Thursday, March 18, 2010

SERA Summer Cave Carnival!

I hitched a ride up to Lookout Mountain in North Georgia with my now good friend Klar. After our quick registration, we cracked open a beer, located our friends and set up our tent. We held many a crawl through the tiny black tube on the kid's playground contest (we all got some good bruises from this one!) and we all tested our limits in the Squeeze Box (think of it as limbo for cavers). I discovered that my head is the biggest part of me and could only squeeze my way through 5 3/4".

The night turned a bit crazy as Sarah & I introduced ourselves and partied with all of the caving "Gods" and preceded to turn even crazier in the infamous hot tub. Somebodies (leaving out names) naked beer run through camp supplied more beer to those of us that continued to drink and dehydrate ourselves in the hot tub.

Obviously all of us were quite chipper in the morning....but we met up with Ann as planned and packed into the car for the short drive to Anderson Spring Cave. After some peanut butter and jelly we began the plesant downhill hike to the cave. After a bit of searching through the woods, and spotting of the nearby road (the local farmer doesn't allow anyone on his land, so you have to get to the cave the long way) we found the small entrance with water flowing out of it.

I'm pretty sure river caves are my favorite kind as they always seem to be full of pretty decorations and hiking through water is pretty fun too. Our group (minus Ann) was dragging quite a bit so we didn't explore quite as much of the cave as we would have liked.

The second night was much tamer than the first and the next morning, a small group of us set out for Drag Fold Pit, part of the Mountain Cove Cave Complex. The rappel into Drag Fold is about 100 feet and it wasn't too drippy when we went. There isn't too much to see at the bottom of the cave, but Klar showed me some passage that he thought I could push since I'm kinda small.


The passage started out as a hand and knees crawl and turned from a belly crawl with decent room, to a tight, tight belly crawl with my back against the ceiling and me barely being able to push my way along. I experience my first ever clausterphobic feelings in this crawl because I knew that getting back out backwards, if I couldn't turn around, was going to be really fricken hard. Pushing my way through the passage and somehow avoiding breaking the 2 small columns. At the end of the crawl I came to a room that was just big enough for me to sit up in and where the air was blowing like crazy. There was a crack above my head that isn't big enough for a human to fit through, but I could see that it opened up into a pretty big room....I'm pretty sure if somebody cracks it open it would lead into 4 Kings Cave. This room was luckily big enough for me to somehow turn myself around in (glad I'm flexible) and I crawled my way back out!


All in all a great caving weekend!

No comments: