chamber of the cave.  And this one was nice!  A 2.5 meter pillar stood on the left, and a huge number of pale white stalactites hung thickly from the ceiling.  The room dropped down a couple meters from the passage and continued away, probably 15 meters long, and 5 meters across.  To the left, a side chamber looked promising, and a tiny crawlhole exited the far side of the room.

While people continued through the squeeze, I helped with the flashes for cave photography.  It was nice to be on the other side of the camera for a change because now I'd have some more photos of me in the cave.  But I'll have to come back here some time and take some more photos myself. :-)

I also turned along the side passage to see what was down there, but it dead-ended around the corner.  A small well-decorated flowstone loop also briefly left the main passage and returned.

A slick muddy passage dropped at a 45-degree angle under the floor, as well, but I didn't follow it, instead deciding to go to the small crawl in the back of the main room which had now emptied out.

There were many tiny formations along the edge of the crawl, and it ended in a small minimally-decorated 1.5 meter tall room.

Going back through the main room and into the first passage, I dropped onto the lower level and followed it.  It ran into a small room with a tight crawl at the end.  I poked my head in, and then saw light on the other side--it was another member of the party who had followed the slick 45-degree passage from the main room, so these two rooms were connected through there!

It's a very neat cave, and my favorite from the trip.

And that was it for the day.  Many of the party began the two-hour drive back to the Bay Area, but four of us headed to Sonora for Mexican food and to find the campsite.  We did both these things, drank some beer, and crashed out for the night.

I heard things hitting my tent in the night.  I remember thinking, "I'm not under an oak--are these acorns?"

In the morning, I found a collection of small stones by my door.  I guess I'd been snoring!

(I did an experiment.  It was only supposed to be a few degrees above freezing that night, and my sleeping bag, though it is supposed to perform well under those conditions, hadn't been.  Acting on a tip from somone who always was cold sleeping on an air mattress, I put my blue foam pad on top of my inflatible Therm-a-Rest.  I was much warmer, albeit a little less comfortable in the bed-softness department.)

I ate some quick oatmeal, and then we got back in the car to go to BK in Angels Camp once more.  We met some other members of our party (well, only one showed up) and went back up the road to the caves once more.

The destination today was Heater Cave, with a possible trip afterward to Wool Hollow.

Heater was another 1 km hike from the car, with views onto New Melones Lake.  It took a little bit of searching in the scrub, but we found it fairly quickly.

The entrance is a 2 meter vertical slot just one body-width thick.  One barrel-chested member of the party couldn't fit, unfortunately.  I went in but had to push hard to get myself past a knob of rock that was digging into my shoulderblade.  (Later I found a nice brused stripe there.)

Once inside, there was a small foyer area.  A 50- or 60-degree slope lead down from to the right, dropping about 15 meters, and we'd rigged a handline going down there.  Straight ahead, a window looked down into a gorgeous 30 meter tall room.  (I guess no one in the grotto has been down there due to bats.)

I was intimidated by the slope.  A fall would be bad (imagine being pulled through that squeeze with broken bones) and I decided I just wasn't comfortable with it.  So I passed on the chance to see one of the best decorated rooms in the Sierras and climbed back out the squeeze.  Bah.  Well, it will still be there when I'm either more comfortable on a hand line, or I bring vertical gear and make it 100% safe.

The rest of the guys went down to take pictures, while the other two of us chatted on the surface, and ran around looking for more caves.  (Found one more (already known) vertical pit just down the hill.)

There's a nearby quarry, and people were out shooting in it.  We heard several rounds whirr overhead as they tumbled by.  Well, as long as there was a hill between us and them.

Off in the distance, I saw what I'm pretty sure was a bald eagle turning lazy circles in the sky.

Finally the photographing party returned.  And just in the nick of time, because one of the shooters, by the sound of it, had climbed to the top of the ridge and now had line-of-sight on us.  We stayed low behind the rock outcrop until we were ready to go, and then skirted the hill on the way back.

A short distance away is Wool Hollow.  It's a cave which you have to do a wee amount of trespassing to get to, but I was more worried about getting shot than getting caught.  We quickly crossed the area between the road and cave, and got our stuff on.

The cave had been gated, but the gate was gone, leaving just the surrounding bars.  These turned out to be very useful for holding onto on the 2-meter drop into the cave.  And the gate itself had been converted into an adhoc short ladder of sorts.  Ironic that something meant to keep people out was so effective now at helping them get in!

Wool Hollow has high ceilings all over, and fairly wide passages.  Lots of up and down stretches, however.

We hiked to an upper level, then the passage dropped back down lower.  An 8-meter pit on the left lead away to more tall passage.  One of the party started looking at climbing down, but it was too hairy even for him.

(I'd discarded the idea the minute I saw the drop.  In retrospect, I determined that I made risk assessment decisions based on the assumption that I was going to fail.  In this case, it meant severe injury or death.  So I didn't want to climb down.  Other people seem to factor in the probability of failure in their assessment calculations, which I grant seems like an intelligent thing to do.  But I don't. :-) )

Fortunately this time there was a narrow chimney that had lots of footholds and handholds that led down to the same place.  So we took that to the lower level instead.

The lower level was pretty neat, with a few narrow but tall meandering passages.  One graffiti-filled side passage ended in a small room with a big pillar and flowstone base.  Another just ended in a squeeze.  But there were some decorations, and it was, overall, a fun cave to climb through.

But now it was getting dark, and we were hungry, and it was getting on time to go.  We climbed out of the cave, and drove home via Mountain Mike's Pizza.

The End.