A Mere 586 Feet Underground - Ellison's!

Ok, so if you're a caver at all you have heard of Ellison's. Its a legendary cave located in North Georgia with Fantastic - the deepest single drop pit in the continental US at 586 feet. To give you an idea, the Washington Monument could fit into the pit! Rappelling into a pit like this is a bit intimidating to say the least, but of course a FANTASTIC experience.


My good friend Sarah wrote her account of our adventures in Ellison's and I thought I would just repost it here. :)

Last Thursday, July 2, Dana Wolski, Alissa Feucht, Charlie Emerson, Kris/ Klar Fausnight, Carl Fausnight, and myself headed up to the Pigeon Mountain area to camp out prior to most of our's first Ellison's adventure. I can't remember the name of the guy's land we stayed on, but there were some pretty questionable looking out houses and tee pee's, a pretty sweet looking traverse line that we didn't get to try, and a nice pavilion area complete with Christmas lights. We set up camp, ate some cold McDonalds, and consumed far too much wine.


The next morning we got a bit of a slow start. By the time we got ready and hiked up the mountain it was about 11:30 when we actually made it into the cave. We easily rigged the warm up pit and made it to Fantastic with out any major issues. The rest of us chilled out, had a snack and relaxed, while Charlie and Klar bravely rigged the pit. Klar and Carl were the only ones who had done a 500+ ft. pit before and the rest of us didn't really know what we were getting into.

We sent Klar down first and he made it to the bottom with out any problems. Alissa was next. She had a little trouble at the top since she was far too light to get anywhere with five bars on her rack. She was unable to get the last bar off with the weight of the rope, so she managed to swing over to the ledge and some how work the last bar out. She then continued to rappel the rest of the way with little trouble.

Dana was up next. Unfortunately we didn't have enough normal rappel racks and she was the one who got stuck using a mini. She had the same problem at the top that Alissa did but also managed to get the fifth bar off and continue down the rope. Since she was using a mini rack, she had a lot more trouble and pretty much had to feed the rope all the way until about 100 feet off the ground. At this point the rope became much stickier and worn and Dana could no longer even feed the rope into her rack. She was just high enough off the ground that communication was very limited, so she did the only the she knew to do and started to down climb. After about 30 to 40 feet she was too exhausted to go any further.

Klar and Alissa were able to talk to her a little bit at this point and tried to get her to do a change over. Unfortunately the gear wasn't appropriately adjusted for her height and the safety was too longto make that happen. Not knowing what else to do, Klar began to climb up the rope in order to do a pick off. The three of us at the top had no idea what was going on and we heard the words pick off and began to freak out. Klar made it up to Dana and sucessfuly completed about half of a pick off. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong but he put her back on rope and they finally realized it would just be easier to switch rappel racks. They both made it down safely and radioed up to us thate verything was okay.


At this point Dana had been on rope for over an hour and we realized that there was not going to be much time to explore the rest of the cave. Charlie, Carl and I still wanted to bounce the pit since we were already there and Dana needed some time to rest anyway. I got on rope next and decided to start with four bars since Alissa and Dana had already had so much trouble. I was also surprised by the weight of the rope and felt very uncomfortable not being able to pull up on it to stop like I normally do. I was unable to get a fifth bar on due to the weight of the rope and decided it would be best just to do a change over, climb back up to the top and start over with five bars. Unfortunately my gear was not properly adjusted either. The foot loops were too short to get the kroll on the rope above the larger than normal rappell rack. I had a short moment of freaking out while I was stuck on rope. Charlie talked me through it, and I eventually managed to work the rack out of the rope and climb back up to the top. At this point I was a little intimidated and decided I no longer wanted to do the pit that day.

Carl and I waited at top while Charlie descended with out any trouble to help the rest of them back out of the pit. About an hour later a very exhausted Dana and a Charlie made it over the lip and collapsed on the edge.

Klar and Alissa did a little exploring at the bottom while they waited and got to see some of the pretty crystal rooms. By this point Carl and I had become pretty cold and bored and had worked up enough courage to try going down again. This time I startedwith five bars and made it down with no problem. A few minutes later Carl made it down and joined me at the bottom. Once down there we decided it would be best for Carl and Alissa to climb up together since Alissa was pretty cold.


Klar and I decided to go exploring again while Carl and Alissa climbed. We took off at a very fast pace and managed to make it back to the north pole and back in under an hour. I was impressed by how beautiful the gypsum crystals were and by how clearly the fault line was defined. It was unlike any other cave I have been to. The north pole formation was very pretty as well, but much smaller than I was expecting it to be. Once the two of us made it back to the bottom of the pit and Alissa and Carl got off rope, we sent Alissa, Dana, and Carl out to the warm up pit to start climbing that.

Klar and I made it out of fantastic in about 45min. (I had a rope walker), and with the help of Charlie, we coiled up the rope and headed back to the warm up pit as well. We were all pretty exhausted and nobody really wanted to climb with the 600 ft beast attached to them so we decided to make a haul system instead. We (and by we I mean Charlie and Klar) set it up so the weight was 2:1 and got it up to the ledge pretty easily. Charlie dragged it up the rest of the way and then we made like trees and got the eff out of there. By the time we made it out we had spent a total of 12 hours in cave.

All in all it wasn't a complete failure even though we didn't get to do everything we had planned and we had a few amature moments. We learned that rappelling on rope over about 300 feet is much different. You can no longer use pulling up on the rack as a stopping mechanism, it is incredibly hard to lock off and to change the amount of bars you have on, and mini racks are pretty much a horrible idea. We also learned that everyone should adjust their gear so it is the appropriate size, everyone should know how to do change overs in their sleep, and pickoff's should only be done as a last resort and if the picker offer knows how to do them really well. I would recommend practicing at a wallwith a heavy weight at the end of the rope so you can know what to expect if you've never done a serious pit before. The important thing is we all made it out safely and we learned from our mistakes. It was still fun and the next time we return we'll know what to expect and be able to explore much more!

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!

Virgins, Concerts, Shamu, and Squirt Guns in Caves!

Friday after work, we packed up two cars with camping and caving gear and set off to the Cumberland Caverns in Tennessee. Not long after arriving and setting up camp (Cumberland Caverns rocks and allows us cavers to camp there for free!), I get the usual I'm lost call from Dana and somehow direct her along the foggy roads to our campsite. We get a little roudy as usual with our 2 handles of Soco (Dana and I think alike) and Sean's obligatory bottle of 2 buck chuck.

The next morning we woke up and headed to a small cave in the area called Cave of the Virgins. I'm still not sure that this cave actually qualifies for vertical status, but nonetheless we set up a rope and rappelled into the VERY tight entrance. The cave was pretty small, but decently decorated and we spent about an hour exploring with everyone rappelling and climbing on out. Getting out the cave was interesting and I just got frustrated as my gear got in the way and some people REALLY struggled to get out.

More of our friends had arrived when we were in the cave and the parking lot for Cumberland Caverns had filled up. The group of us showed our pre-purchased tickets and we were led down the path to the cave entrance. Cumberland Caverns is a very touristy cave and the passages leading to the main room were well lit and all of us cavers looked for tiny side passages that we debated crawling off into. Most of the seats were already taken, so we awkwardly found places to sit on a pile of rocks off to the side and waited for the magical cave bluegrass to start. A concert inside of a cave? Awesome idea as the acoustics made the fiddles and twangy singing sound ethereal.

Post-concert we piled in our various cars and set out for Snail Shell, where we would camp for the night. chili, hobo meals, and bottles of wine put us to sleep this night (after Sean's drunk dialing antics and Lisa's epic first pee in the woods).

A few more friends joined our group the next morning and we all donned our wetsuits and either hiked or rappelled our various flotation devices down to the cave. There were several kayaks, a dingy, 2 intertubes, a pool lounge chair, and Shamu.

Sarah and I grabbed our oars and paddled our little inflatable dingy on into the cave. I think the paddle upstream is about a mile, at which point all of us but Dana deserted our respective floatation devices and preceded into the cave by foot. Dana was determined to use her River Rat raft (1 of the 2 that had survived Puerto Rico) for as long as possible, and this eventually led to its demise.

We hiked on in for a while, having to occasionally swim...but, all too soon we had to head back out of the cave and on the road back to the ATL.

Wrecking our way through Nashville

AK, Jon (my amazing couchsurfer who now lives in Germany) and I took off early on Saturday morning for Nashville, TN. I had planned the trip about a month before because the NCAA Gymnastics Nationals was being held up there and to top it off one of my best friends Dana was working at her first grown up job up there as well. Jon was trying to make it up to his brother's place in West Virginia so we offered him a ride up there with us.

We met up with Dana and the new boy she was dating and grabbed a bite to eat along with the restaurant's make your own bloody mary bar. Well 3 of us went and watched the Georgia Bulldogs grab their 5th consecutive NCAA title...even though I'm a yellow jacket at heart, I feel compelled to root for the Georgia Gym Dogs since they're the only Division 1 team in Georgia and one of their Olympic athletes had helped choreograph a couple of my girl's floor routines.

After the meet we met up with Jon and Ben, the new boy and all went to grab a bite at a local Indian restaurant and then the 5 of us headed out to the bars in East Nashville. Jon decided that he would be the DD for the night and we spent the next couple hours hopping from bar to bar, to taco stand, to bar.

Deciding we had had enough for the night, we all piled into Ben's car with Jon in the drivers seat. At night in downtown Nashville, the main road's lights all turn to flashing yellow and all of the streets that cross have flashing red lights. We were driving along the main road with flashing yellows when another car decided that they weren't going to even slow down for their flashing red and came flying into the intersection...there wasn't even enough time for somebody to get out an, "Oh, shit" before we T-boned the other vehicle. Because I was sitting in the middle seat in the back, which thankfully actually had a shoulder strap I didn't see the accident coming - only had felt the screech of our breaks and Jon tried to avoid the hit, felt the painful crunching crash and then saw the smoke coming up out of our engine. The 4 of us quickly bolted from the car, nervous that smoke might mean fire or explosion that you see in the movies.

The other car had spun out after we had T-boned it and had landed half on a curb. The driver of the other car emerged, screaming accusingly at us for hitting her car. We informed her that it had in fact been her that had a run a red light and her mad screaming turned into a repitition of, "I did NOT run a red light, I did NOT run a red light". There were 4 people total in her car, one who had not been buckled as was displayed by her head sized dent in the front windshield...I think she ended up being ok.

Between the 5 of us we did a quick survey of eachother to make sure all of us were alright. My neck and everyone else's was starting to ache a little from whiplash and a couple minutes later Jon showed us his hand and his knuckle had swollen up like crazy - it ws definitely broken. I'm sure he was so grateful to be our designated driver. The cops showed up shortly after and questioned all of us separately and for some unknown reason they decided not to breathalize the driver of the other car even though everyone in that car was dressed in clubbing clothes and it was pretty apparent to us that she had been drinking....seriously? I feel like any accident that happens around 2 am should require that both drivers be breathalized!

All 4 of the girls from the other car were taken to the hospital on stretchers even though 1 refused to put her cell phone down even when they were rolling her onto the ambulence with a neck brace on. I do honestly hope the girls were physically ok, they obviously were not so mentally competent as they later tried to sue. All 5 of us had refused medical service and we spent at least another hour waiting on the tow truck to come pick up the car and the police to finally stop questioning us and leave. Funny how the accident wasn't our fault at all and we were left stranded on the side of the road until Dana got a hold of her friend to come pick us up at what was now like 4 in the morning.

The previous night had obviously been pretty eventful, but we didn't get much chance to sleep in the next morning as we were meeting up with a caving friend of mine - David at a cave called Indian Grave Point in the middle of nowhere Tennessee. The owner of the cave is extremely friendly to cavers and has some nice parking spots for us on the side of the road and has built a small fence so that you can cross over the barbed wire that surrounds him farmland to access the cave. Once crossing the fence, you hike around a cow dung infested pond and straight up the hill - avoiding more cow patties along the way. The cave entrance itself is a pretty large sinkhole that you can scramble down and then enter the chilly air of the cave - that had a smell of rot about it this particular day.

I absolutely love caving and am built small and agile which greatly helps me get around in caves and I went happily tromping ahead, leading us into the cave and doing my best to ignore the awful smell. From behind me I hear a loud, "Gross!" Jon had discovered the source of the smell - a rotting, bloated goat corpse - yuck!!!! Jon and Ben were all entertained by the dead, rotting corpse and preceded to take pictures in front of it, while the other 3 of us hiked as quickly as possible on past the goat and deeper into the cave to get away from the stench.

I had been in this cave once before and its got so big passages and chambers as well as some fun muddy crawl spaces that I of course wormed my way through whenever possible. There is a particularly "special" chamber with a particularly "welcoming" women is spraypainted on the wall. The 6 of us wandered up, down and around through the cave and eventually came upon the cave guest book which is surrounded by many interesting toys and a dorito was some funky mold on it. We signed our names and crawled up and down several more dark and muddy passages before making our way back to the entrance which was grossly apparent due to the odor of dead goat.

After a fun day and interesting weekend in whole we all headed our respective ways - Atlanta, Nashville, and West Virginia.

Puerto Rico - Day 8 - Out of the Jungle and Stuffing our Faces

Well, I would like to say that we woke up...but to be honest we hardly slept at all - between flashing our headlamps at low flying aircraft, freaking out because yet another huge bug was crawling on us, and discussing how on earth we were going to make it out of the jungle...very little sleep was had. I do remember having a couple of dreams about rescue being just over the top of the hill though and Dana had dreams of death and skulls all night...yep, that was comforting to hear. For breakfast we pigged out by splitting the other 1/2 of our cliff bar. My left arm was starting to itch like crazy and already had a fun rash on it...not to mention the dozens of bug bites. (pretty sure the rash came from a plant called Ortiga - supposidly worse than poison oak and ivy combined)

We made a plan of attack on how to get out of the jungle and began making our way slowly through the dense jungle - heading upstream. We made sure to stay within listening distance of the river at the bottom of the canyon and we tripped our way through the jungle. We were all definitely fatigued from the little sleep and even less food so we were creeping along. We kept our eyes peeled for any sign of a path and I continually peered up through the trees to try to spot another observatory watch tower across the canyon to keep our bearings and make sure we weren't heading too far upstream and missing the cave that we had to hike over to get to the other side.

I'm pretty sure when Dana spotted the orange flagging it was one of the happiest moments of all of our lives and we made sure to thoroughly celebrate the moment by splitting our other granola bar! :) We managed to follow the very sparse orange tagging until we reached the dirt road that led to the house in the middle of nowhere (this was actually on our map!) We were a little confused where to pick up the other path that head back across the river even though we had been on it the previous day so I asked the farmer in my broken Spanish pointing at his casa on the map. He pointed us on our way and we happily followed the path across the river and after another hour or so of hiking we made it back to the Observatory. We decided that it was time for a "We found our way out of the jungle" celebration picture and we posed in front of the warning sign that we had laughed at the day before.


We continued back to the car and made sure to pick up all of the fallen grapefruit that we found on the walk back. Our car was just where we had left it - parked randomly on the side of the road. We opened it up and raided the car for all of our food supplies and promptly ate everything in site.

We got in the car and started on our way to San Juan where we would stay the night before flying out the next morning. I called my mom and asked if she would find us a cheap hotel room for the night...we had all decided that we had had enough of camping for the trip. :) When you take the northern highway, it only takes about an hour to drive across all of Puerto Rico. We arrived in San Juan and promptly looked for a place to eat because we were all still starving...I guess getting lost in the jungle takes a lot out of a person. We managed to find an all you can eat buffet and we gorged ourselves with heaping plates and flowing beers.

My mom called back and gave us directions to the double tree that she had booked us at. I think us walking into the fancy hotel, covered in mud, smelly and destroyed made most of the employees days and we were more than happpy with the complimentery cookies they handed to us. It took several trips for us to unload the car and we laid everything out to repack it for our flights home the next day. The three of us headed down the street to pick up some snacks, cerveza, and a couple handles each of Don Q to bring home with us. Dana passed out after a beer, so Adam and I headed down to the hot tub alone...and even though it wasn't working - it was the perfect end to a great vacation. :)

Puerto Rico - Day 7 - Lost in the Jungle!

We woke up early and got a move on the day because we knew that we had to make it to the river rather early in order to fit in our full day of cave tubing. Following Tom's directions, we easily found the parking lot near the Arecibo Observatory that is located on the gorge above the Rio Tanama.

Using Tom's hand drawn map we hiked along a winding jungly path for a good 30 minutes before realizing that we weren't circling around the satellite like in the picture....after back tracking we found the right path and were soon hiking along a huge fence and looking down on the satellite dish. Before continuing on the path we passed a sign that said "Warning: The Tanama River is Dangerous. Inexperienced Persons should not go Alone". We kind of laughed at the sign before heading along the path, I mean Dana & I are experienced cavers and we had Tom's great advice to help us out....everything would be fine.

The hike through the jungle took us over the top of Cave #1 without us even realizing it as the cave is pretty massive. Following the path is the only easy way to get down to the river bed as the river is at the bottom of a good 200-300 foot gorge. The trail was relatively well marked with orange flagging on trees and all in all it took about another 2 hours to make it down to the river bed.


Once down at the river, we had to forge across 3 times in order to avoid a couple of waterfalls before making it to the entrance of Cave #1, the one that we had previously hiked over the top of. Tom had advised us that we should have to walk through half of the first cave before actually sitting down in our tubes and floating down river, but the water level was so elevated that we could easily put in ahead of the cave. According to Tom, if the water level was at this height we should not attempt to go through the 3rd and final cave because the water level would be too high.


We excitedly hopped on our rafts, turned on our caving lights and headed downstream. The current was fast flowing and entering the cave; it was hard to decide whether to look up at the tall ceiling of the cave with countless bats flying and making a commotion or to fearfully face upstream as our tubes flew through the Class III-IV rapids. I have been whitewater rafting several times before and knew that the first rule of rafting is to keep your feet up and float if you fall in such that you avoid trapping a foot in between rocks. Unfortunately, in the situation of tubing through a fast flowing stream in a dark cave with only an inflatable tube...the opposite instinct took hold whenever I fell off the raft. Luckily, my feet never got caught on the rocky river bed and I was able to hop back onto my tube each time. The experience was one of the most exhilarating of my life so far and stupid in many ways, but I'm sure that was half the fun.
So, after successfully making it through cave #1, we took a few minutes to be silly and do some handstands. Cave #2 was almost right downstream of #1 and according to our "map" there was a trail going over the top of #2 that we would be using to hike back out to the cars after crossing through it. We were disappointed that we weren't going to be able to go through the 3rd cave, but since we were caving in another country we were taking all of the precautions that we could.

So, the water in between the caves had surprisingly dropped from the fast flowing currents in Cave #1 to a dead halt. Once we paddled our way over to the caves entrance we discovered why. Cave #2 was completely clogged with dead trees, debris, and what smelled like some decomposing animals...the smell was horrible! We searched the rock wall in front of the cave for a way to climb over the cave and up to the path, but there was no safe way to climb up to the top of the cave - we were going to have to go through.

We spent a good 30 minutes on top of our tubes trying to slowly break through the clogged debris, but the going was so slow that we realized that we were going to have to crawl over the top of the floating mess. Holding onto our tubes for flotation we slowly moved across the debris...I could manage to stand on top of some of the bigger trees for several seconds before they would sink too deep. Occasionally, the floating debris would break apart and I would sink through the fragments and this was more than terrifying...I did have at least one major freak out moment when I sunk through the the logs started to move back around me. After that I just crawled over the debris as fast as humanely possible and the three of us made it out ok. This was actually much, MUCH more terrifying than tubing through Cave #1 and I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I was out. Dana and I ordered Adam to turn around, and we were quick to strip off our clothes and dive back into the water to wash away all of the disgusting wood chips and whatever else had managed to stick to us and make its way into our clothing.


So, this is where things got even more interesting for us. The map that Tom drew for us showed a path that went up and over Cave #2, so we crawled up and attempted to find something that looked remotely like a path....um, if anybody thinks that the most wicked compilation of roots with giant gnarly holes that I fell into (twice) = a path...then we might have found it. The jungle was so thick on top of the cave that there was no way that we could pass through it.

We made what we thought was an educated decision and followed the river downstream until we could easily crawl up and out of the gorge. Most of it was a cliff so we walked a ways downstream before literally crawling up through the jungle on the right side of the river. Going up to the right was the opposite side from the cars, but since this was the most climbable side we decided that it was best. We made it to the top of the climb, literally crawling up the mountainside through thick jungle, and began weaving our way upstream. We always tried to remain within hearing distance of the rushing water below, but far enough away that we wouldn't have the possibility of falling down the gorge.

Well, we hiked and hiked and hiked, found an ancient wall in the middle of the thick jungle and hiked some more. We were getting incredibly thirsty and hungry, but were doing our best to save all of the water and food we had with us since this situation was beginning to look more dire by the minute. All of the earlier adventures had taken longer than expected and now with the brutal hike we were getting really worried about making it back to the car. We were moving pretty dang slowly through the jungle as every couple steps one of us would uninvitedly trip or occasionally slip and have to grab onto trees to keep from sliding down the steep slope (that was me) and we were literally crawling up and down - trying to remain far enough from the cliff, but close enough that we would notice a path. We figured that the worst thing that could possibly happen would be for one of us to get injured, so going slow was how we were going to be ok. It was taking forever to cover even a little bit of ground so we started logically making a plan for what we would do if we had to sleep there...

Well, as we continued rambling through the denseness I began picking fiddleheads (the curly cues that are ferns, before the ferns uncurl) because Bear Grillz taught me that I could eat them and we were starting to get pretty shaky from the amount of activity and little consumption of food.

Unfortunately the sun sets around 6 pm...hahaha, yeah...so, even though we had our headlamps on there was no way with how clutzy we were being in the day that we were going to do any night hiking. So, well rolling out our flat river rat tubes and laid them onto the jungle floor and Dana accidentally dropped hers and it went rolling down the hill and dropped into the river gorge below. Yeah, this little bit of flat ground was a great place to sleep...we decided to sleep with our helmets on. For dinner the 3 of us split 1/2 of a cliff bar and some of the fiddleheads - tasty! Dana was starting to shiver a ton, so without question we put her in the middle and formed a 3 person spoon...even though we were on the nice tropical island, we had not dried out from our swimming and tubing earlier in the day and when the temperature dropped to about 60 - that was definitely cold enough. Dana was actually starting to get pretty shaky so we all cuddled up tight and talked about how we would make our way our in the morning.

In the distance we could see the red flashing light of one of the three control towers surrounding the Arecibo Observatory, so using this light we gained an idea of which way we would need to hike and approximately how far. We also discussed every worst case scenario situation and I tried to impose whatever "wilderness" survival knowledge I had to make the two of them more comfortable even though I was pretty fricken scared myself. As we were talking we would occasionally hear a low flying airplane over the top of us and even though we were under the tree cover we would all turn on our headlamps to flash mode, just in case there was even a possibility of attracting them.

We all decided it would be good to attempt to get a little bit of sleep so we all tried to sleep and I maybe got an hour or two (realize there was darkness from 6 pm to 6 am) between having to rotate spoon positions every 45 minutes or so because I really only worked as the little spoon and Dana had to be in the middle to stay unhypothermic. Occasionally we would hear another airplane and turn on our lights again and we turned them on even more frequently after freaking out about another LARGE insect crawling on top of us. Needless to say, it was a very sleepless night.....

Puerto Rico - Day 6 - Cave Mapping & Canal Tubing

Well, if you couldn't tell...we might have had a wee bit to drink for our "New Years" celebrations and woke up with plans to meet up with Caver Tom and his wife for some caving. Somehow with the confusion of the night before and the high tide....Dana had managed to misplace the keys. We searched the beach up and down, managing to find Dana's missing flip flop...but the keys were nowhere in sight. Assuming that they had been washed away to Poseidon we gave Tom a call and explained that we would be a bit late in meeting them and then called the rental car company to come drop off a set of keys. Dana decided that she would take a nap in the car and wait for the keys to arrive and Adam and I went to grab some breakfast.

Adam and my timing was perfect and the keys were dropped minutes after we made it back to the car. Right as we were about to pull away, an older Puerto Rican walked up holding....our missing set of keys. We have NO idea where he could have possibly found them since we were positive that we had searched every inch of beach, but our lost keys had returned.

We met Tom and his wife at a small town right outside of Guajataca National Park and followed them up the mountain to park on the side of the road. We all grabbed our caving and tubing gear and hiked into the jungle. The National Park services had recently published a new map of the park which included the location of Effrain Lopez Cave - which Tom was very opposed to because of vandalism in other more touristy caves in the area. He had taken it upon himself to hide the trail to the cave and was more than happy that the three of us just walked right on past the "trail". Once pointed in the right direction we walked down to the decent sized mouth of the short, horizontal cave. Tom got out his surveying gear and I was put in charge of the laser pointer that would help measure the size of the cave. The cave is relatively small, but very interesting since the ceilings are full of pockets that have been slowly worn away by the bats that reside within.

After the survey was complete, the 5 of us hiked back through the jungle and down to a canal that had been built to supply water to the town of Isabela on the north of the island. We blew up our inflatable tubes and the 2 Puerto Ricans donned their wetsuits before we set out floating down the canal that ran literally through the middle of the beautiful jungle. I got the fortunate position in the front and as we floated through the tunnels and underneath the bridges this put me in charge of unintentionally clearing the spiders out of the way for everyone else....lucky me. Some of the tunnels were especially long and curvy so you couldn't even see the exit - these were significantly more fun and terrifying to ride through with our lights off....and slightly reminiscent of a Willy Wonka boat ride.

Because of Tom and his wife's generousness for showing us around the jungle and even offering up their grass for us to pitch our tent that night - we offered to take them out to dinner. We ate at a local fast food type restaurant that they insisted had some of the best Mofongo - fried yuca or plaintains mushed together.

After dinner we followed them back to their house and Tom patiently drew us a map for our cave tubing excursion that we were planning for the next day down the Rio Tanama.

Sorry, lack of pictures due to the water activities....

Puerto Rico - Day 4 - Cave Day!

We woke up early from our uber exciting New Years. Having gotten directions to several caves from Caver Tom who is a Professor of Geology at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez over the phone, we set out Bosque De Guajataca to see what we could find.

Driving into the park, the roads approached a new degree of terrifying...dirt roads with cliff drop offs on one side made for maybe 1 1/2 cars to be able to safely drive down them. Our 1st cave of the trip, we named "Car Cave" as we were able to drive our rental car partway into it. The cave was rather insignificant in size, but entertaining enough when you drove into it.


We found parking next to the visitor's center that is under construction and got into our caving gear and ready for our couple mile hike to Cueva Viento. Along the path Adam found a small cave on the left side of the trail and Dana and I followed him down the small hole into an interesting small caves with a ton of formations for such a small space. We found another much larger entrance to the cave which exited into the thick jungle.


Cueva Viento turned out to be a very well traveled cave with a circular staircase going down into the cave that would have originally been a good 50 foot rappel. The cave was mostly just one big room, but the most interesting part was our 1st siting of a Gordo - a huge spider, scorpion looking insect about the size of a softball. Not sure if they are poisonous or not, but certainly wasn't going to tempt it.


We hiked back along the trail to our car and headed out of the park to find Infierno - another cave that Caver Tom had recommended. Infierno was a great cave with a great skinny muddy passage off to the left that was blocked by a crab - the gatekeeper of that section of cave. We ended up knee deep in mud in some sections and had a ton of fun in the less traveled cave.

After our fun caving adventure we grabbed a delicious dinner of ham and cheese sandwiches (mine just cheese) and set up camp in Guajataca just up a small dirt road from the visitors center that was still under construction. Now, we weren't technically suppose to camp here...but we had a great time drinking our Don Q and juice drinks and making sure to turn off our headlamps whenever we heard cars driving along the crazy dirt road.