Rail Valley Entrance with Joel Johnson. Photo by Dave Dugid

Me at the lip of the nuisance drop of Olympus Pit. Photo by Brian Williams

The remains of a former cave explorer; encountered in Olympus pit. Photo by Brian Williams

Me at the top of the 40′ pit at the bottom of the cave. Photo by Brian Williams

SALAMANDERS!!! Photo by Brian Williams

Neither team got a ton of footage this weekend but we did add some good depth.

Entrance to Beaver Creek Photo by Dave Dugid

The most exciting discovery of the day?

En route

read backsights. We started with a side lead that was basically just a debris blocked passage parallel to the 200’ crawl on the old trade route. This wasn’t too interesting until we made a voice connection with the other team. We found by moving a few rocks we were able to make a tight surveyed connection to the other team. Pretty cool.

Me sketching.

Frosty formations at the end of a side passage we surveyed.

Antler helictites near station TP15A

With landowner permission, the annual grotto clean-up this year was held at New River Cave. Usually we aim for something in Smyth county, but we had a hard time coming up with a good candidate over there this year, which is a good thing, so we instead headed off to New River Cave on a tip from Ken Walsh. We all drove up to the nearby Bat Ranch on Friday night and had a rather quiet night camping under the clouds and stars. Mike was asleep when many of us arrived and Ava, who was very helpful in making sure we were taken care of, was out of town.

The trip was pretty straight forward. Hike up steep hill, clean graffiti, pick up trash, have fun, get tired, turn around, exit cave, hike down steep hill. Am I forgetting anything? We had a nice turn out with 11 cavers coming, many of whom it was only their first or second time underground. Hopefully some of them will be back for more because caving is awesome. (Cave survey is especially cool ;p)

Ken explaining a bit about how fun caving is and how to make sure it doesn’t become no fun.

Ugliness on walls being removed by smiling faces.

The roof graffiti was a pain here, but the Price’s did a good job clearing it off.

Insert pun here

Lunch

Pretties — with Mark for scale

Awkward family photos.

Date: 14 Jun 2013-16 Jun 2013

I arrived after some prep time at Carlin’s place in Durham, with a much distressed soon to die water pump in the car. After the gear move to his car, we were off. The drive up pretty uneventful, smooth sailing and a good time to eat a sandwich. Next day, we got to the cave around 930-1000. The trip in was tight and muddier than I remembered. The path seemed longer, for some reason. We got in and Carlin lead off to get some sketches while I caught up. This trip was a lot harder than I wanted it to be. Once at recovery junction, we made some plans to traverse a few points on the left, getting cross section sketches along the way. The sketching did not take long, just about 10-15 min, I assume. When done, it was back to recovery junction and off to the pit traverse. Across that, and a few squeezes later, we ran headlong into more mud. It made the slopes in there a whole lot tougher to climb. At one point, I found it easier to rely on my mechanics skills to scoot myself up the slope by hanging on the ceiling. My choice in packs for my gear at this point was becoming a pain in the… At any rate, it was the death of that one on the way out. The path onward was one full of surprises. I had some trouble due in large part to no traction from my boots. But hey that happens. The points that were needed for surveying will still have to wait until someone else does them. When there at the critical junctions, there was a lot more mud and it was tight, Carlin opted not to press on, I volunteered being there and all. But we passed on them due to the conditions of the cave. I think that was the wiser choice. We did have some fun on the way out at the section now dubiously titled Muddy Flags, all puns intended. The giant slide was the best, and the quickest way down. It got a little scary, truth be told.The next week, my ribs quit hurting about Wednesday. In closing all in all a good trip, scary at times. I’ll be ready for the next non-Cold Sink trip just as soon as I get new boots and a good gear pack, because confidentially this one was ridiculous. Sunday—That for me was Water pump Showdown. Nothing a mechanically inclined tech can’t handle. Job started about at 1500 completed 1820..No worries, just sweat and pain on sore ribs. A few cuts and a sunburn or two, nothing major, really. Just a well placed oh S*** in traffic when the pump died from being jammed. So far, no leaks.

-Martin G.

It’s been more than a week since the last CS trip and I’m still riding high. The prospect of running a survey project in an ‘unknown’ cave starting from zero feet that pulls in over a mile of surveyed cave is just too exciting. On this last trip we pulled off 1017.2 feet surveyed. I tried to plan far in advance to build interest in this trip, but somehow I still managed to only pull out two teams. I’d emailed with Brian Williams a few days before the trip convinced we still could pull off three teams, but there were a few late bail outs which left us with only six surveyors. I was not too concerned though. The weather was looking good, and we had a good set of experience participating in the trip so I had high hopes we’d make good use of the weekend. I was not expecting what we found.

With that small crawl in mind for this trip I divided our six cavers into the following teams. Myself, Jacob Jackson and Buford Pruitt on survey group ‘N’ (aka the Ninnies), and Ken Walsh, Brian Williams, and Stephanie Petri in survey group ‘M’ (aka the Monkeys). Stephanie had come with Brian and was new to surveying so I wanted to keep them together with someone who’d had some experience in the cave making Ken a natural choice. Of those signed up I figured Jacob was probably the most masochistic and likely the only one willing to help inspect the low crawl, so he ended up on my team. Surprisingly it took very little begging for me to get his assistance. Unfortunately Jacob was also the only other person on the trip who’d been past the pencil junction which meant the monkeys only had a vague idea where they were going. I really should have given them a copy of the working map.

When we arrived at the cave on Saturday morning around 10am, the monkeys headed in first followed by the ninnies. In the first room we noticed a bunch of harvestmen gathering on the ceiling, some cave crickets, and a small cave salamander. I even managed to convince the salamander to crawl up onto my hand for a brief moment. I might have damaged him before saying hello had Jacob not warned me of his location. He seemed mostly ungrateful if not perturbed by our luminous presence so we crawled on. We continued down the passage eventually reaching our starting point where we were blessed to hear Stephanie and Ken still working their way through the crawlway past the crawlway to heaven. (We really should name that passage. As it really is considered separate from the crawlway to heaven. Any suggestions? I think ‘Pergatory’ might fit nicely.) While we surveyed Buford worked on creating profile sketches of the cave since there was no room for a third where Jacob and I would be working.  

Eventually, we escaped that boring lead to find the monkeys now working their way through the crawing lead at what was then the back of the cave. With no real leads to survey in the cave before that point, I broke out some line plots of the profile and had my team start sketching profiles. Ken suggested that we finish their next couple of crawl survey shots so they could start in the subsequent walking passage, but I declined thinking our time would be better spent working on profile sketches. Boy was that a silly decision. 

Giving Jacob, Buford and myself a different section to work on we split up heading back in the direction of the cave to work on profiles for the already surveyed passage. I finished before the other two and decided to dance off to where Ken, Stephanie and Brian were at. When I got there the whole group was giggling and generally acting sillier that they had been earlier in the day. It was easy to see why. They’d gotten into walking passage with great leads running off in multiple directions. Apparently Brian had scooped a little bit so I figured I could  look into what he saw so I ducked around the corner and started walking around. There was nice cave every where! It didn’t take long before Ken shouted at me for scooping so I easily concluded I needed some man power to back me up. I literally raced back through the crawls telling both Jacob and Buford to drop their sketches because they we’re going to love what we’d found. If I’d taken more than just a couple steps into that passage on the last trip I probably wouldn’t have been patient enough to wait till October to get the next trip in.
When we finally were established surveying things went rather smoothly. We hadn’t made the breakthrough until 7pm, but with that discovery, both teams seemed happy to keep surveying for another few hours. Ken worked until he got cross eye’d from trying to do plan and profile sketches while working in larger cave passage. I kept my team going after that team left so we could finish surveying a loop we’d started and by that point I felt as though I was going to get a headache. I was making silly mistakes in the book so I needed to stop. We took about 1hour 15min to exit the cave and got back to the cars around 1am with a fresh coat of frost forming on the ground. We got back to Tanya’s around 2am and stayed up for another 1.5 hours eating soup and talking about our new discoveries. I was on cloud 9. 

The next day we got to a slow start and had breakfast at the golf clubhouse near Tanya’s house around 10:30 am. The service was the best I’d experienced in the county, so we’ll certainly return. We didn’t feel much like caving, but did do some ridgewalking trying again to find that elusive second entrance to CS, and to try following up on a blowing lead Tanya had on the edge of the county. We didn’t find anything that day, but the weather was great, the sky was clear and the leaves were changing on many of the trees. It’d be hard to find a nicer day to wander around outside. 

Early on in this project I gave myself two goals as motivation to help the project move forward. Get three teams working the cave on a single survey day, and survey over 1000’ on a given weekend. We just barely eeked out the 1000’ goal, but I’d still hope to push for three teams at some point. I’m guessing the temptation of virgin walking passage might be a nice hook when advertising the next trip. For a while now I’ve thought it would be really cool to explore a “new” cave from station A0 to something longer than a mile. There is now 4318.5 feet in the included survey length, andd with the leads we left behind I’m fully expecting we’re going to achieve that large goal. Hopefully on the next trip!

This picture could use 100 captions, but I think it most important to note there are no footprints past the last station!

For another perspective on the trip see Buford’s trip report from the weekend at his blog onrappel.blogspot.com

Given only two weeks notice on the heels of convention and a well attended grotto trip, led to limited interest in the fifth trip to Cold Sink since our survey began last November. I had a few people on the fence for this trip and ultimately most everyone backed out leaving only myself, Jacob Jackson, and Jason Schomo. This would make it the first Cold Sink trip that didn’t field two teams. Lucky for us, we got the easy survey.

As seems usual we had a slower start to the day than I would have liked; both in getting to and getting started once in the cave. I blame the slow start partially on staying up so late with Tanya. There is always way too much to talk about when visiting her. When we finally got to the cave I was slow in trying to analyze how much water had been in there since our last visit. At the cave, bent over plants and debris on the fence showed signs of recent high water. There was also evidence that significant water had been flowing in the first series of low crawls. Later at the traverse pit there was foam about a third of the way up the pit also deposited by recent waters. Also, the stations in the lead below the crawl way to heaven had unfortunately been washed further into the cave. 

Because we were such a small group I decided this was my time to check that unfinished lead early in the cave. There was a gravel pile built up behind the log that was once a survey station, so I spent a fair amount of time digging it out so I could fit through. Once through a tight spot I got into a space that allowed plenty of room to turn around. There was another low squeeze that opened into another small room which had water flowing through it. Up stream looks like a hopeless dig, but downstream continues tight in more passage like what I’d just pushed through. The big difference was the mud downsteam was highly water saturated, with the stream disappearing into the mud. After sitting in mud which enveloped me, chilling my butt and thighs I concluded the passage was something to save for a dryer day. Like the next trip perhaps. 

After I worked my way back to the base of the crawl way to heaven I took some time to catch my breath and ponder about the wisdom of our decision to cave that day. The weather forecast looked safe, but there was still a 30% chance of light rain last I checked and the surface ground appeared super saturated. I began to wonder if I got such a large turnout on this trip because bad things were fated for us. After rolling the thought around in my head I made the decision to do the hardest part of the cave and re-think our plan after arriving at the recovery junction. Of course once we got there I decided to keep caving.

Upon making it back to the room where the K survey had finished, our first objective was the side lead with a drop I thought was climbable. We used Jacob’s ~50′? of webbing as a handline rigged far back from the drop and did the 14′ down climb into a small room just below a flowstone cascade. Off this room we left another lead with a pit that had a narrow down sloping entry which prevented us from seeing the bottom. It didn’t sound deep, maybe 10′-15′, but it also appeared too wide to be climbable. I think I’m going to want vertical gear to check the bottom of this one.

Once back in the main room we had two choices to pursue. A high lead that was unvisited, and a low lead Robbie had crawled into on the previous trip reporting it went. We opted for the high lead. It was certainly the easier choice. It was easy to navigate and opened into larger passage. In this passage we found what we were calling an ‘ax’, but a later internet search would more accurately describe it as a mattock tiller. The mattock had certainly seen better days and we would now consider it part of the cave.

The lines below the mattock appear to be a fungal growth. The black staining is also from the mattock.

 It was here that Jason and Jacob tried to give me a 62′ shot, but I made them cut it in half so we could have a good tie in for the lower crawl passage we’d passed. Near the end of our survey for the day, we got into a larger room which seemed to stop our progress. For a few minutes we walked around stunned to think we were at the end of the cave. In one location there is a depression in the floor that certainly drains water, but the cave just seemed to stop. There was a small lead under the area we climbed on to get to the floor, but it didn’t look too interesting on the first pass. Since we seemed to be running out of options I decided to check it again. I did the crawl and it opened up into another room. It goes! I walked into it about 20′ then turned around to save further discovery to those who earn it through survey. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera into the new section of cave. I guess you’re going to need to come on the next survey trip to see what it looks like.

Since we’d planned to return to the Triangle that same evening, we decided to leave the cave earlier than any of us really seemed ready for. That day we set 15 survey stations with an average of 20′ per shot giving it the longest average shot length of any previous team. This wasn’t standard Cold Sink survey as we didn’t survey in a single crawl!

I need to thank Jacob and Jason for coming on the trip. This was Jacob’s second survey trip, his second trip into Cold Sink, and his first time setting stations. He did a great job! Jason is new to the caving, but was also a great asset to the team. I started the day making bets against the accuracy of their first shot because it had a steep angle, but their compass readings matched on the first try! I hope they are both around to continue caving with us for a long time.

Seen this shot before?

The plants near the cave entrance we’re higher than our heads requiring some serious bushwhacking.

Sadly, the cow skull guarding the entrance had vanished…

…. so we replaced it with an alternative.

Jason in the room we started our survey from currently referred to as the delay chamber.

A side passage off the delay chamber.

In the milk jug room on the way out of the cave.

A side passage off the milk jug room.

Did we have fun? Well, I did.

Finally, Ava should know that on the way out we saw a cave salamander at the bottom of the wedgie slide (crawl way to heaven). For a creature that never appears to manage more than a slow crawl, he was amazingly fast as I coerced him to leave the drop zone.

Erata: Used my new disto for the first time on this trip. Very nice. Also, as a word of caution there might be chupacabras in the cave now.