Trip Six: the top*
“Cave passage can only be explored via flesh and blood.”
– Justin H.
The guys rolled in to the camp area after dark on Sunday evening. Justin immediately drifts into the darkness to find somewhere quiet to camp. Meanwhile, Mark and I knock back a beer in my Subaru. We contemplate whether or not the introduction of yoga pants to remote agrarian cultures in developing nations, such as the Mazetec people of Huautla de Jimenez, would be considered a violation of Starfleet’s Prime Directive.
Monday morning. A much-appreciated cold front slammed TAG the day prior and we awake to frosted grass. Mark is sitting in the driver seat of his car, eating a cold can of Chef Boyardee (contemporary recipe). I point out the uncanny similarity between his current state and my favorite video game, a tedious survival simulator called The Long Dark.
We are not yet to the treeline when someone mentions something about the rope pad. Someone else mumbles a reply that is inaudible over the scuffling of our boots and the cacophonous crunching of the fall leaves. A series of assumptions fire through our sleepy brains and we continue walking without bothering to clarify the conversation. At the cave entrance we used my mitten as a rope pad. Honestly, bringing a real rope pad would be breaking tradition at this point in the project.
The journey through the cave was pleasantly uneventful. We convened at the dome, assessing the “gear explosion” that we were forced to abandon a week prior. Our bolts are still laid out neatly on the big rock, each assembled with its accompanying hanger and ready-to-go. Next to that, the Raumer hammer on its fancy dyneema leash. The pile of quickdraws. The daisies and aiders and tagline. I do not recall if Justin read our “hope you’re not shot!?” note or simply disregarded it… after all, we had a climb to finish.
As mentioned earlier, the rock for the final pitch of the dome is the terrible quality: flakey, sharp, and laced with brittle chert. At the top, there is also a ceiling of chert about 6-inches thick that is directly overhead the belay anchors. Undercut chert layers such as this are notoriously unreliable and may collapse unexpectedly under someone’s weight.
The path of the final climb was fairly obvious based on the areas where we could not climb. Directly above the belayer was a definite “no” due to the risk of rockfall and to the right of the anchors was absolute shit. Moving left of the anchors, and then up, was the only feasible option.
We started the final pitch both tethered into the belay anchors. Justin reached as far to the left of anchors as he could reach to bolt the first placement. This piece would not eliminate an unpleasant decking on the belay ledge if he were to fall, but it would minimize the pendulum-swing as well as help with the jolt felt by the belayer during the arrest. Once the first bolt was placed, he added the quickdraw and clipped in the dynamic rope. Simultaneously, I fed the twin ropes through the ATC and took one last check that nothing was tangled in my web of slings and cowstails and anchors.
Okay, Justin.
You are on belay.
No, that flake was not as bad as it looks from this angle.
With eyes locked on him, and I loosely clutched the trailing rope below the ATC with my brake-hand. My hands twinged with anticipation: the muscles were electric, yet my mind was completely still. We are gunslingers armed with hammer drills. This is our frontier. He steadied himself and removed his tether to the belay anchors. In this moment, a fall would drop him below our anchors whilst scraping him along the jagged rock wall. It wouldn’t be lethal, but it would not be pleasant.
We were calm and quiet; he moved through the bolt-setting routine without hesitation. Although the rock along our anticipated route looked daunting, the hammer proved that it was actually solid. A little rock-grooming with the “cave conservation hammer” was needed to clear away the water-worn snarls on the face of the wall, but there were no “THUD” of comically-bad rock this time.
From the first bolt, roughly five feet leftward and a few feet above the belay anchors, the second bolt was comfortably in line with our desired route and it too found solid rock. The third bolt followed suite; the progression was moving like a perfectly-tuned machine. The fourth bolt went in; it put Justin eye-level to the top-out.
After a shuffle of the slack, I communicated to Justin: go for it (whenever he saw fit). He gave me a roger-that in his usual form, “Okay. I need quiet, please.”
He top-stepped in the aider ladder and steadied himself. Then moved one foot from its ladder and stemmed out wide toward the center; the footing was solid. He could now clear the landing zone of the top-out. A sprinkle of pebbles rained down… we were almost there. I have to keep my head down so I won’t be able to watch you. Yell when you need slack.
For this pitch of the climb, we used a twin-rope method in which the climber is belayed on two independent dynamic ropes that are both clipped into each quickdraw. I reasoned that this minimizes the chance of the rope getting cut in the event of a fall. In addition to the normal quickdraws, we used an assortment of alpine draws of various length to smoothly guide the belay rope away from any potential hazards. The route placement Justin set exceeded my expectations and made the effort of using twin ropes seem like overkill. Feeling like that, about this climb, was a major victory.
Slack.
Okay!
I tilted my Zebra light and stole an upward glance; the moment felt monumental. In one steady move, Justin stepped across the chasm above me and planted his boot firmly onto the balcony above. The tagline and the dynamic slithered up across the chert edge of the ceiling above as he sank out of my view.
We did it. We just topped it. The thought was matter-of-fact, maybe because we were just inexperienced enough to believe wholeheartedly that we were going to pull this off. I did not expect fanfare from Justin regardless of the result, be it a tiny balcony or a borehole passage above. I could only wonder what was up there.
Take me off belay.
I freed both strands of ropes from the ATC… Okay, you are OFF belay!
Whatever was up there, the landing was large enough that Justin could move away from the edge and safely be off rope. It was all up to him now. I dimmed my Zebra headlight and rested the brim of my helmet against the wall in front of me, the way that folks rest in a crammed airplane. Over the next several minutes, the dome echoed with a mix of hammer taps and thwacks on the rock above, followed by pauses, then the rustling of the dynamic rope across the rock in front of me, followed by another pause, another thwack. Then the bolt setting ritual returned to its typical rhythm as he set the 3/8th stainless steel top anchors. Although I don’t recall it specifically, by this point I’m sure that I asked “Does it go!?” at least a few times, to which I received no definitive answer.
Spoiler: it’s a balcony
Considerable ledge-cleaning (aka, “rock tossing”) was needed before the tagline could be permanently rigged to the top anchors. Since I could not go up to the balcony until the tagline was installed, there was no need for me to linger in the fall-zone at the belay anchors. I pulled the dynamic rope down to me, reset it through the anchors, cleaned the my web of slings, and bailed off the wall using my ATC. Wheeee!
ROPE!
The dynamic zipped down the wall and seemingly melted into a puddle of coils on the floor of the dome. Mark and I grabbed handfuls and armfuls of it, and briskly lugged the 70-meters of noodliness out of the rockfall zone. Then we retreated to the far side of the dome room and hunker down under a mylar emergency blanket.
Okay! All clear!
We give the go-ahead for Justin to rain down rocks from above.
ROCK!
CRRrrr … bounce … BAM!
We watched from afar the 30-lb chunk of limestone fail to clear the lower of the two ledges. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except that the slack of the tagline was coiled on that ledge. Later, Mark discovered that rock had hit part of the coil and exploded a section of the extra rope; the sheath had burst and the core was cut halfway through. This wasn’t actually a “safety-scare” because the damage was on the excess tail of the rope used for the second pitch. This is also why Justin does not notice the rope damage when he rappelled from the balcony. However, it wasn’t our proudest moment … and this is exactly why ropes should be kept in rope bags during rigging (and climbs). We agreed that this was the learning experience of the climb. Unfortunately, I did not get a picture at the time but I will try to add one eventually… it is definitely worth seeing.
Update! Finally have photos to share…!
Aside from that little incident, the edge of the balcony was cleaned of falling hazards without event as Justin neatly arranged and rigged the static tagline. More loose flakes and spindly fingers of chert were gingerly groomed from the wall mid-descent as he rappelled smoothly to floor.
Meanwhile, Mark and I, still hunkered down in the e-blanket, had spent this time learning just how difficult it was to light matches without a striker. Mark did not approve of the 8.5 ounces of candles that I had deviously smuggled into the project pack in an audacious attempt to make caving more comfortable. My utter inability to convert said contraband into warmth (while simultaneously ridding us its weight) was a deplorable failure on my part. We weren’t uncomfortably cold, mind you… we just wanted to be dry.
((If you did not find this paragraph funny, I’m sorry but I cannot help you.))
Justin approached us in his usual no-nonsense // get-it-done demeanor, and told us that he is uninterested in continuing with this project. Despite his unamusement, I still gave him a huge hug and congratulated him on the top-out (after all, that is the hardest part). The “top” was actually a balcony and the dome’s ceiling, approximately 50-ft above the balcony, was an impassable boulder-choke. Whatever, I was proud of us. Our team still achieved something that we weren’t honestly certain we could accomplish.
Oh, and the dome didn’t not go…
So it’s a balcony. Well, that makes sense seeing as we descended seven pits (more than 400-ft below the surface) to reach this area. I believed there was still potential for more cave above our dome. The balcony put us about 80-ft above the floor, and the ceiling above the balcony would be about the same elevation as the top of the sixth pit. The top of the sixth drop also has a notable breakdown layer and, most importantly, has a lot of cave above it.
I wasn’t about to walk away from this project. Mark’s attitude was “Sure, why not? After all, it is a good cave.” Justin probably has bigger fish to fry, or maybe he just found quieter project partners. At any rate, it was time to investigate our discovery!
We donned our vertical gear and Mark was first to hopped onto our newly-established SRT route. When he reached the first set of belay anchors (at the lower ledge), he discovered the aforementioned rockfall damage on the unused section of rope: the core was burst. Even beefy 11mm rope is no match for bad rockfall. The damaged spot was isolated so that we could easily find it when we finally de-rig the dome, and we continued our mission.
Upon joining Mark on the balcony, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was quite nice: approximately 20-ft wide and 12-ft from the edge to the back wall. More surprising, the back wall was not flaky horror-rock…! It actually looked okay. We paced around the balcony and drew in the air various potential routes for the climb and we pointed out possible top-out spots. Why the heck would we stop now?! Another 31-ft climb on decent rock would put us on the actual top-out.
I’ll be the first to admit that the actual top of the dome did not look promising. As Justin had described, there was no obvious passage to be seen and the ceiling directly above us was choked with boulders the size of an SUV. However, we’ve already gotten this far. One more trip.
The three of us hauled out the vast majority of the climbing gear, as well as de-rigged the pit series. The hour-long hike back from the cave while hauling huge project packs intensified all of the aches and pains from the 12-hours of surveying I had done in Byer’s the day before. A hot shower rekindled enough energy to remind me that I was starving, and we made it to the Waffle House in Kimball by a respectable hour. It would be nearly a month between this trip and our next visit.
Trip Seven: wet socks
Much like the fifth trip, the seventh trip shouldn’t really be counted to the project tally. Sometimes I am surprised by how long it takes me to realize that a trip will be a bust. Maybe it is a good thing that I stay completely optimistic for several hours beyond the obvious “this ain’t happenin’ today” point of the trip? Oh well, it all counts as “training.” You should always be training for a harder cave.
I arrived to the camp area just before dark on Saturday, December 1st. I was on less than four hours of sleep, and drove directly down from the Hamilton Valley Research Station in Mammoth Cave National Park. My survey group was comprised of myself and two wonderful Virginians who were gluttons for tough caving. We had just wrapped-up a 17-hour long survey (mapping) trip in grim, wet passage between Proctor and Roppel Cave (Mammoth Cave system). We had emerged from that trip just after 4 AM on Saturday morning; I was black and blue.
Although I could have spent all of Saturday sleeping in my fancy bunk room at HVRS, the thought of soaking in the hot tub at the campground down in TAG was far too tempting. The three-hour drive down from Kentucky was mostly uneventful, sans the massive rainstorm that chased behind me. I got less than an hour of hot tub soaking in before the lightning scared me off. So much for that idea. Everything ached. The thunderstorm raged all night.
It has been nearly a month since we “topped” the climb, which put us on a balcony large enough that we could safely be off-rope. We hauled out almost all of the gear at the end of that trip, as well as de-rigged our ropes from the pit series. Naturally, all this gear had to go back into the cave. As an added bonus, I had conned Mark into bringing me a crowbar to also haul into the cave. The intention was to cut better footholds into the mud slope above the fourth drop, but (unsurprisingly) that didn’t happen… something-something training weight. As usual, we had a LOT of stuff to get organized and into the cave … and here I was, hopelessly optimistic because this time we had an extra friend (a.k.a., gear mule) on the trip.
On the topic of said extra gear mule: prior to this trip, I should have asked Mark exactly how long it had been since Tom’s last advanced vertical trip. Rather than give me an actual answer, I think Mark made a declaration about how this builds character, or reinforces skills, or something. For whatever reason, I took Mark’s declaration as a totally acceptable answer and did not factor in the additional time-sink. It only takes a few minutes to remind someone how to cross a rebelay safely, just don’t expect them to cross it quickly.
It had poured rain all of Saturday evening and into the early hours of Sunday morning, but we weren’t discouraged. We knew the rigging kept us out of the water, and we were genuinely curious about whether or not the crawl sumps. Although Mark made it to the camp area almost an hour early on Sunday morning, we were still slow to get our gear sorted and packed into the massive MTDE Sherpa and Rodcle packs. On top of that, the weather had made the holiday traffic westbound from Chattanooga a nightmare and delayed the rest of our comrades.
Upon Tom’s arrival, I promptly tell him that he doesn’t need that wet suit or his neoprene jacket. This turned out to be a complete lie. As every caver knows, the sure-fire way to guarantee your party will be absolutely soaked is to make any statement along the lines of “it’s a dry trip.” At least Tom and I were on the same page about the superiority of the cave shorts + leggings combo. Cave fashion is extremely important.
The last time I had seen Jesse was at Lee’s memorial service two months prior. He had grown a bitchin’ mustache since then, and looked strikingly like a cartoon pirate in his blue polypro and red Ecrin Roc. It is critical that your team appears somewhat absurd while doing major caving projects, but not too silly, in the unlikely event that there is a rescue. After all, we wouldn’t want the professional cavers to judge us.
Tom unleashes a maddening arrangement of vertical gear (SRT kit) from his cave pack. I have seen some unconventional setups, and I have seen plenty of personal preference tweaks, but this was downright puzzling. Although it pained my soul, I could look passed the use of locking carabiners on his cowstails… but why were there quicklinks involved!?
On the bright side, the asinine cowstails setup did provide us with the quicklink we needed to replace the locking carabiner on his rack. We took a moment to demonstrate the roll-out mode of failure, a potentially-lethal scenario in which a rappelling rack twists itself out of the carabiner. At least two US cavers have been killed by this combination in the last 30 years. There is also a good write-up about this failure mode, as well as a case study on a non-fatal sudden accidental detachment incident, in the NSS’ American Caving Accidents 50th Anniversary issue. Unfortunately, it is not available digitally so you’ll just have to buy it. (/tangent)
The weather was lovely as we reached the entrance; the storms had passed and it was sunny. The hike down to the entrance was crisscrossed from all directions by shallow streams. From our vantage point on the cliff, which makes the high ground side of the entrance pit, we could see an exciting new feature: a white-capped stream was rushing down the steep ravine and pouring into the pit below. Ugh, we’re going to be drenched. I gave myself a pat on the back for remembering to bring a dry jacket to wear for the hike out, as it would be dark and cold by the time we resurfaced. It was already well after 1PM when I jumped on rope. We had started at “gentlemanly hours” before, but this was a new record for slow. Justin would have completely disapproved had he not already forsaken our group for better caving.
The first 30-ft of the rappel was dry… and then I hit the curtain of water. Dropping through waterfalls is like stepping into a cold shower. I gritted my teeth and braced for the inevitable as the rope fed smoothly through my brake hand; the initial baptism in cold cave water always sucks. After that you’re blessed with the invincible feeling of “fuck it, we’re already wet” while encountering all other water obstacles. Unfortunately, you still have to suffer the tragedy of wet socks which is arguably one of the worst parts about caving.
At the second drop, we were all very excited for Jesse execute an advanced rigging method that he had been practicing: ultralight! The methodology for it is detailed in Alpine Caving Techniques, but the TL/DR is simply replace rigging carabiners with strands of dyneema cord. The purpose of this is to dramatically reduce weight for major rigging endeavors such as remote expeditions or very deep caves. The method worked beautifully.
Anxious to find out whether or not the crawl after the third drop sumps, I immediately bomb-ahead. The splash-pool on the floor of the slot canyon front of the crawl is full and I am nearly up to my knees in water when I jump down. Weary that our trip will be over prematurely, I wearily duck my head below the ledge and look into the crawl.
Airspace! It doesn’t sump!
If the crawl remains passable after a huge storm like the one last night, then it would take a genuine flood (or maybe getting caught in the pulse..?) to actually sump-out the crawl. Not only was there airspace, but there was plenty of airspace…! While I did take my helmet off (helmets are annoying in low-air), I didn’t have to dip an ear in the water. In fact, I almost made it through the crawl with dry socks … until … gluuurg … dammit, the deep spot got me. The GoreTex snow shell pants kept my boots dry for the downpour in the entrance pit and the splash-pool, but the deep spot was too much. I cried out in anguish: my socks were soaked.
Upon exiting the crawl, I dedicated myself to assuming the role of Cave Waterflow Technician. Pulling up rocks here and piling them over there. Stabbing at the clogs of leaves with a stick. Breaking up the little dams of stones. Re-arranging rocks is the most satisfying activity you can do in a cave (without explosives). The waterline of the puddle began to recede as I heard Mark scuffling into the crawl, followed by Tom and Jesse. Mark does not believe in wearing mud boots in caves, and therefore opts-in to wet feet on every caving trip. He has no sympathy for when I lose the “Wellies gamble” of sock dryness. After all, caving isn’t comfortable.
Mostly thanks to the crawl, but also because the waterfalls were at peak capacity, we were soaking wet from helmet to boots for the rest of the trip. The next four drops had a mixed amount of eventfulness, but the important part is that Tom survived the rebelays without issue. We reached the bottom of the pit series by 5PM, a new “record slow” but it didn’t matter because there was no way I was doing the climb in wet socks (foreshadowing).
It would be a bit long-winded of me to continue with the details of the trip because we simply dumped off the gear and turned around. However, it is worth noting that Tom has this interesting personality: he can be shivering cold because someone lied to him about how much water was blasting through the cave, but he continues to claim that he’s fine and keeps on truckin’ along without complaint.
It was starting to snow when we surfaced, but thankfully I had my trusty North Face hardshell trench coat (a.k.a.: the best jacket I didn’t know I needed until I got it). Even so, I was soaking wet; the only sensible option was to strip down to my underoos and get cozy in my knee-length jacket. So I did. Don’t worry, I put my kneepads back on for safety.
We hiked out, me looking like a mud boots-and-kneepads clad flasher. It is a good thing no one tripped and broke a leg: what would the professional cavers think if they saw me looking so indecent?!
Hot showers. Waffle House. Back to camp. Sleep.
Yes, I’m still in my sleeping bag in the Subaru; it’s called room service, OK?
It was Monday morning and we woke up to a dusting of snow. Still cocooned in my mummy bag, I poked my head out of the Subaru window and called to see if the guys were awake. The rainfly to Tom’s tent flailed and out he rolled, smiling and acting like he was still totally down to go caving because that’s what we had planned. I think I just looked at him and said “yeeeeah, to hell with going caving today. I hurt.” Tom looked very relieved; he had left all of his wet gear in the bed of his truck and it was now frozen. Mark stirred somewhere inside his gangsta-tinted sedan, and then emerged with breakfast beers in hand.
We made the pilgrimage to Sugar’s Ribs in Chattanooga and collectively agreed that this decision was by far the best decision we had made all weekend. Tom pointed out that Mark had basically taken a full day off work to sit around and eat ribs; we collectively agreed that this was also a fantastic decision.
… please see the next post, “Trip Eight,” for the finale.
B R U I S E S 